The Nossiter Net The net that shall enmesh them all Edited, Written, and Published by Josh Nossiter

The Surge Myth Saturday, July 19th, 2008

The Nossiter Net is cast  to snare some of  the riper rascalities of the day.  Comments?  Send a letter to the editor.

John McCain takes credit for it. Lou Dobbs, red faced and finger pointing, insists on it. Blowhards and windbags of every political stripe repeat it at every opportunity. Even the usually clear-eyed and skeptical Gail Collins mindlessly repeats it in today’s column: the so-called “surge” is working in Iraq. The only problem with this comfortable meme? It’s a lie. In fact it’s a lie within a lie. Sending additional troops to Iraq wasn’t a brilliant change in tactics on the part of Bush Defense. The extra troops merely brought overall troop numbers back to earlier levels. Far from a change in tactics, the “surge” was a return to the previous failed scheme. Furthermore any lessening of violence in Iraq has little to do with U.S. troop levels. Shiites stopped killing at their prior pace when Moktada al Sadr declared a cease fire and took his troops off the streets. At the same time the Iranians appear to have slowed their shipments of munitions to their Shia brethren across the border. Meanwhile we’ve been bribing Sunni militiamen with weapons and money, gaining a temporary stand-down from them in exchange. But why let facts get in the way of a useful fable? The “surge” may not have done much to stem the bloodshed in Iraq, but the myth of the surge’s effect is doing Bush, McCain, and their imbecilic mouthpieces a power of good. ©Joshua C. Nossiter, 2008                                                  * * * * * A NOTE TO READERS ***Update*** Another three week plus hiatus, from April 30th until May 23rd, again due to Yahoo Geocities dismal service. There was nothing new at The Nossiter Net between March 3rd and April 26th, 2007, nearly eight weeks.  The reason:  tech sabotage. Yahoo Geocities, the host for this site, denied access for the entire period.  At one point, they even managed to lose all the files.  In many discussions with Yahoo staff, no clear explanation was forthcoming.  No one seemed able to fix the problem.  Ruling out the possibility of Dubbya’s revenge, I finally wrote to Mr. Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Inc and described the ordeal the page had undergone since the beginning of March.  A week later, a helpful Yahooo engineer named Jason called.  He had my letter before him.  Though he couldn’t do the repairs on on the spot, he promised a fix by the next day.  That was April 26th, nearly two months after shutting me down in the first place. The Nossiter Net apologizes, which is more than I can say for Yahoo Geocities.

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