Saved By The Surge: John Podhoretz is a complete wanker

[theredpen]

Hey, everyone, did you hear? The surge not only worked, but it was a tremendous humanitarian acheivement! Well, that's what http://www.nypost.com/seven/10022007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/saved_by_the_surge.htm">John Podhoretz says in his column yesterday. How did he come to this conclusion? He counted all the people that were "saved" by the surge:

IS the surge in Iraq working? Consider this plain, simple and overwhelmingly power ful fact: Hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis are alive today, on Oct. 2, who'd be dead by now if there had been no surge.

There were 1,975 Iraqi civilian fatalities in August. In September, the number fell to 922 - a drop of 53 percent.

According to John's logic, 1053 people who would have died without a surge were "saved" because of it. He doesn't really explain why that should matter to the friends and families of the 922 who did die despite it. Probably because those 922 would probably be alive today if we hadn't invaded Iraq in the first place.

The whole argument is, of course, built on the appalling premise that Iraqi lives are fungible. Sure, 500 more die here, but 600 fewer died over there, so we're 100 ahead! According to wankers like Podhoretz we had a "budget" of 1,975 Iraqi lives for September and we came in under budget. In reality, all the numbers tell us is that there were at least another 922 innocent victims of Bush's war in September.

Podhoretz had utterly disgraced himself as a human being in the space of these two opening paragraphs, but it's quote a couple of more things. First, the very next paragraph starts with this:

How do we know this decline is due to the surge? We can't know for certain, of course.

Having abandoned the titular claim of his analysis, our intrepid wingnut pundit just keeps digging:

That attack was actually an anomaly, as it was a strike against a small subgroup of Kurds who live in a long-pacified area where there is no sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites and no al Qaeda activity. There is very little American troop presence there, and the troop surge is entirely focused elsewhere.

So just for the sake of argument, let's remove the 350 Yazidi victims from the overall number of Iraqi fatalities in August. In that case, the drop in civilian casualties falls to 700 and the percentage decline falls to around 40 percent.

What candor. He voluntarily reduces our "death budget" by 350 Yazidis. He considers that massacre an anomaly because there were no Sunnis and Shiites involved. In reality, this "long-pacified" area has been the arena for some of the most effective ethnic cleansing of the Iraq fiasco.

The Chaldean Christian community, which has existed since the 1st century BCE and still speaks Aramaic, Jesus' native tongue, is in danger of being completely destroys. Chaldean Catholic nuns have been asked to wear hijab instead of habits in the hopes that this will allow them to make it to Church without being murdered. Of course, there are fewer and fewer Churches to attend, as they have been the steady targets of bombings.

The Chaldeans are just one of several ethnic groups targeted by violence. There are also Turkmen and Assyrians — the persecution of the former drawing threats from Turkey to intervene. The forces that have "long-pacified" this region — the Kurds — don't want these other groups around.

No one has been "saved" by anything the Bush Administration has done in Iraq. The flow of blood surges and subsides, but the flow of complete bullshit from contemptible scum like Podhoretz continues unabated.

[muntrv]

1. John, go on vacation to Iraq and take a John McCain stroll through Baghdad.

:evilgrin: :evilgrin: :evilgrin:

[Felix Mala]

2. All the splurge showed was that you can reduce the violent killings by a modest percent...

And makes me wonder what the US might have achieved if they'd sent the 200,000 or 300,000 troops that all those retiring generals wanted to send in '02 and '03.

[theredpen]

3. Excellent point n/t