[Dear John] McCain, The Surge IS Working

OK, I hate to admit it, but McCain may be right after all. I'm thinking that if this is the Surge that McCain was referring to then I'm voting Republican for the first time ever in this 2008 Presidential election.



Anyhow, Surge was manufactured by Coca-Cola and was one of my favorite drinks when it first came out. As a bit of useless trivia, Surge was invented by Coke to battle with Pepsi's Mountain Dew, and was first bottled in Denmark, Norway & Sweden as "Urge", though it was never called that in the U.S. Of course, my favorite soda of all time is Mountain Dew, but that's for a whole 'nother post.



If on the other hand, McCain is referring to "THE SURGE" in Iraq, well then that maybe working, or not depending on who you believe. However if it is working, it is NOT because Bush sent in 30,000 more troops in February 2007, thank you very much. In a "60 Minutes" preview of his forthcoming book, "The War Within," Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward reveals the backroom politics within the White House and military brass which culminated in the surge. Woodward explains that the U.S. military engaged in targeted assassinations about the time of the Sunni Awakening also known as the "Anbar Awakening". Those assassinations combined with Sunni chiefs aligning themselves with the U.S. military for money and [more] guns after realizing that al Qaeda in Iraq was blowing up everything in sight including their Sunni people, caused a dramatic change in attitude. The Sunni's understood that the foreign insurgents posed more of a threat to their way of life than did the hated American invaders.



Apparently, in 2006, the Joint Chiefs of Staff convened and discussed that the US was effectively losing the war in Iraq. I guess up to 1,600 attacks per week will imbue you with a sense of reality no matter how hawkish you are. However, the idea for sending in 5 additional brigades to Iraq was actually Bush's idea, but it was opposed by top military advisers. So Bush met secretly in Jordan with Iraqi PM al Maliki, convinced him this was a great idea, and then proceeded to replace all obstinate generals with those supporting the surge, such as Gen. David Petraeus, now Central Commander for the Middle East. At the same time, a special operations program was commissioned which targeted for removal leaders of Iraqi militias, insurgents & al Qaeda in Iraq. So there you have it, and now you know...the rest of the story.