Feb 11 2008

Eugh, smell that? Democrats say the surge has failed.

Posted by Neocon in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Terrorism

Well, at least they waited for it to actually be implemented before calling it a failure this time.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said twice Sunday that Iraq “is a failure,” adding that President Bush’s troop surge has “not produced the desired effect.”

“The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time for the government of Iraq to make the political change to bring reconciliation to Iraq,” Pelosi said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “They have not done that.”

The speaker hastened to add: “The troops have succeeded, God bless them.”

Yes, God bless the troops. Security is up across the board. Civilian deaths are down. American troop deaths are down. Nancy doesn’t want to listen to any of this, instead sticking to the same ‘but they haven’t perfected a political system yet’ criticism that might seem more credible if they hadn’t been using that line before any reports of progress were released.

The Democratic complaints about Iraq are starting to smell real bad.

Perhaps there is a source that she would be willing to take at face value. And messiah Obama should take heed, too, given that he called the Iraq War a “complete failure” last August.

Al Qaeda leaders admit: “We are in crisis. There is panic and fear.”

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda’s enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province - once the group’s stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

Total collapse? Total collapse!? And this is a sign of failure, eh? I’m willing to wager my considerable CIA funded propaganda salary that if Benjamin Franklin came back from the dead, hopped on a transport to Iraq, and penned a few hundred legislative decrees in fluent Arabic that united the Iraqis in a single day, as opposed to the decades it took for our government to get its act together, then Nancy Pelosi would still find a nice robust reality-phobic view from which to shout for surrender. The story continues after the obligatory ‘there are still threats’ section…

The Anbar letter conceded that the “crusaders” — Americans — had gained the upper hand by persuading ordinary Sunnis that al-Qaeda was responsible for their suffering and by exploiting their poverty to entice them into the security forces. Al-Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar”, the unnamed emir admitted.

In an apparent reference to al-Qaeda’s brutal tactics, he said of the Americans and their Sunni allies: “We helped them to unite against us . . . The Americans and the apostates launched their campaigns against us and we found ourselves in a circle not being able to move, organise or conduct our operations.”

He said of the loss of Anbar province: “This created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight. The morale of the fighters went down . . . There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organisation.” The emir complained that the supply of foreign fighters had dwindled and that they found it increasingly hard to operate inside Iraq because they could not blend in. Foreign suicide bombers determined to kill “not less than 20 or 30 infidels” grew disillusioned because they were kept hanging about and only given small operations. Some gave up and went home.

Who would have thought that suicide bombers would’ve had sense of logic and economics in their murderous minds? They got bored not being able to blow up a lot of people– after all, who wants to be the guy who embarrasses himself by running into an armored column only to end up with only a few sand spiders joining you on the way to ~~hell~~ the afterlife. Talk about being red-faced.