John McCain's Surging Lie

John McCain is desperate to talk about the surge rather than the splurge. His Iraq war is set to cost one trillion dollars, and his deregulation-mania has cost hundreds of billions. So in order to maintain his façade of being "tough on spending", he needs to shift the subject. That's why he has tried to shrink the debate about the Iraq War to one small question. Not: did Saddam have Weapons of Mass Destruction? Not: did Saddam have links to 9/11? Not: why do 70 percent of Iraqis think the presence of US troops make them less safe and they should go home now?

McCain knows he will lose those arguments, so he wants us to talk solely about whether the surge of US troops last year has been successful. But a hole was just blown in that argument - and blood is rushing through.

Those of us who got Iraq wrong have a particular duty to honestly describe what is happening now. A major study by the distinguished scientific journal 'Environment and Planning A' this week has revealed the real picture. The Republican nominee claims the US troops have stopped the violence by their physical presence. To test this, Professor John Agnew and his colleagues used the same techniques the US government has adopted to monitor ethnic cleansing in Burma and Uganda.

Here's how it works. When an entire ethnic or religious group is driven out, they abandon their houses - and they aren't there to switch on the lights. Their areas become much more dark. If satellite images show night-light remains the same in the areas dominated by one ethnic group but significantly falls in mixed areas, you know ethnic cleansing is happening.

So what happened in Iraq? Before, during and after the surge, the areas that had always been Sunni and the areas that had always been Shia were brighter than ever. But in the vast mixed areas, half or more of the lights went out in the six months leading up to the surge. They then stabilised in half-darkness. By the time the US troops arrived, there were no more mixed areas left. The easy pickings - the Shia who lived next door, or the Sunni who lived up the road - had all been attacked already. Sunni and Shia weren't killing each other any more because they had retreated into vast enclaves, cleansed and armed, surrounded by barriers manned by militias. Four million people had been driven from their homes.

Professor Agnew explains: "Our findings suggest the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for the process of ethno-sectarian neighbourhood homogenization that is now largely achieved." The new US troops have simply built concrete walls between the newly-cleansed areas.

This study is a bleak vindication of my extraordinary colleague Patrick Cockburn, who has been almost alone in telling the human story of the cleansing. Here is one example. In May 2006, four gunmen turned up at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in north-east of Baghdad. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," they said. She was a Shia in a Sunni neighbourhood, so she had to run, or die. "Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house," Leila said. "I came away with nothing." Now imagine millions of Leilas, and you have much of Iraq today.

Those who try to get past the checkpoints and walls to their old neighbourhoods find that the intercommunal hatred has not been soothed. Cockburn gives one typical example: "When one couple, both Shia, went last month to visit the house from which they had fled in the Sunni al-Makanik district of Dora in south Baghdad, they were immediately shot dead and their driver beheaded."

Yet Obama has failed to properly challenge this propaganda-surge about the surge. Instead, he echoes the McCain line that "the surge has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams", and swiftly shifts the conversation back to the terrible decision to invade in the first place. He has evidently concluded that this case is too complex and too easily attacked with the ludicrous charge that he is "criticising the troops." So John McCain is getting away with braying about the "great success" of wrapping one of the worst programmes of ethnic cleansing of our time in towering concrete walls of reinforcement.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, go here.

Comments

[dadw5boys]

only 1/3 of IRAQ is secure !!!!!!!!!

how is that success ?????

[JessieatEPIC]

Obama's Iraq plan falls short as well. It is time we stop talking about "success." How about "stability," sustainability," "security," and "peace?" The humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, a result of the Iraq War, has displaced 5 million Iraqis. This threatens to destabilize the entire Middle East. Let's get back to the present issues and go from here in our efforts to build a sustainable, peaceful and just resolution to the war. To find out what's going at the ground level in Iraq, check out:

http://thegroundtruth.blogspot.com/

[delta7777]

Surge??? Winning the war??

any progress in Iraq, even if temporary, is due to:
-replacing Rumsfield with Gates
-General Petraeus, who is anextraordinarily competent leader and a humanist as well
-stationing troops in neighborhoods instead of in central camps with daily forays
-enlisting the Sunni insurgent forces (Sons of Iraq) against Al Quaeda
-20' walls separating Sunni fron Shiite in cities (!!???)

Notwithstanding---Iraq remains a house of cards

This is not a "war" that can be won....
too many lives already lost and destroyed to consider any possible outcome as a "win"

the real enemy is al quaeda who are not located here, but in Waziristan
except by infiltration into Iraq under cover of the Bush attack on Iraq.

What I want to know is how to win the peace

not just in Iraq, but in the entire middle east including Israel and Palestine

I think that Obama is far more suited than McCain to winning the peace

[kemo5]

"He has evidently concluded that this case is too complex and too easily attacked with the ludicrous charge that he is "criticising the troops."

That makes a lot of sense. I go nuts every time the Obama camp lets the "Surge is a success" exageration go uncontested.

But I keep in mind that the vote they are working on is the "stupid" or "ignorant" vote. This issue is too complex for those voters to get it, or care about it. And the whole issue of Bush wanting a reduction in violence to appear as success, is another level to this surge preposterousness.

