This:
The Pentagon on Wednesday said an eruption of violence in southern Iraq, where US-backed government forces were battling Shiite militias, was a “by-product of the success of the surge.”
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said it showed that the Iraqi government and security forces were now confident enough to take the initiative against Shiite extremists in the southern port of Basra.
“Citizens down there have been living in a city of chaos and corruption for some time and they and the prime minister clearly have had enough of it,” he said at a Pentagon press conference.
The positive outcome of the surge to stop the violence was an increase in elective violence.
Let’s not debate the merits or veracity of this claim, but point out that this is the worst framing of the situation in Iraq, ever- “The surge is so successful that we can expect a lot more violence!” This is even dumber than the previously trumpeted “The fact that they are resorting to suicide bombs is a sign of our success!”
Just make this all stop. Blogging is too depressing anymore- it really was more fun when I was with the right wing and “making my own reality.” This actual reality just sucks.
demimondian
Can we debate the mendacity of the claim, instead?
Delia
This too will pass. Soon the uptick in violence will be the fault of the nefarious Iranians.
Ninerdave
Cheer up John, someday we’ll all be dead and it won’t matter.
TR
Just make this all stop. Blogging is too depressing anymore- it really was more fun when I was with the right wing and “making my own reality.” This actual reality just sucks.
Yep, it’s just like The Matrix.
Bet you wish you’d swallowed the other pill now, right?
demimondian
No, it already is.
In fact, comrade, Delia 665491, aren’t you assisting your comrades in removing the posters which appear to say “Sadr is a hero” (although, of course, they don’t; it’s merely a trick of the light, and they must be replaced lest anyone think they ever did).
dbrown
Reality – is like thermodynamics (really entropy); you can’t win, you can’t break even, and worse, you can’t get out of the game.
Facts – can’t evade them, can’t beat them, and can’t live with them.
zsa
When life gives you lemons, make living-in-a-city-of-chaos-and-corruption-ade.
Ned R.
And if you can stand it, RedState is already talking about it that way (at least in their comments).
JL
Hey, Don’t quit now. You have to many fans that would go into withdrawal without your daily rants.
tBone
Give him a break. He was probably just sleep-deprived.
jake
Ah yes, it all makes sense. A big steaming pile of shit is the by-product of a good meal, so bAdmin. continues to shovel it down our throats and wonder why we don’t clamor for more.
Thepanzer
I guess the Turkish incursions into northern Iraq are also positive side effects of the surge. The fact that we’re not dropping below 140,000 troops is another positive effect of the surge. Getting to the 4k US death toll is another positive effect of the surge (cuz y’know like Dick Cheney said they volunteered for it and George Bush finds it terribly romantic to be gunned down in your prime just so long as it isn’t someone he’s related to).
The credibility gap that developed around the US military during Vietnam and then subsided has re-emerged and turned into a credibility chasm.
The Commander Guy
Well, there is no balance of power on the ground there. So Iraq is all up for grabs.
My grade school kid asked me what was going on in Iraq. So I asked her if she thought things at school would be fair if the biggest meanest strongest kid got to make up all the rules. No was the answer. Things would not be fair.
Well, I told her, in Iraq, there are a lot of big strong mean men fighting so they can be the ones that get to make all the rules.
So there you go, this kinda stuff is going to happen.
Pb
Wow. Maybe one day the Iraqi government can be confident enough again to start a war with Iran, or at least invade Kuwait.
Jay McDonough
“After six months of a self imposed cease fire by the Mahdi Army, all hell is breaking loose in Baghdad and Basra as the Mahdi Army is battling U.S. and Iraqi Army forces and the relative stability brought about by the “surge” of U.S. forces is now threatened.
Today, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino delivered what may be the most stunning counter perspective in ages. This, in fact, may well rank in the Hall of Fame for counterintuitive logic. Ms. Perino asserts the new violence in Iraq is not a setback but, in fact, really a positive sign.” from http://swimmingfreestyle.typepad.com
Dennis - SGMM
This is nothing more, or less, than an attempt to provoke Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers into open warfare with the US forces and the Iraqi government. Neither the US nor the al-Maliki crowd want al-Sadr around during the October elections in Iraq. Al-Sadr is a nationalist who wants neither the US nor Iran meddling in Iraq ergo, he has to go.
Look for al-Sadr to be “accidentally killed in a US raid on a suspected terrorist stronghold.”
The Other Steve
These militia in Basra are simply excercising their new found freedom of expression.
jukeboxgrad
“Soon the uptick in violence will be the fault of the nefarious Iranians.”
