Friday, September 14, 2007

More time. Shocking. People should stop deluding themselves in the notion that some sort of concrete timeline will ever be given for troop withdrawal. The fact of the matter is that we are in too deep. While General Petraeus may be revered by both politicians and the media, as strong and intelligent, the fact of the matter is he is just another Washington big shot who will be taking the fall for the continuous problems in Iraq. But even then, who are we to believe? General Petraeus dragged on arguing that the situation in Iraq truly has improved, and that the number of civilian casualties is down from what it was a year ago, yet he fails to include Shiite-on-Shiite violence or Sunni-on-Sunni violence. Are those deaths not worth as much that we simply don’t need to even report them in our figures? The Iraqis themselves do not feel safer thanks to the surge. “More Iraqis say security in their local area has gotten worse in the last six months than say it’s gotten better, 31 percent to 24 percent, with the rest reporting no change,” ( Rothschild, http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/12/3787/) The bottom line is it has become impossible to believe with any certainty any of the reports. How can we trust what we are being told when even the most basic figures are being manipulated?