They can always pull it out if needed during these last weeks.

[emncaity]

If you're saying Obama can "pull it out" ("it" being the truth about the surge) during the last weeks, that's gonna be tough, because the one thing Americans canNOT hear is the truth about anything important.

If he tells the truth about the surge, he'll be blasted for denigrating what the U.S. military has done, no matter how much he says "I'm not saying we weren't a factor."

Just like if anybody ever told the truth about what was really wrong with our interventionist and economic-imperialist foreign policy, and what it would take to fix it (start with public apologies to moderate Islamics worldwide and to the state of Iraq for having invaded it when they never attacked us), they'd be deemed a traitor in a millisecond. People like Sarah Palin know this when they talk about "American exceptionalism." I have a teenager who thinks she's "exceptional" too--nobody but her ever went through anything like she's going through, she is always the one wronged, you name it. And yes, I'm saying absolutely that we seem stuck in some kind of national adolescence, right down to the willful ignorance.

[5oclockshadow]

If this pisses you off, then you get a thinktank together, invest a few hundred million dollars, recruit an army of pundits and fight back against the right wing thinktank/pentagon/white house/ k-street cabal that spent billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours selling "the surge is working"TM to the American people over the course of the last 18 months.

If it pisses you off, then you do that, but it's not Obama's job right now.

It's Obama's job to get elected.

[woodchips]

"The surge" is a success? If you think so, please read the GAO report (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08837.pdf)

If your goal is to build a car and after 20 months of trying, you've only managed to make it run for a short time before blowing up, would this be considered a huge success? That's essentially what we're supposed to believe about Iraq.

[sloLes]

Right on Woodchips! And thanks for including the link.

The inability to read our own government reports, or unwillingness to believe them is at the core of all our major problems. National Intelligence Estimates put the lie to any & all notions that we're winning the war on terrorism. Army Corps of Engineers plans to rebuild or repair levees in New Orleans BEFORE Hurricane Katrina demonstrate that some people did know. And documented pre-9/11 warnings about Bin Laden prove that not everyone was asleep. But most Americans still don't know, or refuse to believe.

And of course, who is doing well on American Idol seems to be more important to many than who is stealing their money on Wall Street.

I have no answer. But all the info is out there. It's good to see people here referring to it. As this GAO report documents, the surge only worked at home, where people readily accepted falling short of 15 of the 18 benchmarks set up to measure its success.

Perhaps, losing several trillion dollars in the past month will enter the American consciousness? Unfortunately, the answer has been to help those who profited most from creating this mess.

[guajiro]

I'm tired of hearing the "surge" worked. If it did then why the heck are we still out there in Iraq?

[Ironquill]

Shorly before the conventions McCain crossed himself up by making a string of questionable statements about the Sunni "awakening", whether the surge was his idea, the sequence of events, and so forth. It seems as if the Obama camp should do more with this, another example of erratic thinking.

[Fenianheart]

The biggest reason the surge "worked" was because of the Sadr cease-fire, which is completely ignored by the MSM.

[Crowhaul]

Like most Americans, I understand that the question is not about whether a tactic worked or did not work (we don't sit around discussing whether Shock and Awe worked, do we?).

The real question comes down to this: were we correct in invading that foreign country?

Was the intel vetted the way it should have been?

Was the intel used much like propaganda to compel a country toward a war it didn't need?

Believing that the war was a good thing or not is THE cornerstone issue; not whether 'the surge' worked. Americans understand that it wasn't smart to invade Iraq and we definitely don't want to elect ANYONE who believes it was a good thing.

[NoMoFearNoMoHate]

what you hear far too seldom is that the success of the surge is only true as long as it continues - the moment it is over it is back to square one if not worse.

[jcdf]

I have read and heard this months ago from other sources and I wondered why this hasn't been picked up more in the MSM. Are they afraid to seam un-patriotic by not giving the troops credit for this? The media is taking Bush's word on this without question. He hasn't been right yet, why do they believe him now?

[KennaP]

keep putting out articles like this, eventually the truth will spread.

[Gidster]

It perpetuated the power of radical mullahs.
By taking everything from these people, thrusting them into crowded and fearful conditions where only their strong militia is seen to offer protection, then radical clerics can say anything and it will be received as truth.
Bush's blundering policies have created generational enemies of America.

Every mullah will tell his flock that America is to blame for their suffering and their losses.

This may never end

[Kindheart]

The really smart, thinking people have known this all along. The minute we stop paying the Sunnis not to attack us and/or we leave the country, a huge civil war will break out. The surge did not work, despite all the news that say it did. Additionally, Johnny keeps thinking we will have a victory in Iraq and even David Petraeus has said that he would not use the word, "victory" in Iraq. It is just a simmering pot, waiting to boil over.

[Bobrobert]

:-)

War - ugly don't you think?!?!?!????

Anyone notice that the public doesn't want to admit the war has been lost and that all our troops died for oil we will never see.

Feel good America - it only took 50 years to enter into another war that cannot be won and we still feel patriotic - maybe.

War crimes are hard to prosecute - we don't have enough prisons to house all those guilty of them.

Another day.

Another GI dies for oil.

Sad.