Squawk This Way

One exhausted parrot-point that my bud Bill O'Reilly perpetually trumpets is that the surge is "working." He frequently cites the decrease in American and civilian casualties as evidence of success. That's the no-spin zone, baby. Specious reasoning, Bill, and you know it. There are swarms of exiled Iraqis and more than a handful of dead. Not to sound totally irreverent, but I don't think there's nearly as many people to kill. Now, violence is down, and that's undeniably a major plus, but, as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice declared in a January 11th press conference, "Success in Iraq relies on more than military efforts, it requires robust political and economic progress." Oh odious reality! Why hast thou forsaken me?! In respect to creating a modicum of stability, the surge is "working," but in the context of the entire mission, the surge is a hangnail. We've almost ripped the nail off, but can't quite finish the job. Worse yet, the wound might trigger infection. And that's when it hurts like hell. Enter the Iraqi parliament. This window of relative calm is intended for the highly factious Iraqi government to forge a compromise, tenuous though it may be, to avoid gangrene. Exit the Iraqi parliament. There has been such sluggish political progress, if any, that the already floundering coalition of the willing withdrew British troops from Basra earlier this month.

My beef with BillO (besides 99% of everything he craps out his bloviating mouth) is that he, like this administration, has once again muddled and obfuscated history. My problem concerns his deceit. (I have a couple of friends in the Marines, and to see them being so flagrantly used as a crutch downright pisses me off.) In terms he might understand: we've been led out into the desert for, say, 40 months, give or take, and instead of looking behind and observing nothing but sand, Bill claims that the last oasis was in fact a Mission Accomplished sign. It never existed, but if Bill convinces people that the oasis was a mirage, and the sign was real, then...victory! (Aside: how he conflates dissent with emboldening (<-- *Shudder*) the enemy, I have no idea.) It's all about semantically outlining goals so that you can purposefully manipulate and redefine them later when you fall short. For example, remember earlier this year when the army failed to reach its recruitment goals? What did they do? They lowered the requirements:

They've lowered standards, accepting more soldiers with poorer scores on military aptitude tests and no high school diploma. They've raised the age of enlistment to as high as 42. They've offered millions of dollars in signing, promotion and retention bonuses. They're taking more people with medical problems. And they're using thousands of "moral waivers" to enlist recruits with records of petty crime or drug offenses. Steven Green, who was charged last year with raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl and killing her family in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, was one of those.

[Washington Post, June 3, 2007, Brigid Schulte: Why Won't We Let Them Fill the Ranks?]

Low and behold, they attained their recruitment goals!

To be continued....