I think Rev. Wright is to blame. His kind of talk encourages the terrorists.
Incertus
I wonder–could it ever get so bad that the press would just decide not to show up for one of these things? I have my doubts.
Thepanzer
Commander guy, this kind of stuff is going to happen? Which part? The invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 or AQ, completely botching the occupation and reconstruction, unleashing sectarian violence with no clue how to stop it, putting our troops in the middle of it with no idea how to curtail it, picking which of three factions to support or the botching of playing the three against each other, or the point of this post that our military senior leaders are so infatuated with getting another star that they’ll gladly sell out over 200 years of american military tradition and any concept of strategy and tactics in warfare to shamelessly try to bullshit the public into thinking that long-term quagmire and strategic clusterfuck is, in actuality, the same as winning the super-bowl while getting a blowjob?
Maybe I misread your post but it sounded a lot like the Rumsfeldism “stuff happens.” Yeah stuff happens, but that’s not the excuse you use when you drag the American public and world at large into a botched war of choice that weakens American power in every conceivable category and will take decades to recover from. Criminal fucking negligence in the first degree with a helpful dose of dumber-than-Napoleon-in-the-Russian-winter fucking stupid is a lot closer to the mark.
RSA
Remember the slightly-less-bad old days (okay, they were just as bad) when it was commonplace to ask about specific things that would happen to indicate it would be appropriate to get out of Iraq? I think John even wrote about such metrics. In any case, I guess we found that when our leaders (1) hadn’t made any plans for the future, (2) couldn’t make predictions without such plans, and (3) weren’t competent to carry out plans of any kind, everyone stopped asking. Now it’s just vague handwaving–we’ll be in Iraq forever, I guess.
myiq2xu
I’m waiting for “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”
maxbaer (not the original)
So, if the violence were to stop, it would mean the surge was a failure? Sadly, in Bush/Cheney world that may be the truth.
Tara the anti-social social worker
“I’ve done some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.” -Jane Wagner
Xenos
How the White House Press corps keeps from bursting out in laughter at these statements by Perino is astonishing. They should organize a bit and just walk out of the room next time. That would get the president’s attention.
Kav
Don’t worry John, this will be blamed on the Brits since we ‘left’ Basra. The right-wing, who once crowed about their coalition allies, were exceedingly quick to turn on us after we declared that we were handing Basra over and reducing troop levels.
bhagamu
I have some better spin for you.
“Phased withdrawal is proving to be a bad idea for the country.” – RedState, tying together the “troop reductions” and the recent violence.
Some guy
It is a cliche for sure, but when I read insulting blather like that from the Pentagon, all I can think ‘they must have some fantastic shit they are on when the design this stuff.’
Aiming to win over the slack-jawed.
demimondian
Just think of it this way, John.
Whenever you think about whatever demagoguery the Clinton camp is committing on any given day, just remember “The current Republican administration is worse.”
The Commander Guy
Thepanzer
When you kick over the ants nest you can’t control the ants. Everybody knows this.
So stuff does happen. And stuff is gonna keep happening cause humpty dumpty ain’t going to magically put itself back together. The surge is not going to remake the realities on the ground.
Lesson: don’t kick over the nest for the hell of it.
~
The glass is half full.
D-Chance.
Uh, wintertime’s over in Iraq. Of course, the violence is rising. Anyone looking at the correlation of violence levels and the calendar can tell you that it quells during the harsher winter months and increases during the warmer springtime. This has been a recurring pattern over there. The surge “worked” beginning around late October due more to weather than troop levels, and now it will look like it’s failing due more to weather and insurgent activity more than troop level or troop aggression.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
John,
Don’t despair – the fact that their lies are getting this awful means that they’ve running on fumes now – all the even vaugely plausible stuff has been used up already. This has to be putting a strain on the kool-aid supply. It can’t hold up forever.
KC45s
This actual reality just sucks.
Careful, John. You’re starting to sound like a liberal.
joe
Oh, come one. You remember how the Pentagon and the warbloggers spent the last six months saying “If the surge succeeds, we can expect to see a coordinated campaign of attacks by Sadrists on government forces.”
You remember that, right?
DrDave
John:
You need Lexapro (or prozac). It won’t make the bad stuff go away; you just won’t give a shit.
Dennis - SGMM
No one could have anticipated that attacking the guy who’d put his followers under two successive cease-fires might lead to another cycle of violence in Iraq.
