For the past several weeks, I've been collecting articles from all sorts of sources on what is actually going on in Iraq.  The right is howling that the so-called "surge" is working, and some on the left are claiming that it's time liberals accepted that fact and quit denying it--as if that answers everything. 

As usual, this argument presents us with a false choice.

In the meantime, the public seems to have zoned out altogether on the war, both in polling and in mainstream media coverage.  In fact, Thomas Friedman wisecracked in the NY Times, "The war is over!" because those in his line of work seemed to be treating the subject as if it were, indeed, over.

I've spent a couple of weeks now trying to clear my calendar so I could spend the better part of a day putting together a major post on this subject, complete with dozens of links and blocked-off quotes.  But those kinds of posts take longer to read, and people have less time these days for that sort of thing.

So what I'm going to do is generalize my conclusions drawn from all these sources.  Some I will try to link; some you'll just have to trust me, in the name of saving us both time.  If you're dying to find a source and can't, ask me in the comments section and I'll link it there.

As in all things related to this war, this administration has done a far better job of selling it than actually conducting it. 

For instance, the Anbar province has long been the deadliest area in Iraq for American troops.  My nephew deployed three times there with the Marines and my son twice, and all five deployments were harrowing and bloody.  For more than two years, Marine and army commanders debated whether to offer amnesty to insurgents to put down their guns and inform on those who were trying the hardest to kill our soldiers and Marines.  While they were trying to decide this, al Qaeda was setting up a Taliban-like center of operations in the Anbar and murdering, torturing, and forcing into marriage anyone who objected.  Consequently, it was Sunni sheiks who first approached American troops and offered to help them snuff out al Qaeda in exchange for money, arms, and amnesty.

We had already begun working with those sheiks--many of whom have since been assassinated by al Qaeda--when the so-called "surge" began, but the resulting drop in American casualties in the Anbar was immediately trumpeted by the Bush administration as proof that "the surge is working."

Like I say--salesmanship versus actual strategy.

Meanwhile, to the south, Shiite thug Muqtada al-Sadr was losing control of his massive Mahdi Army, and in his name, no small number of them were kidnapping, torturing, and dismembering not just Sunnis but other Shiite rivals.  This did not bode well for the longevity of his rule and his plans to take over Iraq eventually or, at the very least, to set up an Iraqi-style Hezbollah.  So he called for a six-month lay-down of arms on the part of his people so that he could ferret out and round up those who'd gone rogue.  And, as with the Sunni sheiks, this happened to coincide with the "surge" and so, again, Bush took credit.

Snake-oil salesman, all the way.

In Baghdad, ethnic cleansing had pretty much cleared out mixed-sect neighborhoods and, in some cases, run off one sect from a neighborhood while moving a different one into the abandoned homes.  Meanwhile, the U.S. army was building gigantic concrete walls that literally imprisoned whole neighborhoods behind one checkpoint, thus cutting down cross-neighborhood traffic and thereby slowing down car bombings.

Again, this took place at about the same time that 30,000 U.S. troops flooded the streets and moved into neighborhoods, setting up forward operating bases in abandoned buildings and houses and patrolling neighborhoods with an efficiency and neutrality that gave all sects a certain freedom to move around again within the confines of their walls.

So there were less Mahdi army-types setting IEDs to blow up Americans in the south, and less Sunni terrorists blowing up Americans in the northwest, and less of any violence in Baghdad. 

And some of it WAS due to the surge.  Some of it.

Numbers of all kinds went down, although it must be always remembered that the Iraqis are in the Americans' pockets and so al Maliki's government is not releasing true figures of any kind anyway.  Also, they've outlawed any filming of the aftermath of any bombing even as the Americans have taken to forbidding the photographing of any American troops who've been wounded. 

Meanwhile, on the border, anyone who crosses into Iraq gets counted as "returning refugees" whether they are or not.  And if they ARE, and they're coming back because Syria or Jordan won't let their kids attend school there and won't let the parents work there and so on--that gets ignored and they get included in the number who are said to be returning because, well, you know, the surge is working.

So, up in the Anbar, we have hired and put guns in the hands of so many former insurgents that now the commanders fear there are too many "hanging around with a rifle on street corners," so we've decided to start a civilian job corps similar to what FDR did in the U.S. during the depression. We'll keep paying them but we'll put them to work rebuilding their country.

