The Surge in Iraq:
"Success’ Is a Vicious Lie

Dec 1, 2008

The U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq, engineered under General David Petraeus, has been portrayed as a big "success’ and has been credited by the news media and Republican and Democratic politicians with rescuing U.S. imperialism’s disastrous war in Iraq from becoming another Viet Nam, that is, a humiliating defeat.

In reality, the "surge" was an enormous escalation of the war against the Iraqi people, with U.S. troops supporting vast amounts of ethnic cleansing. In Baghdad, U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies bombed and destroyed entire neighborhoods, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee. Refugees from Baghdad then joined a human flood that today encompasses one-sixth of the Iraqi population, or close to five million people. Baghdad was divided up and segregated by enormous blast walls into Sunni and Shia enclaves, which are patrolled by murderous police, gangs and troops. In other words, Baghdad was bled dry... and then turned into a virtual prison.

Some provincial cities like Ramadi and Falujah were reduced to rubble after years and years of intense bombing. If they are quiet... it’s only the quiet of a cemetery.

The country continues to seethe with violence and ethnic conflicts. Iraq is still so dangerous, almost none of the five million refugees have felt safe enough to return home, despite the truly harsh conditions they have to endure as refugees. Those few who returned were most often confronted by the violent hostility of one gang or another, which left them with only this choice: leave or die. Certainly the mixed neighborhoods and cities, where people of different ethnic origins used to live together and intermarry, appear to be a thing of the past.

In other words, the U.S. has achieved a sort of "peace" by pitting one ethnic or religious group against another in battles and butcheries that still continue.

They call the "surge" a success? By this measure, they would call the Holocaust a success!