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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 9/22/10

The Myth That Kills: The Iraq Surge in the Neo-Con Imagination

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Looking back, the resistance was necessary, if mostly futile. We environmentalists, peaceniks, feminists, racial and social justice activists, LGBT advocates didn't win many during an era that historians may someday call the Great Wasteland, or the Great Blood Thirst. It was a punishingly long detour from the urgent, positive work needed to transform society.

With the liberal-surge example, Brooks again plays his essential role as myth conveyor. Consciously constructed fables are the intellectual essence of postwar American conservatism. Communists control the State Department. Vietnam was lost by meddling politicians and insufficient application of brute force. Corporate capitalism has been good for America. Trickle-down economics benefits all Americans. The US won the Cold War. Saddam was behind 9/11. Drill, Baby, Drill. And today's winner: the Iraq surge that, um, er . . . George Bush was "so right" about.

People like me were "so wrong" about the surge. Yet we're unable to ask whether Bush was right and we were wrong because "the question is too uncomfortable." The risk is that were we to come to grips with the "fact' that Bush was right, our ideological edifice would crumble. Partisan bankruptcy would suddenly supplant mental laziness. Everything we believed about the evils of war in general and the Iraq war in particular might be proved false. The war could've been worth it after all.

There are two problems with Brook's surge myth, one perceptual, the other factual. Brooks instinctively but lazily assumes that all of us want to be right all the time and that we'll engage in denial to avoid being wrong. It's not that simple. If you're some sort of professional wonk, or policy (meta-)analyst paid to think, teach, or write about scenarios, wonder about the future, follow trend lines, examine statistics, or a Nation reader, or simply a well-informed citizen trying to keep up on things--being "right' is a good news/bad news situation. Being right doesn't stop the world from going to hell in a hand basket, or keep you from teetering on the precipice of despair.

And should you assess humanity's long-term prospects for a bright and abundant future as slim-to-none, you may fiercely defend the painstaking analysis, but you want to be wrong about the conclusion. Not just a little off, but dead wrong. You don't need, at this point, "to step back and think about the weakness in [your] own thinking." Think rather about all the thinking--scary, honest, let the chips fall where they may thinking--necessary to arrive at such a finding in the first place. No mental flabbiness evident here. Indeed, who wouldn't opt for one or the other of the most popular varieties of mental feebleness-- belief in the Rapture, or in a happy techno-cornucopia--saving us in the final reel if they honestly could?

The second problem with Brooks' surge myth concerns a large and unfortunately growing set of inconvenient facts (there's that bad news again). Brooks' provides but a silent brief for the surge, a sign that the myth has matured to the point that it no longer requires explanation or defense. When myths get to this insidiously effective stage, they're just floating about the culture like big shiny balloons without strings. They pick up subscribers with static electricity provided by the corporate media, pushed this way and that by and at the convenience of their authors and co-authors, with little opportunity for the anti-fabulist to poke them with a pin. Let's assume a maximal version of the myth as it strengthens Brooks' claim regarding liberal denial: the surge ended or prevented an Iraqi civil war, paving the way for Iraqi self-government, and made possible the eventual victorious return of US combat forces from Iraq.

A quick review of some of the war's milestones: shock and awe began on March 19, 2003. Baghdad fell on April 9. President Bush's infamous "mission accomplished" flight took place on May 1 (138 dead Americans thus far). Saddam was nabbed on December 13, 2003. On February 22, 2006, the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra escalated the vicious sectarian bloodletting ravaging the country. The surge involved the deployment of five Army brigades starting in February 2007, with 30,000 men and women in place by mid-June 2007. From April to June 2007, 331 US service members were killed, the deadliest quarter of the war for the US military. On September 10, 2007, General Petraeus suggested reducing the US troop presence by 20,000 the following June. Come July 22, 2008, the surge officially ended with the return of the last of the five brigades to the US. All told, nearly 1000 American service members died during the surge period. Four months later, on November 17, the US and Iraq agreed that all US forces would be gone by the end of 2011. On February 27, 2009, President Obama announced the end of US combat operations by August 31, 2010 but the retention of some 50,000 troops in the country.

If the surge "worked," then it's born(e) some strange fruit (collated by the leading US anti-war organizations):

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Steve Breyman teaches peace, environmental and media studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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