Petraeus: "...we believe al-Qa'ida is off balance at the very least..." WHY? It's the SURGE, stupid!

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Surge working: top US general

Dennis Shanahan, in Baghdad | August 31, 2007

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22337285-31477,00.html



THE US troop surge in Iraq has thrown al-Qa'ida off balance and produced a dramatic reduction in sectarian killings and a drop in roadside bombings. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, said the build-up of American forces in Baghdad since late January had produced positive outcomes. These included the killing or capture of al-Qa'ida fighters, causing the terrorist group to lose influence with local Sunnis. The strategic gains against insurgents would lead to a changed and possibly longer-term role for Australian troops, shifting from security operations to a focus on training Iraqi soldiers and police.

General Petraeus told The Australian during a face-to-face interview at his Baghdad headquarters there had been a 75 per cent reduction in religious and ethnic killings since last year, a doubling in the seizure of insurgents' weapons caches between January and August, a rise in the number of al-Qa'ida "kills and captures" and a fall in the number of coalition deaths from roadside bombings.

:spray:

"We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress and we believe al-Qa'ida is off balance at the very least," he said.

:spray:

General Petraeus's overview comes a fortnight before he is due to present a crucial report on military progress in Iraq to the US Congress and President George W. Bush.

[Amonester]

1. oh-uh... That report was written next to the Oval Office...

Lies.
More of the same.

[asjr]

2. Probably Karl Rove's

post-resignation thesis.

[Fridays Child]

3. Uh, did Gomer Pyle steal a general's cap?

[frogcycle]

4. figures don't lie, but liars can figure...

w/respect to coalition deaths from roadside bombings...

Indeed, there was a huge jump in deaths from IEDs as the "surge" got under way. That's because they sent lots of poorly-armored humvees out to drive around until they got blown up. MANY of the incidents were 3, 4 or 5 deaths in one incident. After a while they changed practices - cut back on the "fool's mission" patrols. In the first week of July there were something like 26 deaths, many from IEDs. The next ten days were very, very quiet. "Only" about one death per day, and many of those non-hostile. The total number from IEDs is now back to what it was last fall; the percentage due to IEDs is artificially low this month due the the copter crash; last month it was right up there with the highest-percentage period in the latter half of June '05

Without a doubt they have found weapons caches, arrested insurgents, and foiled many, many IED-planting attempts. And if they were sweeping the beach, they could brag about how much sand they had moved. The numbers, though, cannot be attributed specifically to those actions. Their changes in tactics, the helicopter crashes, etc. have too big an impact for ANY significant trends to be inferred from the ups and downs of numbers week-to-week.

Saying what they have done is one thing; trumping up statistics to "prove" it is "working" is another thing entirely.

[Lasher]

6. Well done

That's a good graphic and you articulated your point well.

It's no surprise General Pyle would cherrypick like this. After all, the 'surge' has been referred to by some as the 'Petraeus Doctrine.' He's going to spin this as positively as he can. And he has been given an extra star during Junior's tenure. Twice. That's not likely to happen to generals who make a habit of saying what their Chimp in Chief doesn't want to hear.

But we don't have to rely on just what they say. As you have shown there is information out there that can be used to confirm or refute their claims.

http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf

[frogcycle]

11. thanks

too bad the media won't do their homework and come up with the same graph and rub the administrations nose in it. It only took a couple of minutes.

"Petraeus doctrine" is just bush's cover. He gave Petraeus the job because he agreed to the escalation, when several others refused.

[Lasher]

20. Checked out your website

I see you're quite the college football fan. The season is upon us at last! Big game tonight, with #15 Tennessee at #12 California.

But WVU is going to take the championship this year. :P

[frogcycle]

21. Don't hold your breath!

The Lady Vols basketball team showed Fulmer's boys up - I expect Eric Ainge to finally get it together. They know the women are likely to repeat - and they'd better be respectable or else!

[Solon]

5. How the fuck do you "knock off balance" a decentralized group of people...

with different goals and tactics in addition to not knowing everyone in the organization? In fact, the only thing they share is a fucking name. What the fuck would throw them off balance?

