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Here he comes again – the Cheerleader-in-Chief! George W, who was a cheerleader at Yale, is doing back flips and waving pom-poms in a PR effort to claim that his “surge” strategy in Baghdad is working splendidly.
As Bush cheerfully puts it, “American forces are now deployed 24 hours in these neighborhoods and, guess what’s happening? The Iraqi people are beginning to gain confidence.” Well… not really George. In fact, the latest ABC poll finds that only 18 percent of Iraqis have confidence in the U.S. troop surge, and nearly 90 percent say they “live in fear” for their lives.
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No amount of presidential pep talk can hide the fact that George’s disastrous war has already lasted longer than World War II and has cost more than Vietnam. Yet, Bush and the war-whoopers of the right-wing media are now loudly insisting that the surge is working in Baghdad. That will come as news to the city’s residents, who are dying from a record number of insurgent car bombings there.
But the dirty little secret of Bush’s strategy of concentrating troops strength in the capitol city is that the civil war has simply moved elsewhere, with the deaths of Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops increasing outside of Baghdad. In the northwestern town of Tal Afar, for example, two massive truck bombs ripped through the town market in late March, killing 48. In response to this bombing by Sunnis, Shiite militia went on a revenge spree against Sunni residents, killing some 60 of them.
Meanwhile, the decline of Shiite violence in Baghdad is ephemeral. Knowing that the U. S. surge was coming, and knowing that it will last for only a few months, the deadly Shiite militias that were based there have simply made a tactical withdrawal to other parts of the country, where they foment new violence while waiting out Bush’s surge in the capitol.
This is Jim Hightower saying… Sis-boom-ba, George! Bring our troops home.
“Bush can’t fix lives and promises he’s broken,” Associated Press, March 26, 2007
“Escalation’s Reality,” Faiz Sdhakir, Nico Pitney, Amanda Terkel, and Satyam Khanna, March 29, 2007