'you people act like it's a bad thing to stand on a mountain of corpses and crow about "victory" '

General Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Surge

Chris Floyd says it all again in a review of a fluff piece for Petraeus Caesar (who, according to the main$tream, is responsible for the latest incarnation of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraqiranistan):

...To be fair, Walsh does note, way down in her review, that the downturn (or, following the brilliant rhetoric of our vice president, Joe Biden, should we not say "downtick"?) in violence in occupied Iraq was due in large part to the American tactic of bribing and arming violent sectarian gangs and giving them chunks of territory to lord over, as an alternative to their previous practice of, well, killing Americans.

This tactic, of course, had nothing to do with the so-called "surge" plan hatched in the bowels of that neocon chicken coop, the American Enterprise Institute -- which Walsh reluctantly praises for its surge plans which "healed" Iraq...

You know, the same way you heal a migraine by drinking yourself into oblivion.

So if and when we run out of money for the warlords- oh, never mind.

There is never an end of money for the warlords in Amerika or Iraqiranistan.

...even Walsh's acknowledgement of the central role played by the "bribes and bullets for local warlords" gambit ignores other major, non-surge-related factors in the downtick.

For instance, the completion of the American-abetted Sunni-Shia civil war, which saw "ethnic cleansing" on a scale that made, say, the Serbia-Kosovo imbroglio or the conflict in Northern Ireland look like a family reunion; and the part played by Iran in backing the American-installed Iraqi government – which is, of course, now run by long-time clients and dependents of Iran.

In other words, the violence has abated to a degree – a degree that still makes Iraq one of the deadliest places on earth – because so many people had already been killed and displaced that there were fewer people to kill and displace, and because the Americans bribed one set of antagonists to quit the battlefield and the Iranians helped tamp down internal violence, especially a potentially catastrophic intra-Shiite conflict between their Green Zone clients and the Mahdi Army.

There was also the American use of death squads, hit teams and "extrajudicial assassinations," as Bob Woodward reported – and lauded – last year. All of these developments that had nothing at all to do with the deployment of 30,000 extra troops that constituted the "surge..."

Hey, don't knock the jobs program. It's likely the only one both Reptilicans and DINOcrats will both support. Moloch, too.