Obama was wrong about the surge?

One thing that's really annoying me about the coverage of the presidential election is the notion that Obama was wrong when he said, last year, that the surge of new troops into Iraq was "doomed to failure." Because there has been a reduction in violence in Iraq, some pundits have concluded the the surge worked.

But it really was the failure that Obama predicted. 1,000 more US troops died since the surge began. Were their lives really worth a "reduction in violence" given that we could have pulled our troops out long before Bush decided to send more of them into his war of choice? We've also spent billions more. Given what we have to pay now to bail out Wall Street, were the billions we spent to fund the surge in Iraq really worth the "reduction in violence?"

Here's where the rubber really meets the road: if the Surge was a success and Obama was wrong, then why in the Hell are we still in Iraq? The fact of our continued occupation is proof enough that the surge failed. The point was to end the war and bring our troops home. Didn't happen. Surge failed. Deal with it.

And they sent the oil to China

Iraq's government signed a deal to sell $3 billion of oil to... Chinahttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7585790.stm.

So the Bush administration starts a war over aggression over oil and they don't get the oil. Not only that but it goes to our biggest competitor.

Nice one, morons.

Seriously I could have stolen that oil. I'd have just bribed Saddam for it.

A Genuinely Horrible Oil Fact

The New York Times is reporting that between 5-15% of Iraqi oil production goes missing every day and has been doing so for the past four years. That's 100,000-300,000 barrels daily.

Apparently, investigators aren't sure if the loss is caused by improper production estimates, theft, graft, sabotage, or some mixture.

Oil is basically Iraq's only source of revenue. This is a mess, folks.

Drudge Tries to Punch Pelosi During Press Conference

April 4, 2007. 10:29 am EST. WASHINGTON.

DrudgeReport author Matt Drudge tried to punch Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a press conference on steps of the Capitol Building, said an official who was present at the press conference.

"He sort of swung a sloppy right hook at her but missed," said the official. "Then he fell over. I've never never seen such disrespect or such bad footwork. He's definitely a DC gossip guy, not a boxer. It actually sorta looked like he was drunk." The official says Drudge was then knelt on by Secret Service personnel. Pelosi was unhurt.

The official is so far is the only person to mention the incident, which took place in front of dozens of cameras and Washington reporters. He has asked to remain anonymous because he fears retaliation for tipping us off to a story that should be available to anyone with YouTube.

"This is all BS wingnut spin. I didn't try to punch Pelosi," Drudge wrote on his own site. "I wasn't even there." At its first appearance on the website, however, Drudge's denial contained multiple typos, suggesting that he was still drunk and trembling when he wrote it.

Developing...

Just Because You're Paranoid...

So most of the reason that Iran's president (and the clerics who actually run the country) are so insistent on defying the world and developing nukes is that they're paranoid and smugly convinced of their own righteousness. They tend to talk about America as the imperialist Great Satan for the same reason.

Even so, I can still sort of understand their concern. The Pres. & VP still intermittently saber-rattle about Iran, which can't help, but the current physical, military realities can't have escaped the Iranian leadership's attention. Specifically, the two countries that share Iran's most important borders--Iraq and Afghanistan--are under US-led occupation. Nearby Saudi Arabia is home to US military bases, and bordering Pakistan gets a lot of military support from the US. We have them surrounded.

Under those circumstances, I'd be pretty skeptical of America's intentions also. But then I know that we're not a bunch of gun-happy idiots bent on a disastrous occupation of a nation WAY BETTER equipped to fight our army and then, even if it were to lose, positioned to conduct a generations-long insurgency.

We're not, right?

Death Counts-Iraq, America

The UN Assistance Mission to Iraq just released estimated casualty counts for 2006. It says that 34,452 Iraqis died violently in 2006 and slightly more than that were injured by violence.

The Iraqi government disputes the numbers and says that only 12,357 died.

I'm betting that the UN's number is a lot closer. The Iraqi government is apparently taking its figures from published news reports, while the UN is getting them from Iraqi hospitals and the Iraqi Ministry of Health. More bodies will make it into the hospital than into newspaper stories (Iraq Body count, which also operates on published news reports, says as much on its website).

