Petraeus

"There is this issue in a sense this term of battlefield geometry. As I mentioned, together with Ambassador Crocker and Iraqi political leaders, there’s even sort of a political military calculus that you have to consider, again, in establishing where the conditions are met to make further reductions" - Gen. David Petraeus, April 8, 2008

"This new increase in violence raises questions about the military success of the surge. But, more significantly, the purpose of the surge, as announced by President Bush last year, which was to give the Iraqi leaders breathing room to work out a settlement, has not been achieved." — U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), April 8, 2008

A day before Gen David Petraeus told the U.S. Congress and Americans to forget about any meaningful troop withdrawals from Iraq the military announced the deaths of ten American soldiers since Sunday.

See, you might not know about it because most corporate media outlets are putting Iraq stories on the back pages now, but American military and Iraqi civilian deaths actually spiked in March after some relative decline in violence over the last few months. The long, gruesome occupation is just as violent and senseless as ever.

Meanwhile, as Petraeus spoke Tuesday to Congressional committees, tension continued to increase between cleric Moktada Al-Sadr and Iraq Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. On Tuesday, Sadr, who controls the Mahdi Army milita, called off a planned anti-American protest this week after Maliki’s government begun detaining young Shiite men at checkpoints throughout the country in an effort to stop the rally. Sadr also threatened to end his militia’s cease fire truce. Sadr loyalists have recently clashed with government-backed troops in the Iraq city of Basra.

In another recent development concerning Iraq, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz now argues that his $3 trillion estimate for the overall cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation is probably too low. Stiglitz now says a “$4 or $5 trillion tag would be more reasonable.”

Against this backdrop and with Petraeus’s apparent blessing, our nation’s professional cabal of lying warmongers, the conservative ideologues and the radical right-wing media outlets are declaring much progress if not an impending victory (whatever this means to them individually) in Iraq because of Imperial President George Bush’s surge. The big lie always works best, right? The mighty surge has been an unqualified success. That’s the latest right-wing storyline, and the GOP is sticking with it despite increasing American military casualities.

But all this Iraq occupation cheerleading is from the same bag of lies and tricks the American people have been handed since the Bush administration was warning in 2003 of the immediate end of Western civilization because of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Petraeus has called for a halt to any American troop withdrawals after mid-July and stubbornly refuses to discuss or estimate future troop levels even though the surge has supposedly been so successful. That would still leave at least 140,000 troops in Iraq. Essentially, Petraeus once again deceptively described Bush’s philosophy of perpetual war in terms designed to manipulate a complacent U.S. Congress. There is no surprise here.

Sure, Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, gave himself the necessary political cover Tuesday in his comments by qualifying his reports of glorious success with words such as “uneven” and “still-fragile” and the vacuous and meaningless “battlefield geometry,” but he certainly accomplished his mission as a major political courtier for the Bush regime, giving Republicans like U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) an opportunity to twist his words into an extended, drawling campaign advertisement for the presumptive Republican nominee U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona). (And, yes, media darling McCain still cannot get his facts straight about the Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq.)

Come on, how can any rational person not see Petraeus's empty terms of "battlefield geometry" and "political military calculus" (see the above quote) as anything less than rhetorical subterfuge? Basically, the Occupation General is counting on American people, specifically members of the U.S. Congress, to not challenge his pseudo-math terms because, really, these terms are just too complicated for our Senators, Representatives and you to understand. It's a Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert skit in the making.

The bottom line from Petraeus is that Bush and company will continue their open-ended occupation of Iraq through the president’s last term, no matter what the cost in human suffering, no matter how much money American taxpayers must pay for this disaster and no matter what the majority of American citizens think about the ongoing occupation.