Juan Cole discusses the “Surge” and Bob Woodward’s new book about Bush at war:
[T]he Surge was not just 30,000 extra troops building blast walls.
The Surge was a dirty war. It was a vast effort at identifying, finding and assassinating the leaders of the Sunni Arab resistance. […]
That is, US officers in Baghdad were playing Col Mathieu in a rerun of the Battle of Algiers, tracking down and killing the members of the Sunni resistance cells with ever increasing efficiency.
Crowing about the success of Surge wouldn’t look so pretty if you were actually celebrating an assassination campaign.
Not so pretty? Perhaps, but in a society that can glorify fictional torture in “24”, and has a war criminal for a president, “pretty” doesn’t seem to matter.