The Surge Isn’t Working
US casualties are climbing back up.
by Charles Coughlin
It looks like casualties are climbing back up in Iraq. Casualties dropped to 23 US soldiers killed in December, but climbed back up to 40 in January and should hit 52 in February considering that there are 15 dead for the first eight days.
We have been propagandized by the neocons for the last few months that the “surge is working” but the current drop in casualties is not much different from earlier random fluctuations in casualties. For example, casualties dropped to 31 in March of 2006 (without a surge) and then climbed to 106 per month by October, 2006.
The US has tried a “surge” tactic before in Vietnam –only back then it was called an “escalation.” The escalation ultimately increased our troop strength to over one million troops, but we still lost with 58 thousand dead and over 300 thousand wounded.
A number of pundits suspected that the neocons had caused a temporary drop in casualties by cutting back on patrols in the shooting galleries of Fallujah, Baghdad and various other cities, where our presence isn’t wanted and that control of some parts of Iraq was being handed over to local mullahs. This wouldn’t be the first time the neocons blatantly lied to us. By pretending that the surge was a big success, they will do more surges in the future whenever we start to lose control again.
Why would our government pull a “trick” like this? The Republican primary was going on, and it made a great sound bite for the neocon Republican candidates to (dishonestly) claim “The surge is working.” Well, we’ve just been stuck with the crazy warmonger John McCain as the likely GOP candidate when we could have had the anti-war candidate, Ron Paul. McCain has vowed to keep the Iraq War going for 100 years. If the Vietnam War had kept going for 100 years, John McCain would still be a prisoner of war.
So our government cut back on patrolling to temporarily drop casualties so they could defeat the anti-war candidate. This was done not to save US lives for the sake of saving US lives, but to prolong the war. The victory of a pro-war McCain or Hillary or Obama will cost thousands of additional US dead over an additional four years. Obama and Hillary refused to promise that they would pull our troops out of Iraq by the year 2013 by the way.