Dramatic Readings

So General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are starring in a two-man show for Congress tomorrow written by the people responsible for the Shrubbery’s speech at the OPEC APEC conference in Austria Australia, the Cheney Apocalyptic Agitprop Workshop. Everyone needs to remember that it is filed under fiction.

If you are looking for nonfiction, you might read Leila Fadel of McClatchy Newspapers who offers us, Security in Iraq still elusive.

BAGHDAD — When President Bush announced in January what the White House called a “New Way Forward” in Iraq, he said that Iraqi and American troops would improve security while the Iraqi government improved services. Responsibility for security in most of Iraq would be turned over to Iraqi security forces by November.

With better security would come the breathing room needed for political reconciliation, Bush said.

With less than a week to go before the White House delivers a congressionally mandated report on that plan, none of this has happened.
…

Unidentified bodies continue to show up daily in Baghdad, though the pace is lower than it was last December, when 1,030 bodies were found, according to statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers. The biggest drop came between December and January, before the U.S. began adding troops and after Sadr told his troops to lie low. Since February, when the first additional troops arrived, the trend has been inconsistent — dropping to 596 in February, rising in May to 736, and then dropping again to 428 in August.

Some military officials and many residents attribute the generally lower numbers not to the U.S. security plan, but to the purges in mixed neighborhoods that have left militants with fewer people to kill.

So the good news is that before the surge was even discussed the Sunni tribes in Anbar started evicting foreign fighters, and the ethnic cleansing in Baghdad has left fewer people to be killed. The US troops had almost no effect on either event, although handing out weapons to the various groups has sped the processes.

Since he has experience in this area, why don’t we have General Petraeus “misplace” another couple of hundred thousand small arms while we get the flock out of Iraq.