Stoic
Redemption’s a bitch, ain’t it?
srv
John, John. These guys need a few victories to build up thier confidence. They’ve come a long way from the PT training.
It never gets old.
Sasha
Welcome to the waking nightmare feeling that virtually every member of the American political left has had since November 2000.
BDS also stands for (the) Bullshit Doesn’t Stop. 8 years of non-stop bullshit served up from on high can drive anyone batty.
vwcat
John, Glad you came over to the dark side. Love your sarcasm and blog.
mark
“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” – Phillip K. Dick
demimondian
In fact, D-Chance, I saw an interesting time line somewhere — it’s pretty clear that the predominant cause of the fall in violence was the Sadrist ceasefire (whatever its ultimate cause). If that’s the case, and if the Sadrists have used the intervening months to resuply, then what we’re going to see over the next few months is a sharp spike in casualties, both American and Iraqi, and a rapid descent into complete anarchy.
Gus
I’m a little late to the party. I was going to say that the wingnuts will eat it up like it’s chocolate pudding and ask for more. It appears that’s already the case. Among the 28 percenters, bad news is not an option regardless of what the reality is.
TenguPhule
Two drinks too sober for reality.
Every single fucking day.
Gus
I’ll look on the bright side. At least horrible violence in Iraq keeps the internecine pissing match between Hillbots and MUPpets to a minimum.
Dennis - SGMM
Some comic relief:
Homey the Clown
Video could be better but still vintage Homey.
Rick Taylor
You’ll get used to it. Just give it a few more years. I used to go up the wall too, but eventually, you just loose your capacity for constant outrage.
It has the advantage of simplicity. Whatever happens, it means were succeeding. If combat deaths are down, of course we’re succeeding. If combat deaths are up, that’s a sign the terrorists are getting desperate and we’re succeeding. It certainly beats having to think.
p.a.
I know I’ve said this before, but the really scary part is that 28%-30% of Americans will swallow this whole like it’s a glass of lemonade on a hot day. 6%,8% wouldn’t worry me, every society has its loons. But 30%??!!
Submitted for discussion; the rise in late 20th century ‘conservatism’ coincided with the decline of public education. Concurrence does not necessarily indicate causality, but in this case…
n.b.:1) quotes around conservative; most of the movement, and especially Bushism, isn’t. I like John’s label: Republican Crime Syndicate.
2) Has there really been a decline in public education? How do the benchmarks really compare to past generations? Hasn’t every generation since 1789 at least had a movement to ‘improve’ declining standards?
The Other Steve
What I find particularly amazing is that the media is not really covering this new fighting.
I’ve heard a bit about it on NPR, but nearly nothing on CNN.
apparently it interferes with their “Surge is working” theme music.
Ninerdave
Well the surge is working. Duh!
Christ TOS get with the program.
The Other Steve
Apparently the most important news story is about how Saddam hussein paid for some congressmen to fly to Iraq back in 2002… but the congressmen didn’t know it, because it was some third party guy working with some other guy who new a guy who had a sister.
TenguPhule
Or nobody wants to go bak there because it’s ‘old news’.
99% of our media needs to be taken out and horsewhipped.
The Other Steve
Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot the surge already worked, and we’re now operating in a post-surge world.
The Other Steve
You know, every time I go out looking for footage of Iraq… it dawns on me just how bloody fucking stupid Iraqis must be.
Who the fuck fires a gun from your hip expecting to hit anything?
Teach those idiots how to aim already!
cbear
Sorta depends on the weapon. See, BAR, SAW, etc.
Dennis probably has some pretty good insight on the subject.
LiberalTarian
It’s shock and slack-jaw.
J. Michael Neal
Tried ’em. Lexapro and Prozac are both useless. That’s why I take a combination of Xanax and Seroquel now.
LiberalTarian
On a more serious note:
There was a reason people took to the streets to end the Viet Nam war–it was the only way to convince our “leadership” to end the war.
When you see hundreds of thousands in the streets every weekend to end the Iraq War, we’ll declare victory and come home.
A couple dirty fucking hippies and their converts commenting about it on their blogs is not going to do it.
cbear
A “slowball”.
Cool.
J. Michael Neal
I have to be the only one on the planet who can take Seroquel, Xanax, and Lunesta and lie awake for five hours.
matt
Whoa! Just saw that Balloon Juice is now averaging 16,348 hits a day.
John’s conversation? The dem primary? The Kos link?
Whatever it is, congratulations!
Is this the biggest Balloon Juice has been?
wingnuts to iraq
i thought England left Iraq because Basara was safe.
