Bush's backers are peddling a sunny view of the president's strategy -- despite Iraq's political chaos and soaring death counts.
By Juan Cole
Salon.com
"......Some proponents of the surge may have rightly argued that an effort to take on the guerrillas and militias will produce higher casualties in the short term -- but some of them are also saying the strategy has already begun working and is producing lower casualties and more security for Iraqis, which is a blatant falsehood.
What has surged is not calm or political compromise, but rather the number of guerrilla attacks, the number of U.S. troop deaths compared to the same months in previous years, and the number of Iraqi casualties. That some of the U.S. media and the U.S. public have allowed themselves to be manipulated into thinking the "numbers" from Iraq are a cause for optimism echoes the sloppy and wishful thinking that got U.S. into this mess in the first place.
Iraqi access to electricity and even food and water has fallen, 2 million have been displaced internally and another million abroad since April of 2003. That is not encouraging, to say the least. The "national unity government" of Prime Minister al-Maliki is on the brink of total collapse, as the bad news piles up.
Indeed, the power of positive thinking is an old American value. But sometimes it causes people to fall for pyramid schemes, or even worse."
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