HILLARY STRADDLES AND GEORGE ADDLES

"You can't be against the war and for the surge."
(John Edwards on Hillary's pandering to VFW)

"Hillary Clinton said the surge was 'working' and gave
a helping hand to Bush's spin machine." (Sen. Gravel)

Edwards put his finger on Mrs. Clinton's ambivilence
about the war. She supported it in the early days
when the American public did, and changed slowly, as
they changed in their support. Now there's an uptick
in popular support for the surge, and Hil says: "it's
working!" For proof of success, she cites Anbar,
where there has been no surge, but a quieting of
violence due to local initiatives and joint operations
among the tribal leaders and U. S. forces. That's good,
but was happening before the surge, which is
concentrated in Baghdad. The most violent forces
pushed out of Anbar have simply surfaced elsewhere
and continued the violence.

Combat soldiers report from Iraq (in a gut-wrenching
op-ed in The New York Times (8/19/07): "Viewed
from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment,
the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. . .
A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death
of one American soldier and the critical wounding of
two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was
detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a
police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American
investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers
escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb.
These civilians highlighted their own predicment: had
they informed the Americans of the bomb before the
incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite
militia would have killed their families."

These six soldiers, non-coms with the 82nd Airborne,
are dismissive of politicians' claims of success in Iraq:
"To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that
long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a
recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsur-
gency is far fetched. . . we are skeptical of recent press
coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly
manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting
civil, political and social unrest we see every day."

They go on to explain: "Counterinsurgency is, by
definition, a competition between insurgents and
counterinsurgents for the control and support of the
population. . . the most important front in the counter-
insurgency, improving basic social and economic
conditions, is the one on which we have failed most
miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps
in bordering countries. Close to two million more are
internally displaced and now fill many urban slums.
Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and
sanitation. 'Lucky' Iraqis live in gated communities
barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them
with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than
any sense of security we would consider normal. . .
Four years into our occupation, we have failed every
promise, while we have substituted Baath Party
tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and
criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation
of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to
be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care
packages. . ."

I hope all of you will track down this full article in the
Times. It is a most helpful counter-weight to the
flood of happy talk emanating from the spin factories!

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net