Are we talking about the same Surge?

It’s official, the surge is failing

The “troop surge” by American soldiers in Iraq is not working, one of Britain’s senior military officials in Baghdad has said.

In a pessimistic assessment of the strategy designed to pull Iraq back from all-out civil war, Alastair Campbell, the outgoing defence attaché at the British Embassy in Baghdad, claimed that extra US forces were not achieving the desired drop in violence.

Of course, don’t expect ring wing bloggers to accept any of this.

Reader Charles Rutt emails: “Obviously, we need to just leave Baltimore. We’ve been there for almost 200 years and still don’t have it under control. I think we should cut off funding to the city to teach them that we mean business and be out of there by the end of summer. I’ve got 29 Senators who agree with me”¦. “

Meanwhile, in the Baltimore of the Middle East,

Five U.S. soldiers were killed in a series of bombings and gunbattles across Iraq, the U.S. military announced Saturday.

As for the facile claim that none of this could have been foreseen, that lie has just bitten the dust too.

“Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies,” reports the Washington Post.

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