John McCain, increasing looking like a loser on many fronts, has been talking up the success of the so-called surge in Iraq. Post Ramadan, it looks like ethnic killing is back in Iraq. More to the point, the cost to America of the entire Iraq fiasco is more like a splurge rather than a surge.
The full cost of what has occurred, those killings and the apparent delusion of John MCain in the matter, are the subject of an op-ed piece in The Independent by John Hari "McCain is deluding himself over the 'surge'":
"John McCain is desperate to talk about the surge rather than the splurge. His Iraq war is set to cost one trillion dollars, and his deregulation-mania has cost hundreds of billions. So in order to maintain his façade of being "tough on spending", he needs to shift the subject. That's why he has tried to shrink the debate about the Iraq War to one small question. Not: did Saddam have Weapons of Mass Destruction? Not: did Saddam have links to 9/11? Not: why do 70 per cent of Iraqis think the presence of US troops make them less safe and they should go home now?
McCain knows he will lose those arguments, so he wants us to talk solely about whether the surge of US troops last year has been successful. But a hole was just blown in that argument – and blood is rushing through.
Those of us who got Iraq wrong have a particular duty to honestly describe what is happening now. A major study by the distinguished scientific journal Environment and Planning A has just revealed the real picture. The Republican nominee claims the US troops have stopped the violence by their physical presence. To test this, Professor John Agnew and his colleagues used the same techniques the US government has adopted to monitor ethnic-cleansing in Burma and Uganda.
Here's how it works. When an entire ethnic or religious group is driven out, they abandon their houses – and aren't there to switch on the lights. Their areas become much more dark. If satellite images show night-light remains the same in the areas dominated by one ethnic group but significantly falls in mixed areas, you know ethnic cleansing is happening."
The full cost of what has occurred, those killings and the apparent delusion of John MCain in the matter, are the subject of an op-ed piece in The Independent by John Hari "McCain is deluding himself over the 'surge'":
"John McCain is desperate to talk about the surge rather than the splurge. His Iraq war is set to cost one trillion dollars, and his deregulation-mania has cost hundreds of billions. So in order to maintain his façade of being "tough on spending", he needs to shift the subject. That's why he has tried to shrink the debate about the Iraq War to one small question. Not: did Saddam have Weapons of Mass Destruction? Not: did Saddam have links to 9/11? Not: why do 70 per cent of Iraqis think the presence of US troops make them less safe and they should go home now?
McCain knows he will lose those arguments, so he wants us to talk solely about whether the surge of US troops last year has been successful. But a hole was just blown in that argument – and blood is rushing through.
Those of us who got Iraq wrong have a particular duty to honestly describe what is happening now. A major study by the distinguished scientific journal Environment and Planning A has just revealed the real picture. The Republican nominee claims the US troops have stopped the violence by their physical presence. To test this, Professor John Agnew and his colleagues used the same techniques the US government has adopted to monitor ethnic-cleansing in Burma and Uganda.
Here's how it works. When an entire ethnic or religious group is driven out, they abandon their houses – and aren't there to switch on the lights. Their areas become much more dark. If satellite images show night-light remains the same in the areas dominated by one ethnic group but significantly falls in mixed areas, you know ethnic cleansing is happening."
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