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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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Who cares about any of this now, these several years later? Probably not Barak Obama. As Parry reports:

When [candidate] Obama argued that the reasons for the dip in violence were more complicated than simply "the surge worked," he was hectored by . . . CBS anchor Katie Couric and ABC's George Stephanopoulos, demanding to know why he wouldn't just admit that Sen. John McCain had been "right" about the surge. . . . Obama chose to retreat in the face of this Washington conventional wisdom, regardless of how misguided it was. Finally, he admitted to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that the surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

Obama's surrender was not merely tactical, as we have seen on issue after issue, and that's why we should care about the myth of the surge that worked. This myth can kill, and get you killed. Inside a month of his inauguration, the new president dispatched 17,000 additional troops to the "war of necessity" in Afghanistan. Before the year was out, a second surge of 30,000 was on its way to Operation Enduring Freedom. Perhaps the misery and terror Afghans suffer will magically lift because of or despite the Obama surges. I don't think so, but I hope I'm wrong.

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