DON’T BE FOOLED BY DEATH TOLL FIGURES COMING OUT OF IRAQ
THE SURGE WAS MORE OF A SQUIRT THAN A SWELL
Any numbers that come out of this administration and its military commanders in Iraq deserve severe scrutiny.
This surge is not the success that we are being told by the field commanders and the media that it is.
In January, 2006, 615 Iraqis were killed; long before the surge was undertaken. The most recent report indicates that six months after the surge began with the addition of 30,000 troops and thousands more of support personnel and contractor employees, the death rate is 718—one hundred and three more than prior to the infusion of the additional combat forces. Now you can call that a success if you wish, but I call that rise in deaths by any form of math you wish to employ, distressful.
At the point that all of the additional forces were on the ground there were 1023 Iraqis deaths in September, 2007, 911 in October and 718 in November.
Keep this in mind—Moqtada al Sadr, the rebel cleric has not been heard from since the surge began. However, prior to the increase in forces introduced primarily into the Baghdad area, ad Sadr urged his militia and followers to retreat into their homes and hideouts until the Americans departed. He understood that if the “surge” was fait accompli, Bush would then feel sufficiently successful to disengage and send the troops home over a reasonable period of time.
Bush has been looking for a way out of this disaster. His military commanders came up with a marvelously ingenious way to convince the hawkish, right-wing Americans that we have won while ending the conflict step by step prior to the November, 2008 presidential elections.
Keep this clearly in mind--Bush just signed an agreement with Maliki providing the U. S. with four (4) military bases from which to operate and to protect the oil wells that were the initial and authentic purpose of the whole, dirty farce.
Several of Bush and Cheney’s friends have signed agreements with the Kurds and are negotiating with other Shiite leaders to gain control over the oil production as soon as Iraq is on its own. However, the U. S. will have military bases in place that will allow the oil wells to be protected by the American Military and provide the U. S. with a launching pad to thwart any uprisings either the Shiites or the Sunnis undertake.
And one more thing: Four bases provides the U. S. a long term presence in the region to handily control any effort on the part of Iran to go nuclear or to invade or physically influence the politics of the new Iraq.
I do not intend to be too cynical, but this is the scenario I see playing out over the next 18 months.
Therefore, whatever figures the military or the administration announce relative to the number of Iraqi deaths in any future months, it is all a result of the following: [1] the Shiites under the command of al Sadr are in hiding and have been throughout the surge; [2] the U. S. will use the “success of the surge” as an excuse for extricating our troops from a disastrous situation, [3] after the troops have begun to come home, the American electorate will take Iraq off the list of the most important issues for the presidential campaign, [4] all troops will depart over a unspecified period of months, except for those assigned to the massive new embassy and the four military bases Bush has signed on to for the protection of the oil wells, any type of insurgency by Shiites or Sunnis, any invasion by Iran or Iran’s persistent effort to acquire nuclear capability.
Columbia University’s professor Richard Garfield, and expert on the effects of conflicts civilians, made this statement for Yahoo News, “We’ve gone from horrific levels of murder to very bad, which is an improvement but not a reason to celebrate…At these so-called low levels, there is a massive number of excess deaths still likely to occur.”
718 deaths of Iraqis in the month of November, 2007 is not a victory for the surge, it is an unintended victory for the Shiites who will come out of hiding as soon as Bush and the imbeciles in Congress decide that we have won and can now bring our soldiers home.
718 is a terrible toll on the families in Iraq who are attempting to endure to the end of the U. S. presence as occupiers in their nation. If one of the 718 is a father, mother, brother, sister, or a distant relative, it is 718 too many deaths for a cause that seems so remote it is impossible to imagine that things will get better in spite of George W. Bush and his democratic answer for everything.
5:44:56 PM 
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