In perspective: the US has just over 11 times as many inhabitants as Iraq, so the violence Iraqis endured last year was the equivalent of 138,398 to 385,862 Americans getting killed. The most recent FBI stats on the US murder rate say that 17,000 Americans were murdered in 2005. So, per capita, 8 to 23 times as many Iraqis died as Americans last year.

Of course, the good news is that you if add the Americans killed in Iraq to the US murder rate, that ratio goes down a little.

Just in case you're feeling good to be an American, make sure you check your race and gender. Unsurprisingly, it's good to be white. Perhaps surprisingly, it's good to be a woman. While the average American violent death rate is about 6 per 100,000, that average combines very different subtotals. Consider these selected murder rates per 100,000:

All men: 7.8
All women: 2.0
White women: 1.8
Black women: 6.0
All black: 19.8
All white: 3.2
White men: 7.8
Black men: 33.5

The Iraqi violent death rate is between 46 (UN) to 128 (Iraqi govt.) per 100,000. So white Americans in general are 14 to 40 times less likely to be killed than the average Iraqi. Black Americans in general are 2.3 to 6.5 times less likely. Black men are 1.3 to 3.8 times less likely. And given the strong correlation between low income and violent death, poor and working-class Americans of all races are at an even higher risk of violent death. So if the Iraqi government's figures are right (unlikely), poor black men in America are at least as likely to die violently as the average Iraqi.

(The bad news about the earlier good news about adding the death toll of American soldiers to the domestic murder rate is that, since black men make up a disproportionately high percentage of the armed services, doing so would also raise the murder rate of American black men.)

Of course, the nature of the violence in Iraq almost certainly means that significantly more Iraqi men are dying than Iraqi women, so the above comparisons aren't quite oranges to oranges. But even if it's apples to oranges, it's apples nobody can like. Imagine if instead of sending soldiers and reconstruction money to invade and occupy Iraq, we'd sent teachers and reconstruction money to stabilize and revive poor parts of America. Or, if you're easily depressed, don't.

Lose What, Exactly?

Watched the morning chat shows and there was a lot of talk, especially from Joe Lieberman (Connecticut for Lieberman - CT) about how our only choices in Iraq are victory or defeat and how losing this war is unthinkable.

So, I've been thinking about what it would mean if we just retreated. I don't mean what it would mean for Iraq bvecause I do think we'd leave a bloodbath behind, but what would it mean for the US and its place in the world?

Not much. We wouldn't have lost to Saddam Hussein, of course. He's dead. We won't have lost to Al-Qaeda because it's not a war against Al-Qaeda, we're caught in the crossfires of a sectarian civil war that has little to do with Al-Qaeda. The war against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban is in Afghanistan. We did a good job on that one. Were we not distracted by Iraq, we could be doing an even better job (maybe we could have caught Osama by now).

I suppose that countries like North Korea and Iran might think we don't have staying power and they might continue to pursue their nuclear weapons programs in the face of American weakness. But, it seems just as easy to argue that the fact that we invaded Iraq caused both of those countries to accelerate their nuclear efforts as a deterrent.

I suppose some will worry about a repeat of the post Viet Nam effect where a war weary American public was generally unwilling to support grand foreign adventures. But, given all the meddling we did in Central and South America during and after Viet Nam and that we also pursued a pretty hard line stance against the Soviet Union, I don't get why that would be such a bad thing. The US was still able to pursue its international interests after Viet Nam. If leaving Iraq just means it's going to be two decades before we invade another country and get involved in a civil war, then that in itself seems like a great reason to leave Iraq.

What's really interesting is that the current polls seem to show that the American people are not overly concerned about whether or not we "lose" in Iraq. It would hardly be a stinging loss (we couldn't pacify the country once it erupted into civil war, but who could?) and it's not even a war that we had to fight in the first place.

What this is really all about are the legacies of Bush and his Senate allies like Joe Lieberman who got us into this war in the first place. But their legacies will be tarnished by this grand mistake no matter what they do. It's time for them to face that.