For more than 6 months now, pundits and politicians alike have continued to speak nearly rapturously about the decrease in violence in Iraq. The Bush Administration and their apologists continue to tout the success of the “surge” as the reason for the decrease in hostilities. Speaking from the heavily secured Green Zone recently, Dick Cheney gushed about the “phenomenal” and “remarkable turnaround” in Iraq’s security situation. Apparently, the Vice-President doesn’t see the irony of his remarks considering that the Green Zone was hit with rockets the day of his arrival, not to mention the massive suicide bombing that killed more than 50 people in Karbala. But those events didn’t deter Cheney who spoke glowingly of the “successes” in Iraq. He went on to say that all of the death, destruction, suffering, deprivation and chaos has been, in his terms, “well worth it.” George W. Bush, in a speech commemorating the 5th anniversary of the start of his dirty little war echoed the same sentiments. And I suppose if you’re an executive at Halliburton, Blackwater USA, General Electric, KBR, Bechtel or any of the other multinational corporate entities in Iraq, this disaster has been well worth it.

Predictably however, the corporate media taking the Bush Administration talking points as gospel continues regurgitating the “everything-is-great-freedom’s-on-the-march-the-surge-is-working” meme across the airwaves, the internet, in newspapers and magazines and many, many people across this country have simply swallowed it whole. It seems to me that too few people seem willing dig a little deeper. It seems to me that too few people have stopped to question whether or not those numbers and figures, those neat little graphs and pie charts provided to us by the Bush Administration, (people by the way, who have a vested interest in painting the rosiest of pictures) are actually true and accurate.

It’s said that numbers don’t lie. And in some cases, that’s true. But sometimes, those raw numbers don’t reveal the entire story. Numbers can be massaged, they can be manipulated and they can certainly be used to distort and obfuscate the truth. And the way I see things, the Bush Administration has gone to great lengths and performed some incredible logical as well as factual gymnastics to make sure everybody believes that the surge is working and that violence in Iraq is down as a direct result of the increase in troop levels.

Last year was the single deadliest year for American soldiers since this dirty little war began even though the number of troops killed declined over the last 3 months of 2007 and the first three months of 2008. But since the nation’s corporate media seems incapable of doing anything like independent analysis or actual journalism, I guess it should be little surprise that what seems to me to be an essential question that should be asked isn’t being asked. Knowing all that we know and given the Administration’s track record of lies, manipulations and distortions, the question isn’t whether or not violence is down, but whether or not the decrease in violence is simply more sleight of hand by the Bush Administration? Are the facts once again being fit around a specific political agenda? I believe the answer to those unasked questions are a resounding yes.

And why do I think this? Because there are four very specific things that have led me to believe that in terms of quelling the violence, the “surge” has been an absolute failure and all of the statistics being thrown at us by the Bush Administration “proving” that violence is down across the board is nothing but smoke and mirrors. For me, it was merely a matter of connecting the dots…

( Behind the Numbers... )

Something else that the corporate media has failed to grasp that we should all keep in mind when talking about the “effectiveness” of the “surge” is that Bush increased troop levels in an attempt to quell the violence enough so that a political reconciliation could take place within the Iraqi government. In the universe of the Bush Administration (a universe where any similarities to reality are purely accidental) the Iraqi Parliament was supposed to come together to start structuring some sort of law and order in their country. Flowers, lollipops, rainbows and fluffy puppy dogs were supposed to be in abundance throughout the land. But the Parliament predictably fractured straight down sectarian lines. (Gee, who could have seen that coming?) These people couldn’t come together long enough to pass a resolution declaring the sky to be blue. Sunnis and Shi’ites have hated… and I mean a deep, seething, murderous hatred of each other for roughly 2,000 years now. How the Bush Administration, or anybody else for that matter, reasonably expected these two groups to suddenly come together, to start working and playing well together is well beyond me. The odds of that actually happening are about the same as Bush suddenly becoming a Rhodes Scholar.

So from that perspective, the “surge” has been nothing but an abject failure. Despite the glowing predictions and the often repeated messages of "success" and "progress" in Iraq that Bush, Cheney, McCain and all of their minions continue to spout, all facts and evidence show that nothing these people say is true. All signs are pointing to a real escalation in the violence in Iraq... the cauldron is once again going to boil over. Not that the corporate media has seemed to notice.