How Much More Like Vietnam Can It Get?
Well, there could be a draft.
So there's all this talk about how dandy that "surge" worked, and by Jeebus the media hacks are actually using this putrid phrase again (read - the conquered people have finally been beaten into submission, as Chris Floyd would put it):
Have we turned the corner in Iraq?
"By every objective measure of military performance, the United States' surge of military forces into Iraq has been a great success. The number of terrorist attacks has fallen significantly. American military casualties are down, as are Iraqi civilian casualties. Perhaps the best testament to the surge's success is that civilian refugees are beginning to return."
How many more steaming piles of horseshit are they going to fling our way? Let's take these lies and examine them a little.
First that crap about returning refugees. To begin with the reason why some four million Iraqis have fled their homes is because the US invaded, occupied and destroyed their country. It's no wonder that people ran for their lives after their society was torn apart and daily life consisted of barbed wire, random shootings, bombings and constant fear. Some two million of them escaped to neighboring Syria and Jordan, who were extremely gracious in accepting them up until recently, when due to the enormous pressure from the flood of displaced people they were forced to basically close their borders. In Syria most Iraqis aren't allowed to work and since they lived on handouts and savings they're forced to return because they've run out of money and can't live there any more with visa and redidence permit restrictions. They have no other choice than to go back to Baghdad, and they liken it to a death sentence. Even in the glowing MSM propaganda about this fantastic corner we're turning you can find this nugget:
"Most of the capital’s displaced people have yet to return, and the number of those leaving still outpaces those returning, according to Dana Graber Ladek, the Iraqi displacement specialist for the International Organization for Migration."
The reason why american casualties are down as they claim is because the military is doing everything it can to prevent them, which means scaling back activities where they could occur, and just outright lying about the numbers. One or two dead soldiers a day seems to be their acceptable figure and that's what we'll get. But just like Vietnam toward the end of the conflict the military is very happy to call in air strikes instead of having boots on the ground:
"Coalition forces launched 1,140 airstrikes in the first nine months of this year compared with 229 in all of last year, according to military statistics.
Airstrikes are up in Afghanistan, too. Coalition planes have made 2,764 bombing runs this year, up from 1,770 last year. The figures don't include strikes by helicopter gunships."
An added factor is that the military has hired Iraqi goon squads to do a lot of the dirty work for them, in effect paying off the guys who were previously killing americans to go kill fellow Iraqis. This way the heavy lifting of the occupation can be off the books and casualties not chalked up to an ongoing insurgency, just more mercenary privatization as the hired guns terrorize their fellow citizenry. Can anyone say "Vietnamization"?
These tactics are just the latest in the ceaseless propaganda war being waged for our heads, and the desired end result isn't a positive outcome for the occupied or the occupiers but a change in perception on the part of the targeted audience, us. The US military is never going to leave that wasteland until they're forced out, the resistance to the occupation will never stop, and our overlords will continue to lie about the entire sordid nightmare. The Iraqis aren't fooled by this lipstick on a pig.
"Attacks against US forces are not much less than they were last month, but media coverage has almost disappeared," Muhammad Younis from Mosul, in Baghdad on a business trip, told IPS. "The resistance is moving fast and changing locations in order to avoid intelligence provided by collaborators. Most Iraqis hate the Americans more than ever after the death and destruction caused by their occupation."
So there's all this talk about how dandy that "surge" worked, and by Jeebus the media hacks are actually using this putrid phrase again (read - the conquered people have finally been beaten into submission, as Chris Floyd would put it):
Have we turned the corner in Iraq?
"By every objective measure of military performance, the United States' surge of military forces into Iraq has been a great success. The number of terrorist attacks has fallen significantly. American military casualties are down, as are Iraqi civilian casualties. Perhaps the best testament to the surge's success is that civilian refugees are beginning to return."
How many more steaming piles of horseshit are they going to fling our way? Let's take these lies and examine them a little.
First that crap about returning refugees. To begin with the reason why some four million Iraqis have fled their homes is because the US invaded, occupied and destroyed their country. It's no wonder that people ran for their lives after their society was torn apart and daily life consisted of barbed wire, random shootings, bombings and constant fear. Some two million of them escaped to neighboring Syria and Jordan, who were extremely gracious in accepting them up until recently, when due to the enormous pressure from the flood of displaced people they were forced to basically close their borders. In Syria most Iraqis aren't allowed to work and since they lived on handouts and savings they're forced to return because they've run out of money and can't live there any more with visa and redidence permit restrictions. They have no other choice than to go back to Baghdad, and they liken it to a death sentence. Even in the glowing MSM propaganda about this fantastic corner we're turning you can find this nugget:
"Most of the capital’s displaced people have yet to return, and the number of those leaving still outpaces those returning, according to Dana Graber Ladek, the Iraqi displacement specialist for the International Organization for Migration."
The reason why american casualties are down as they claim is because the military is doing everything it can to prevent them, which means scaling back activities where they could occur, and just outright lying about the numbers. One or two dead soldiers a day seems to be their acceptable figure and that's what we'll get. But just like Vietnam toward the end of the conflict the military is very happy to call in air strikes instead of having boots on the ground:
"Coalition forces launched 1,140 airstrikes in the first nine months of this year compared with 229 in all of last year, according to military statistics.
Airstrikes are up in Afghanistan, too. Coalition planes have made 2,764 bombing runs this year, up from 1,770 last year. The figures don't include strikes by helicopter gunships."
An added factor is that the military has hired Iraqi goon squads to do a lot of the dirty work for them, in effect paying off the guys who were previously killing americans to go kill fellow Iraqis. This way the heavy lifting of the occupation can be off the books and casualties not chalked up to an ongoing insurgency, just more mercenary privatization as the hired guns terrorize their fellow citizenry. Can anyone say "Vietnamization"?
These tactics are just the latest in the ceaseless propaganda war being waged for our heads, and the desired end result isn't a positive outcome for the occupied or the occupiers but a change in perception on the part of the targeted audience, us. The US military is never going to leave that wasteland until they're forced out, the resistance to the occupation will never stop, and our overlords will continue to lie about the entire sordid nightmare. The Iraqis aren't fooled by this lipstick on a pig.
"Attacks against US forces are not much less than they were last month, but media coverage has almost disappeared," Muhammad Younis from Mosul, in Baghdad on a business trip, told IPS. "The resistance is moving fast and changing locations in order to avoid intelligence provided by collaborators. Most Iraqis hate the Americans more than ever after the death and destruction caused by their occupation."
posted by nolocontendere at 9:11 PM
2 Comments:
Sooo glad you included the escalation of the air-war to exolain the decrease in US casualties. I've read half a dozen articles about this in the "left-wing", including antiwar.com, that completely omitted that point.
Seems to me the reduced casualties are a result of 1) more troops practicing search and avoid and 2) more air sorties.
Even Tomgram's Robert Dreyfus failed to mention this fact. Considering how Tomgram pressed one of the biggest left-wing stories about the air-war over Iraq, I found this point extremely uncharacteristic.
A few points--
1) the surge was supposed to be all about providing some space for the Iraqi government to reconcile and come together-- and become self-sustaining, and on that point, the surge has clearly failed
2) the idea that Iraq is now better is nauseating and ignores the massive ethnic cleansing, the massive slaughter and the crimes against humanity that have occurred
3) clearly the surge was mostly about propaganda, and it was very important for the regime to show some "progress". However, the idea that we are winning-- or even WANT to win-- in Iraq is delusional. We are there for good.
By the way, Antiwar.com is not really left-wing but rather more libertarian -- whether is neither left-wing nor right-wing.
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