We Don't Need No Stinking Goal Posts!

Maybe you too experience an occasional dark moment? Maybe not. One recurrent one for me these last few weeks involves the continual shifting of the goal posts related to the "surge" concept bush adopted in January.

This decision was of course in conspicuous conflict with both the strong suggestions of a semi-bipartisan advisory panel that reviewed the conditions in Iraq as well as the advice of quite a number of senior military. Hence when we hear that the "president listens to his generals" and such-like claptrap we need to carefully postscript that he either doesn't listen well (quite plausible, given notorious petulance and listening deficiencies) or willfully chooses to defy their advice (again the un-parented brat comes to mind, determined to demonstrate that he is independent and not subject to coaching).

I have been concerned that by the time we hear the Official Line on the state of affairs in Iraq later this month the goal of the surge may have been reduced to getting the troops to Iraq.

That isn't much of a stretch, frankly. There were all sorts of milestones supposedly set up that had to be met to deem the surge a success. Recently leaked report (General Accountability Office?) calls "Fail" on 15 of 18 milestones. Too late - the white house had already shifted the goal posts such that all that is needed for the surge to now be called successful as their new game rules have it is that conditions be more secure or there be fewer deaths in some isolated region than was the case before the surge.

Never mind that apparently every month since the surge began there have reportedly been more deaths than in the corresponding month last year.

But then here's another exciting proposal for re-writing the rules, courtesy of Newsweek as reported at TPM:

For all the debate this week about civilian casualities and sectarian violence in Iraq, Newsweek's Babak Dehghanpisheh and Larry Kaplow provide some often overlooked context.

Thousands of other Sunnis like Kamal have been cleared out of the western half of Baghdad, which they once dominated, in recent months. The surge of U.S. troops—meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital—has hardly stemmed the problem. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually "has increased the IDPs to some extent."

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias' cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they've essentially won.

As Matt Yglesias added, "Maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced. Or maybe someone can explain to me again about how we can't leave Iraq because of the ethnic cleansing that'll happen without us around."