Bush and company have bought into the concept set forth in the “Project for the New American Century(PNAC).” Essentially, it is a blueprint for empire building.  In an unsettled world, the strongest nation, both economically and militarily, will lead.  Couple that philosophy with Friedmanian economic protocols and you’ve got the current US administration----an array of government policies intertwined with corporate power.  Called it oligarchism, fascism, or aggressive capitalism----I call it a time bomb!

The Bush administration and the media are trying to create the false impression that southern Iraq, under the control of Shia militants (who the Bush administration is afraid to take on), is really under the control of the Iraqi government and the U.S.  I just read a Reuters story to that effect.

The Iraq situation is even worse than Joe Conason says.  Shia militants control southern Iraq, where over 80% of Iraq’s oil is.  Northern Iraq gets attacked by Turkey.  Bush is stuck with a collaborator regime in Baghdad and without oil.

There is still a ruling class consensus to continue the Iraq War though (with them making money off of it), and the leading presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, do not want to get crossways with that class.  They can destroy one’s campaign.

The fly in ointment is the huge cost of the war to the people, during a recession.

A little research would indicate that sectarian cleansing was nearing an end when Bush announced the surge. His intelligence forces probably knew this beforehand.

But overall, government forces seem to be no closer to providing security for citizens, but killings and violence are down, experiencing a steady decline from September, 2007 to present time.

Civilian statistics bear this out. According to figures compiled by the interior, health and defense ministries, 481 civilians died violently in Iraq in December of 2007, a 75 percent drop from the 1,930 who were killed in December 2006, when the country was on the brink of civil war.

For this decline, neocons gives absolute credit to Bush’s surge.

But more knowledgeable and more objective sources paint another picture.

Though Abdul Samad Sultan, minister of migrations, last year insisted that over 1,000 self-exiled families returned to their neighborhoods, mostly in Madaen, Mahmoudiya and Shaab, other stories have chronicled illegal immigrants returning with no other choice: it was either go to prison or be deported from countries like Syria and Lebanon.

And we should review a little history. The frantic flight of Iraqis during the height of the killing was told on several fronts.

Last year’s report by the non-governmental organization International Medical Corps, said that 540,000 Iraqis had fled their homes from the February 2006 bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra to early 2007.

Consistent reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times revealed stories of the nightly wails and cries of ethnic cleansing reaching a peak by the end of 2006 and into early 2007, when something like 2000 civilians a month turned up mangled and dead.

According to Pepe Escobar, the ‘Roving Eye’ for the online publication, Asia Times, in the rush of dawn hundreds of bodies were displayed to advertise the deaths of Sunnis living in the ethnically-mixed area of Baghdad, thus spreading grief among relatives and intense fear among the rest, causing leagues of Iraqis to leave their home and their possessions.

By the time that Bush announced the surge, the cleansing showed signs of ending and the Shiites were ready to cooperate with allied forces and Sunnis pledged to fight a small al Qaeda force. This might suggest that ethnic cleansing was already complete, and seemed to correspond with the Bush surge.

Many, who are always looking for cynically-calculated Bush policy, say that Bush forces knew this before they even planned the surge.

Even with the improvements, the latest figures show that more civilians died overall in 2007 (16,232) than in 2006 (12,360).

Iraq still remains politically unstable, and is still a dangerous place. It was a mistake from the beginning, an endeavor having nothing to do with fighting terrorism, and probably everything to do with imperialistic strategy.

I see that after nearly five years of war to steal oil, Conason finally mentioned the word “oil,” but only to say that an “agreement” doesn’t quite exist for Iraq except where we did the same as Saddam and keep our hands off the Kurdish sector.

In the first place, the “surge” was not meant to solve any problem save that of how to get crack troops into place guarding oil fields and pipelines while reservists and new hires were relegated to the civilian sectors in Baghdad and vicinity. It worked fine, for the 82nd or 101st airborne was reassigned to Iraq under cover of that surge, and all is well in the oil business.

I say the same thing to Mr. Conason as I do to author Ritter: if you’re going to talk about Iraq and not discuss the reason we are there in the first place---and intend to stay there---then you can utter a lot of truisms but still keep on blowing smoke. I understand that your publishers won’t let you tell the public the truth, and I have always supposed the reason is somewhat like the reason that Ken Lay didn’t want anyone tattling on his Enron manipulations: show them the truth, and the whole house of cards will fall . . .

Well, there are hundreds of countries around the world who don’t want the American consumers to be reduced to the status of Argentina or Enron, i.e. bankrupy, and even Tony Blair and his country knew enough to back our play to steal oil to save our economy, so the fear that we’d go like Argentina is probably wrong. Oh, we’ll go, but not until we start failing to be able to borrow any more money to pay back the money we have already borrowed, and not until every last job in the USA has gone overseas. Greenspan knew that and still was amazed (he said) that NO ONE would talk about oil and Iraq.

It is so simple: all of the mystery about why we have behaved as stupidly as we seem to have done is solved immediately once you admit we went there for oil and we have to stay there for oil or our economy tanks. And it’s not just that oil, it’s all of the oil in the mideast we want to steal. (all those bases we have built at the expense of being able to supply drinking water and electricity to Iraqis are not for taking care of surges, oh no; they are for taking care of future invasions of other oil rich entities in the mideast.

Iran? no, they’d never stand for it. We’re going after the arab oil in the Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. The attack on Iran is only to keep them out of the mix when we invade arab countries to steal their oil.

If the “surge” was merely a matter of troop strength in numbers, then surely we could have increased only the number of mercenaries in place, but that wasn’t what was needed; what was needed was CRACK troops to guard the oil and its transport.

You can’t talk about that if your publishers won’t let you talk about oil, can you?

Marshall,

The reason the surge is not working, and never has, is because what you’ve just claimed as proof of it working, is all bullshit. Specifically this,

• ‘…..having reduced violence, sectarian strife, provided a much greater sense of normalcy to the citizens of Baghdad and beyond, and severely hampered the effectiveness of Al-qaida…..”

The violence hasn’t been ‘reduced’ so I’m not sure where you’re coming up with that. Sectarian strife is impossible to measure, but if it ‘appears’ to be reduced, it’s because the cement walls surrounding these various communities and the forced removal and relocation of over half of the population has ‘reduced’ their interactions. Still, you have absolutely, positively NOTHING to verify this. Car bombs and suicide bombings continue on a daily basis, with civilians continuing to die on a daily basis.

How exactly, do you think that is any greater sense of ‘normalcy’ to the citizens of Baghdad and beyond?

As for ‘severely hampering’ the effectiveness of al-Qaeda, how the hell do YOU know that? And, what are you basing that on. Severely hampering from WHEN? From when they didn’t even exist in Iraq? Because of course we ALL KNOW that al-Qaeda didn’t exist in Iraq, prior to the U.S. invasion and occupation, and we STILL don’t know to what extent al-Qaeda even operates in Iraq, or to what extent they are responsible for any of the on-going destruction of that nation.

So you see, you really are full crap.