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Optimistic Report on the Surge All Talk

Time has a report card on the effectiveness of the surge, which makes it sound like things are looking up. I'm a skeptic. Not because I hate America, but because this administration and its uniform-wearing parrots have cried wolf once (or thrice) too many times.

The Time report doesn't do much to change my mind.

First, like other reports, it touts the fact that some Iraqi families are returning to their Baghdad homes. But look closer. The numbers given are miniscule, and all they indicate is that those people hope the surge will work—not that it is working.

Second, they caught a few terrorists. Cool. Moving on…

Time repeatedly quotes Petraeus saying things like, "They're really quaking in their boots." These assessments are more meaningless than a coach's halftime interview.

I'll give them this point: "Violence in the city has dropped by about a third since the surge began in mid-February," but (a) one month is not long enough to predict a trend, and (b) it seems some of the new tactical ideas should have been implemented long, long ago:

The tactic of sprinkling U.S. and Iraqi troops like salt across the city — instead of keeping them concentrated in a handful of bases — seems to be paying off so far…Operation Safe Markets — where the U.S. military encircles bazaars with concrete barriers — have kept car bombs away from crowds.

They only just thought of this now?

And for those of you meticulous readers who need me to respond to every bit in the article—or those right-wing bloggers among you waiting for an easy way to prove me wrong (obviously the thing I didn't mention destroys my whole point, right?): The report also mentions helicopters. It's true, I mentioned rise in helicopter shoot-downs as a bad sign, and they have subsided. But:

U.S. military helicopters are flying increasingly under cover of darkness and at 2,000 feet, four times higher than normal, beyond the reach of the crude weapons used by the insurgents to take potshots at airborne targets… Army chopper pilots have long been taught to hug the terrain…to limit their exposure to any individual on the ground seeking to shoot them down. But increasingly, U.S. pilots are trading the protection offered by lack of height for the masking offered by lack of light.

Overall response: C-.

Posted by Cameron Scott on 03/23/07 at 1:00 PM | E-mail | Print | Digg | de.licio.us | Reddit | Newsvine | Yahoo! MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Netscape | Google |