A reader tackles my earlier post:
Don’t make the mistake of judging the effectiveness of the surge on the levels of violence and militia activity. This has been a successful insurgency because the bad guys avoid outright confrontation by melting into the civilian population when it suits them. Since we are temporarily flooding Baghdad with troops, the insurgents are wisely lying low and waiting for a more advantageous moment to start the slaughter again. Notice that there has not been a significant increase in the number of insurgents being turned in to the authorities. That’s because their people, be they Shia or Sunni are hiding them, or at least not ratting them out. The effectiveness of the surge can only be judged by the attitudes of the Iraqi people toward the American presence, as well as how much the Sunni and the Shia are willing to get along and work together. So the surge can only indirectly help these issues by decreasing the daily violence as an exacerbating factor.
If you truly think that it is worth American time, money, and blood to play marriage counselor to a dysfunctional, crime-ridden country with three competing factions and a heavy dose of Islamofacsist terrorists on the side, then keep rooting for the surge. This is no longer about American honor. The surge is about the Bush administration strategy of using band aids to hold the whole mess together just until they can get out of office and claim that Iraq wasn’t lost on their watch. Bringing in Petreus was like getting a surgeon for a hospice patient. As long as there are enough people willing to believe that the surge "just might work," the administration will keep up this farce no matter how many lives are lost and tax dollars are wasted.
I take the point. I have favored redeployment to Kurdistan and the borders. But as a simple practical matter, that redeployment is not going to take place under this president, so far as we can tell. Under a parliamentary system, he would have been forced to resign by now. But he’s there for two years, we are conducting a "surge" and it is not crazy to wish it well. The truth is: none of us knows what is really going on there. I’m just doing my best to deal with what little we do know, and not to succumb to knee-jerk despair on the one hand and denial on the other. If there’s good news, I’m not going to ignore it.
The Dish 