Oh well.
Ninerdave
They first have to get jumping jacks down. They just need another Friedman unit or two before they can move beyond basic PT. Patience my friend.
Ninerdave
It’s Demi’s interesting posts.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
p.a.
I’ve got an alternate theory, that all the nutjobs (i.e. about 27% of the population per John Rogers’ crazification factor) used to be divided more or less evenly between the two parties (say 13-14% in each one), but when Marxism went down the drain with the collapse of the Soviet Union there was no happy home left remaining for authoritarian personalities to make a nest in on the ideological left.
Consequently all the people who would have been Maoists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, etc. ended up becoming neocons instead.
If you only need 51% to win an election, and if everyone in a political party holds their nose and goes with the will of the majority within that party, then you only need 25 and 1/2% of the electorate to take over the whole damn country. Lockstep party discipline gives leverage to minorities that they would not otherwise enjoy.
Putting all 27% of the authoritarians together in the same GOP basket made a critical mass large enough that they were able to take over the party, and the rest is history.
AnneLaurie
As if. Look for an increasingly ridiculous string of “al-Sadr seconds-in-command” and “highly-placed al-Sadr associates” whose deaths will be proclaimed as “a deathblow to the enemies of Iraqi freedom”. Any serious attempts by the Oval Office Occupants’ best powerpoint rangers will end, if the rest of us are lucky, as Closeau farces at best. Worst, of course, would involve accidentally murdering another bargeload of Iraqi and American “collateral” in the attempt.
Conservatively Liberal
From what I have read, we are paying some of the fighters not to fight. I have heard of this practice for some time now,but I wonder if the Iraqi fighters are thinking ‘Hey, we usually stop fighting during the winter, so why not have the Americans pay us during the time off?
Naah, try Lithium, the Happy Metal! It will put a smile on your face in nothing flat. :D
AnneLaurie
Slacker. Some of us ADDers use speed* as a sleep aid. Doesn’t work for the neurotypical, but how neurotypical are most bloggers?
*(well, legally prescribed methylphenadates)
gypsy howell
Hey tBone- if you’re not posting over at The great Orange Satan as tripletee, then someone has seriously ripped you off, and kos frontpaged it.
If you ARE tripletee, then congrats!
A fine piece of snark either way.
Shygetz
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Dennis - SGMM
Lucas McCain, “The Rifleman” (Distant relative of John McCain?) was the only person I ever saw who could fire accurately from the hip. However, the first rule in a firefight (At least when I was serving) is to immediately lay down a lot of lead in the general direction of the other guy so that he puts his head down and stops shooting for a few heartbeats. The human tendency is to initially think that bullets aimed near you are aimed at you. This pause gives you the chance to take cover as necessary and then provide better-aimed fire. Most combat casualties are the result of the quantity of the gunfire rather than the quality of it.
Many people don’t ever get beyond the laying down a lot of lead stage due to fear, adrenaline or the simple fact that they couldn’t hit the ground with their helmet. Real marksmen, with both the coolness and the ability to line up a killing shot in the heat of battle, are few and far between.
Buck
William Lind gives his prognosis.
ikewasright
In other news, the Pentagon has announced that STD is a positive sign that you had a really, really good time last week, and White House spokesbimbo Dana Perino told the press corps that a slow, lingering death by cancer “was really not all that bad.”
We need to get the NEA behind legislation that would make Orwell’s “1984” mandatory reading in every American middle school.
libarbarian
Napoleon entered Russia with around 600,000. Less than 50,000 made it home 6 months later.
We’ve lost 4,000 in almost 5 years.
Lets not lose perspective here.
tBone
Wow. Wasn’t expecting that to get front-paged or I would have been more clear about my identity. I’ve had that account for 4+ years but that’s the first diary I’ve ever posted there. Thanks for the heads-up.
demimondian
Now, that isn’t fair.
I don’t think that they’ve cut the page views by more than…oh…10%.
Krista
Yeah, you might want to put a little update right at the start of that diary. A lot of people seem to be very upset at the thought that you’ve been plagiarized. ;)
Li
“Napoleon entered Russia with around 600,000. Less than 50,000 made it home 6 months later.
We’ve lost 4,000 in almost 5 years.
Lets not lose perspective here.”
The Pentagon’s own reports state that we have lost 78k soldiers from the first gulf war, largely from DU poisoning.
We’ve dumped more DU on Iraq this time than last time, and our troops are living in the dust.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a similar casualty count within 10 years. . . .
