It's maddening how effective Bush administration propaganda is. They say the surge has been working. They repeat it a million times. Then they get a couple of their cronies inside think tanks, who are paid to say how great they are, say the surge is working. Then they get a couple of generals, who were promoted to say how great they are, say the surge is working. And voila, all you hear in the news is how well the surge is working.

When are the people in the media going to grow a brain? This so-called surge is a disaster, with zero results. Yes, I said zero.

Now let me say something that is going to sound contradictory to their small, little viewpoints (let's call it that, to be generous). Our strategy in the Anbar province is working. But wait, I just said the surge isn't working. How can that be?

That's because our strategy in the Anbar province has NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING to do with the surge. It doesn't involve more U.S. troops. It involves less U.S. troops!

Can someone please use their minds? Has anyone thought for more than three seconds about what our strategy in Anbar is? It is to turn the Sunni insurgency from our enemies to our allies -- so that they do the fighting for us! We do not have more troops fighting in the Anbar province now, we have less.

This is a deal we could have and should have made a long, long time ago. You empower the local tribes, sects and ethnicities to fight for their area of Iraq. They will have an incentive to drive out Al Qaeda and foreign fighters if they think they are going to control the area afterward. If they think they are going to hand it over to the U.S. or to other ethnicities in Iraq, then they won't do it.

So, this is about empowering Iraqis on a local level, not about an escalation of U.S. troops. The Kurds have kept northern Iraq relatively stable because they have an incentive to keep it that way. They know that they will be running it. There's no chance they're going to hand it over to the Shiites or the Sunni Arabs.

This is also a strategy that could be pursued as we withdraw out of Iraq. In fact, it is a strategy tailor made for withdrawal. Empower the locals to keep order as you clear out of an area. Since you are leaving, they will believe you when you say they will run the place. If anything, a U.S. military escalation in a region will hurt this strategy. That's why we have given weapons and money to the Sunni insurgents in the Anbar province and stepped out of the way.

As far as the rest of the surge is concerned, as The Los Angeles Times showed, there is no decrease in violence levels. More people were killed this month than the last. And more people were killed that month than the one before. The number of casualties is higher than it was last year. How many other statistics would you like to use to prove that the violence hasn't gone down?

There are pockets of Iraq where the level of violence is improving. As Newsweek explains, those are the pockets that have already been ethnically cleansed. A majority of the 1.1 million people who have been displaced within Iraq were ethnically cleansed while the so-called surge was happening. How come you hardly ever hear about that on television? Have you ever seen this headline: Surge Leads to Ethnic Cleansing.

I'm not sure the two are correlated, but they certainly happened at the same time. At the very least, the vaunted surge did absolutely nothing to stop the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. Yet, all we hear is what a lovely success the surge has been. If the surge tried to be more unsuccessful, I don't know how it could have done a better job.

More Americans killed, more Iraqi civilians killed and more ethnic cleansing. And oh yeah, no political reconciliation among the Iraqis at all. Zero. How could the surge be any less successful?

Now, when Petraeus and Crocker come and tell us what we already know they are going to tell us -- and what they were hired to tell us -- that their surge is working just fine, will we take them seriously? My guess is, absolutely. The media and the Congress will pretend that they are neutral arbiters of the facts on the ground and have a whole new round of stories about how well the surge is working.

Petraeus defending the surge he engineered and executed? Wow, I didn't see that coming. It might as well have been called the Petraeus surge (by the way, you should read the horribly wrong assessment of Iraq that Gen. Petraeus wrote in Sept. 2004; if he was so wrong about Iraq and his work there three years ago, why should we trust his judgment about Iraq now?) .

I would hope that the Democratic Congressmen would hold his feet to the fire and really challenge his spin on his surge. But that would be hoping against hope. My guess is that they will be far more likely to get blinded by the shiny stars on his uniform and intimidated out of the room by the fact that he wears a uniform.

Will anyone challenge the nonsensical notion that this surge is working to Petraeus' face? Or will the Democrats profusely thank him for his service and then meekly talk about how they slightly disagree with his assessment later? You and I know both know the answer to that question. So, expect another round of credulous "news" stories about how the mighty and brilliant General Petraeus says the surge is working. So it must be.

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