John McCain would have you believe that it has been The Surge, which brought a relatively small increase in American Combat Brigades to Iraq, is responsible for any decline in levels of violence in the country. McCain has championed “The Surge” but it may not be responsible for what he claims. 

According to an article in today’s New York Times “Iraq Takes Aim at Leaders of U.S.-Tied Sunni Groups” other factors may be in play.  It seems there “groups of former insurgents who joined the American payroll and have been a major pillar in the decline in violence around the nation.” 

The group, known as The Awaking, is composed of former Sunni Insurgents that the Americans organized and paid to fight The American’s paid them but they fought against Al Qaeda. 

I want to comment on John McCain's obsession with "winning a war" in Iraq since his remarks at the VFW indicate he still believes in this and told the veterans there that we are “very close” to winning this war. I assume that’s what he meant. Well insurgent wars are not the kind of wars where one side surrenders so it is kind of hard to define what "winning" really means. Years and years ago, as I recall, the current president "imagined" and so stated that we had won this conflict. But he was sadly mistaken and quickly proven wrong as another war, an insurgent war, began almost immediately. That should have been no shock to anyone who has studied the history of interventionist conflicts. Essentially in an insurgent war, the best you can hope for is for peace and stability to be achieved and the violence associated with the insurgency to disappear, that is, for the insurgency to disappear. One problem though is that an insurgency can go into hiding on a time of its choosing. So disappearing back into the general population is part of any insurgent strategy. For big powers like the United States, these wars are very difficult to conclude on favorable terms. During the Paris peace talks beginning in 1968, Henry Kissinger signed a lot of documents with Le Duc Tho, which led to Kissinger's statement that “Peace is at hand” just before the 1972 elections in the United States. As we all should recall, the signed documents were totally meaningless to the North Vietnamese and since the agreement was between North Vietnam and the United States, as we began to leave even more rapidly, North Vietnam launched a full scale attack on the South. Congress had cut off funding for U.S. military operations in South East Asia by 1973-74 and without the help of American air support, what was left of the South Vietnamese army was not able to stop the invasion from the North and they indeed did surrender. There was a lesson to be learned from this and the feeling in the U.S. Military was that they never wanted to get into another conflict like this again and never again fight a war without the clear support of the American people. (And sticker on car does not = Support). A subject to consider though is if the Soviet Union could have devised something to bring harm to the United States, on the world stage as well as domestically, it couldn’t have come up with anything better than what we did to ourselves in Vietnam. It seems to me that the same could be said about Osama Bin Laden regarding our "War On Terror." You won’t find Bin Laden in Iraq. The neocons had other beliefs about Iraq but they were wrong and that is the short version of why the past 5 years have played out in the manner they did. The only good thing to come out of it is that the ideas of the neocons are now totally discredited and marginalized. Except perhaps to John McCain whose constant uttering of “drill here, drill now” sounds a lot like another neocon con. So let’s recall the reasons that were given in 2003 for the United States to enter Iraq militarily (aka invade): (1) Get rid of WMD which could be used in more terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies. (2) Get rid of Al Qaeda – according to Dick Cheney they were there. (3) Bring democracy to Iraq and the middle east. No evidence of WMD or presence of Al Qaeda was discovered when the original hostilities brought about by our initial military roll in to Iraq ended. So that left democracy. The United States talks a lot about spreading democracy but if one looks at past examples, we don’t always treat democratically elected leaders with much respect if their ideas are in conflict with American corporate interests. I could cite examples. Anyway, after oceans of blood and violence and depravity, something seemingly impossible under such conditions took place: There were elections and a Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was chosen by the Iraqi people to lead their country. And fairly recently this elected leader, put into office by a process we supervised, initiated and had given as one of our original goals for being there, has stated that he would like the United States to leave his country. He did say it would probably happen in a graduated manner, perhaps over a 16-24 months timeframe. Still though a profound request. There are many reasons for this and are outlined in some detail in a recent Seymour Hersh article, which seems to have sources from everywhere, but the Iraqi Prime Minister perhaps feels that convert operations the U.S. in conducting from Iraq into Iran is a threat to him. Iran is in his neighborhood and I’m sure he would like to develop relations with Iran himself. Are we to tell him he can’t? The outcome and consequences of a war between Iran and the United States is not certain by any means and if anyone wants to see an example of mission scope enlargement, this is a conflict that would likely give a sudden example of that. Perhaps if Obama is elected, he will appoint a Secretary of State who can explore peaceful alternatives to what is going on now and will surely be continued and escalated if John McCain continues the policies of Bush over the next 4 years. I don’t predict anything beyond 4 years because I’m not sure we will survive another 4 years of Bushism in the White House. And this is certainly all that John McCain has the ability to give us.

It's happened again. I’ve seen this act before: 2000, 2000. Now again unscrupulous attacks on character on a Democrat running for president who seems to have a good chance of being elected appear on the New York Times best seller list and are passed off by some as serious scholarship. Scholarship from Jerome Corsi?   This guy lives on the edge of reality.  There is no need to go into the details of what he believes and what he’s done on a regular basis since 2004.