T-rex
Delia, don’t you mean “Al Qaeda in Iran?” They exist for all talking-point Republican purposes, just ask McCain.
Ed Drone
I think we can finally put a quantitative value on “some of the people all of the time.” That this value is so high is scary, for sure.
And that glass that’s half-empty? Or half-full? The solution is to get a smaller glass.
Ed
John Cole
I was actually chatting with the Great Orange Satan when I saw your diary come up on the sidebar at DKOS and I linked it to him. We both had a good laugh at it.
Krista
Aww…the bonding…that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Conservatively Liberal
I grew up firing all kinds of weapons. Living on a farm had its advantages. At 14 years of age, with my favorite .30-30 Winchester, I could hit the top of a 4 inch fence post from about 100 feet while firing from the hip.
Ever shoot chipmunks with a .30-06? There ain’t much left but a few tiny bits. Though I found that if you hit one head on, you can skin it from the inside out. ;)
Pb
Congrats, tBone! And thank you John, for the link pimpage! :)
John Cole
Wanna spoon?
eric
So that means that if Iraq falls into a full civil war the surge would be a howling success.
tBone
Thanks, John. I emailed the GOS to apologize for the confusion in the comments and he mentioned that you had vouched for me. If I ever hit 5-diamond status I’ll give you a percentage.
Visceral
Relax, John. There’s a big difference between being in the reality-based community and simply putting up with everything as it is.
Making our own reality is what politics is all about. The difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals actually intend to make their reality tangible, while conservatives are content to create propaganda and their base is too stupid to know the difference.
They and their movement answer to the elite – not the people – who don’t want anything to change because where can they go but down?
Krista
With you AND the Great Orange Satan? Isn’t that every good leftist girl’s ultimate fantasy? :)
Carl Gordon
So GOP Surrealists are imagining that there’s good news from Iraq concerning Cheney’s intestinal problems, er, the surge, and that they’ve undoubtedly hatched a scheme whereby they can free themselves from the evils of the Constitution, escaping so they can all sit back on their laurels and make slop buckets full of cash whilst falling into a heap of their own drool on some “coffeehouse” counter in Amsterdam before their pointy-pointy heads are whistled for a double dribble penalty as they hit the ground, or from their pseudo-religious objective point of view, as the ground rises to greet them. Copious amounts? Wee dram after wee gram? Dancing potatoes everywhere? And don’t forget: They put chemicals on the “stuff” there, too!
But it’s all hope and projection, based on a history of bad upbringing, ulterior motives of fellow siblings, poor stimulus retention due to gazing at penguin attired “lay” persons for eight of the most important formative years, abandonment in a town named after the Mexican word for a pass in the hills, and several ill-advised experiments with herbal extracts and tinctures of pineal glands obtained through illegitimate means trampling beyond the bounds of good taste and legality.
Hey! Don’t stop me, I’m rolling with this! Wherever known reality stops for conservatives, where they touch the unknown (in the biblical sense), there they project an archetypal image, simultaneously puzzling over why their hands smell like rubber. Wait a second, how about Animus, considered to be that natural and primitive part of the mind’s activity and processes remaining after dispensing with a “second self” created by Republican candidate or devil and through whom the narrative is related, which is the mask displayed in interactions with others and which has been shaped by socialization and indifferent promiscuity in local airport restrooms. Freud often described the functioning of psychosexual energies in mechanical terms, influenced perhaps by the dominance of the steam engine at the end of the 19th century, entering a tunnel of course. In this manner, he also tended to think of the libido as a producer of energies, and a main cause of future troubles for persons falling out of favor with “lay” “members” of the clergy or nuns. Hell, maybe I’m just blowing smoke up my frame of reference, or as Joey Rico used to say, a tendency of an organism to revert to instinctive behaviors that can interfere with the conditioned response.
Cain
As long as it’s a girl’s fantasy. I think I’d just be confused.. “what am I doing with you two? I need to lay off the rum..”
cain
Soylent Green
As during Vietnam, we would need a new draft would get them into the streets. Or as Samuel Johnson noted, “Nothing sharpens the mind so much as the knowledge you’re going to be hanged in the morning.”
Krista
Nah, it’s tequila that produces results like that.
Delia
Yeah, there seems to be some expectation it will sell better than the “yellowcake-Niger-Iraq” fable did. I mean, why not? After all, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Asti
Just think of those of us who have dealt with this sucky reality for over seven years. How do you think WE feel?
Asti
But, but… everyone wants the bigger one! ;)