{"id":21807,"date":"2013-09-27T07:13:29","date_gmt":"2013-09-27T15:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=21807"},"modified":"2013-09-27T08:56:30","modified_gmt":"2013-09-27T16:56:30","slug":"the-surge-didnt-work-or-how-can-we-continue-to-ignore-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/27\/the-surge-didnt-work-or-how-can-we-continue-to-ignore-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surge Didn&#8217;t Work, Or How Can We Continue to Ignore Iraq?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-21808\" alt=\"203fe57238fbf71d3b0f6a706700e536\" src=\"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/203fe57238fbf71d3b0f6a706700e536-e1380294715311.jpg\" width=\"580\" height=\"398\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Children tend to have a tough time focusing on too many ideas at once. The same goes for adults who have the brain capacity of children.<\/p>\n<p>Syria stories obviously soared in the media over the past month, and rightly so given that the Obama administration was going drag the U.S. into another unnecessary war based on false pretenses. Iran, too, has shot up in the body of international stories the U.S. media is covering, given new developments towards a possible diplomatic settlement to long simmering tensions. And again, rightly so.<\/p>\n<p>But two big issues sometimes seems like the upper limit of how many separate ideas the major media can juggle at one time (unless of course we&#8217;re talking about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2013\/09\/27\/showbiz\/celebrity-news-gossip\/kimmel-kanye-feud\/index.html?hpt=en_c1\">celebrity gossip<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2013\/09\/26\/showbiz\/michael-jackson-death-trial\/index.html?hpt=en_c2\">the Michael Jackson death trial<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/video\/data\/2.0\/video\/health\/2013\/09\/24\/hot-tub-sperm-damage.upwave.html\">whether hot tubs can make you infertile<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what brought on this rant&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">987 civilians have been killed in <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/Iraq?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#Iraq<\/a> so far THIS MONTH. <\/p>\n<p>6,000 civilian deaths already this year. <\/p>\n<p>There were 4,500 in all of 2012.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/YousefMunayyer\/status\/383398502539096064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 27, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of The Palestine Center and he lists these facts about Iraq, I suspect, in order to highlight how much chaos is still ongoing in the country that the U.S. needlessly and criminally tore apart for the past two decades.<\/p>\n<p>One of the reasons it is really important to cover the ongoing violence in Iraq and its larger context of U.S. policy is because the myth of the success of &#8220;the surge&#8221; is still being peddled, particularly on the right. Senator John McCain, you&#8217;ll remember,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=q-U4UCll4wA\">excoriated Chuck Hagel<\/a>\u00a0during his confirmation process for at one point criticizing the surge in Iraq as potentially &#8220;dangerous.&#8221; He and others have had the gall to scream at people for dissenting on the surge religion even while\u00a0Iraqis are dying in \u201cnumbers\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.iraqbodycount.org\/database\/\" target=\"_blank\">not seen<\/a>\u00a0since the bloody days of 2004,\u201d as Kelley Vlahos <a href=\"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/13\/iraq-this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-you-rip-off-the-band-aid\/\">wrote<\/a> in these spaces last month.<\/p>\n<p>Not only is Iraq on the verge of all out civil war, but the U.S.-backed Shiite government in Baghdad is increasingly authoritarian and is contributing to the country&#8217;s ongoing demise.\u00a0The Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq is, as the International Crisis Group (ICG)<a href=\"http:\/\/www.crisisgroup.org\/en\/regions\/middle-east-north-africa\/iraq-iran-gulf\/iraq\/144-make-or-break-iraq-s-sunnis-and-the-state.aspx?utm_source=iraq-report&amp;utm_medium=1&amp;utm_campaign=mremail\">\u00a0puts it<\/a>, \u201cas acute and explosive as ever\u201d primarily because \u201cPrime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has implemented a divide-and-conquer strategy that has neutered any credible Sunni Arab leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Maliki has had his\u00a0security forces\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/news.antiwar.com\/2012\/01\/19\/iraqs-maliki-accused-of-detaining-torturing-hundreds-of-political-opponents\/\">detain and brutally torture thousands of political opponents<\/a>\u00a0in secret prisons and denied them access to legal counsel. Amnesty International <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amnesty.org\/en\/news\/iraq-executes-13-men-following-unfair-trials-and-torture-allegations-2013-09-25\">reported<\/a> this week that Iraq executed 13 men following unfair trials plagued by allegations of torture. &#8220;Iraq is one of the world&#8217;s most prolific executioners,&#8221; the report states.<\/p>\n<p>So, the U.S. waged war against Iraq in 1991 and followed up with more than a decade of sanctions that decimated the country and was described by one UN official <a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.cornell.edu\/chronicle\/99\/9.30.99\/Halliday_talk.html\">as genocidal<\/a>. Then the U.S. invaded and occupied the country in a war of choice based on lies, ripping what was left of the country to shreds in the process. And now U.S. troops have left and Washington continues to send\u00a0\u00a0about\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/foreignassistance.gov\/OU.aspx?OUID=167&amp;FY=2014&amp;AgencyID=0&amp;budTab=tab_Bud_Planned\">$2 billion<\/a>, not including the additional billions of dollars worth of military training and equipment, to the corrupt and authoritarian regime in Baghdad that is driving the country into civil war.<\/p>\n<p>How can decent Americans ignore this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Children tend to have a tough time focusing on too many ideas at once. The same goes for adults who have the brain capacity of children. Syria stories obviously soared in the media over the past month, and rightly so given that the Obama administration was going drag the U.S. into another unnecessary war based [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-21807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21807"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21811,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21807\/revisions\/21811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21807"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=21807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}