Liberal Weenies Still Desperately Clinging to Their Talking Points About Iraq

Violence Remains Low in Iraq (DoD pdf), but the rhetoric pegs high on the bullshit meter

Violence continues to decline in Iraq, the mostly Sunni Sahwa members are beginning to fall under cognizance of the Shi'ite government, people are out on the streets of Baghdad during Ramadan (a period which used to be marred in violence), detainees are being returned to society en masse, and the Iraqi Parliament recently passed the Provincial Elections bill. You'd think the wags in the punditsphere would throw in the towel on their efforts to portray a country they've never been to as a wretched wasteland of Bush's failed policies. For the most part, it's become a non-issue in politics in recent months, but Gary Kamiya has taken a break from writing about Republicans being a bunch of brain-dead rubes to penning a piece entitled "Remember Iraq?". He asserts:

The media has largely bought into this rosy view of the surge. Violence has fallen sharply in Iraq and U.S. casualties are down, and the media and the U.S. public have tacitly accepted both that the surge was largely responsible for these laudable outcomes and, to a lesser degree, that the underlying situation in Iraq has fundamentally improved. Unfortunately, neither claim is true.

These people have called us liars before (see the General Betrayus FAIL), but now they are citing this UCLA study of satellite imagery of lighting in Baghdad (only goes to Dec. 2007) to prove that ethnic cleansing already took place in Baghdad prior to the surge. The study has nothing to stay about the decline in violence in other provinces, and also suggests that surge brigades were sitting on their duffs during all of 2007 and early 2008.

The U.S. military was sealing off neighborhoods that were no longer really active ribbons of violence, largely because the Shiites were victorious in killing large numbers of Sunnis or driving them out of the city all together," Agnew said. "The large portion of the refugees from Iraq who went during this period to Jordan and Syria are from these neighborhoods."

A ridiculous statement, seeing how combat brigades were focused in the Sunni stronghold of Adhamiya, followed by the massive ethnosectarian violence going on in East & West Rashid along Sunni-Shi'ite faultlines, and Sadr City and New Baghdad (Shi'ite strongholds) in early 2008. What does these college kids think the soldiers were doing in Baghdad during the Surge, jerking each other off? No is saying that the refugee crisis isn't a serious problem, but to say that the entire surge failed because of some lousy study can only be seen as a fit of desperation and distortion of reality.

I understand that many are upset about the reason we went into Iraq and completely disagree with the war, but to deny all facts out of political convenience is becoming harder to do and makes you look more silly by the day. Get with the program.