[Amonester]

7. Well, the 'last throes' LIE has already been said more than two years

ago. We know they R stupid (for thinking near 70% of the people could ever believe any of their blatant LIES, not for making killing profits out of the people's pockets, or in this case, the national credit card, for which they R criminally brilliant because they KNOW nobody will EVER do anything to hold them accountable for looting everything they can put their filthy chickenhawk hands on...), but somehow, not stupid enough to repeat the same LIE (the insurgents are in their 'last throes' - June '05) so they just invented a "new" one: "knock off balance" and they R pretty sure nobody will do anything to stop them, just like nobody did when they said ALL their previous LIES (of which "last throes," and "greeted with flowers," and "six days, six weeks, I doubt six months," and "mushroom cloud," and on, and on... were part of).

(Apologies for the llllllooooooonnnnnnnnggggggggg paragraph.)

In short: "knock off balance" is just another LIE from this junta's pile. Nothing more.


On edit: forgot an i.

[Name removed]

13. Deleted message

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[jmp]

15. You want MORE troops in Iraq?

Every time I hear a soldier or Marine say that, I'm almost inclined to support sending our entire active force out there all at once on an open ended deployment.

I say almost because I'm not inclined to see this nation bankrupt.

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

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[Adelante]

8. They're looking at Petraeus for 2012

I read on Huffington Post.

[frogcycle]

12. that is the stupidest idea they have had

except for looking at Thompson for 2008

[gratuitous]

9. So we threw everything we had left at them . . .

And we knocked them off balance. Wow. I'll bet that makes all those hundreds of American deaths and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths this year totally worth it.

[jmp]

10. People are surprised by this?

If he wasn't going to support the strategy come hell or high water, Bush would not have selected him.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

14. 75% reduction in killings since last year - never!!!

where did he get that figure from?

[jmp]

16. Not in killings ...

In "religious and ethnic killings" killings ... as defined by them. It's more an accounting trick than anything.

[TwilightGardener]

18. It's only Sept. 1, and I'm already sick of General Overbite.

We're gonna hear his name "hosanna-ed in the highest" for the next few weeks when they force-feed us his Happy Progress Bullshit. Ugh.

[BenDavid]

19. The media was all aglow at the end

of July and was so happy they could report there were less killed in Iraq this month then in June, so one could say, "the surge may be working....This was said when the number was 74 and two days from the end of July. If you will notice the pattern here the white house was putting this out as a talking point prior to the end of the month. Seems as though the soldiers that were killed in July served no purpose other then to say there were less killed....Now on the 30th of July more soldiers were killed but the msn did not report that number...(this would be 76) on the final day of July, three more soldiers were killed. MSM did not report this(total now 79) There was only a scroll if one wanted to see the final tally....The MSM had done their part by telling the fickle sound bite american public, less deaths, surge is working.....
Now here we are in August and the total American dead is now 81....2 more then in July....So by the MSM logic, less dead in July then June surge is working...2 more dead in August then in july then the msm should say, there is a question mark if the surge is really working.....
I am happy the GAO came out with their report early or ever how it came out because this is in the public domain now and the white house and the general be tray us cannot give the glowing report the white house intended it to be....If the dems do not come at this guy full bore then I would suggest they go back to be the damn minority because they sure as hell have acted like the minority party, especially in the senate...

I do thank you
Ben David

[frogcycle]

22. well said

figures don't lie, but liars can figure

They love to quote numbers as if they are ironclad evidence of trends - when they like the trend. Otherwise they dismiss them as meaningless. This is the doublethink that comes from being brainwashed from early childhood that science is meaningless and the scribblings of some semi-nomadic tribesmen a couple of thousand years ago are the "spoken word of god."

They dismiss anything that does not support their preconceived notion of "the truth" and grasp at random snippets that they think support it. The bit about the banana proving intelligent design come to mind.

An appallingly large segment of the population is quite happy to believe in some subset of: angels, fairies, leprechauns, dead people moving stones, trumpets knocking down walls, parting of the sea, virgins in paradise, and whatever gwb says, all evidence to the contrary.

[WCGreen]

23. First of all, most of the sectarian violence has drop because the

members of the various sects have gravitated to their own kind...

So we invaded and destroyed the cosmopolitan make-up of urban Iraq...

If the roadside kills have decreased and Iran is responsible for most of them, so they say, how can we say that Iran is meddling in the US occupation...