It's not a bad idea, really, only, we've already spent half a trillion dollars trying to rebuild that miserable country and now we're supposed to hire them all and give them jobs and pay them?  For how long?  Meanwhile, we can't upkeep our own infrastructure, rebuild NEW ORLEANS, or provide health insurance to our own people.

But I digress.

Here's the thing. 

Out here in the country in west Texas, we have these gigantic ant beds.  And it's fascinating to watch them.  They literally build little highways through the grass where they travel in a two-laned, well-trafficked path back and forth from their home.

Once, on horseback, I was amazed to see one of those big ant beds with those tiny highways fanning out like spokes on a wheel, further than you could see, just like highway overpasses and freeways in the city.

When it's cold, though, you can hardly tell there's an ant bed there.  It's a sandy patch in the grass.  No ants anywhere.  Looks very quiet.  Looks very peaceful.

But underneath, extending many feet down, is this whole teeming metropolitan universe of ants, and as soon as the weather heats up, they come swarming up and fan out in all directions.

Right now, this relative quiet in Iraq merely hides a teeming ant bed of activity beneath the surface.  Sunnis are arming and preparing, as soon as we leave, to get back what they lost to the Shiites in the first place.  Shiites are battling between tribes for power.  To the north, the Kurds are provoking Turkey and itching for autonomy--and those bad guys who fled Baghdad ahead of those U.S. troops have moved up there, bombing and killing hundreds and hundreds of people in just the past few months.  It makes the news but nobody cares.

The central government is useless.  All it is doing is relying on U.S. troops to provide private bodyguard service in Baghdad so they can remain safe in the Green Zone.  U.S. commanders are BEGGING them to provide jobs and civic services to the Sunnis and they refuse.  They are angry at the U.S. for arming Sunnis and don't want to give them anything--and why should they?  We're doing it for them already, aren't we?

When Bush first announced this Big Plan, he made it clear that we were sending in all these troops so that the Iraqi government could work in peace, could get some things done to GOVERN.  The most important thing, of course, was not to provide water and electricity and sanitation to its own people.  It was to provide oil to American companies.  That was the MAIN THING they were expected to do while Americans died to give them time and space to pass this legislation.

So U.S. troops, who, by the way, had more casualties last month than in any other month since the war began, did what was asked of them.  By God, they did it splendidly.  My nephew is with the army right now in the Diyala province, and I've seen for myself the miracles his unit has accomplished.  I take absolutely nothing away from the incredible job the U.S. troops are accomplishing all over that country. 

Most of them are doing it for the second, third, or fourth time.  They're doing it for months past the time they were promised they could go home.  They're doing it without complaint, and they are dying.

They are still dying.

But in Baghdad, the Iraqi government is planning to take yet another month off.  They took the month of August off, when the "surge" was first peaking, and now, they're going to take another month.

They haven't passed the oil legislation.  They haven't provided power and water and sanitation to their people.  In fact, cholera has broken out in Baghdad, something I don't hear Bush bragging about so much.

Cholera.  From raw sewage running in the streets.

But I digress.

The stated purpose for the troop escalation has not taken place. 

Americans are still dying while al Maliki and his weak sock-puppets bicker and backbite and take vacations.

Meanwhile, and again, I gotta give Friedman credit for this--he mentioned that the fact that Condoleeza Rice had called this big conference to debate the Israeli-Palestinian question right now while Iraq sinks into the swamp was, "like, if I had a fire at my house and the fire department stopped along the way to rescue a cat from a tree."

I read one source where American commanders have BEGGED for vigorous American diplomacy in the region to back up the military sacrifice. 

"Where is Condoleeza Rice?" one asked plaintively.

Every last one of them acknowledges that simple military power IS NOT ENOUGH.  Sure, they can quiet things down with corner patrols and concrete walls, but they can't sustain that indefinitely.  They've GOT to start pulling out in the next few months, and what will happen then?

Tom Ricks of the Washington Post and author of FIASCO, stated online just yesterday that the improvement in security in Baghdad had actually "taken the pressure off Baghdad to compromise."

In other words, the surge actually REMOVED the very so-called and stated Bush-reason FOR the surge--which was supposed to have been to take pressure off Baghdad SO THEY COULD compromise.

As with everything else Bush has tried, the exact opposite of what he intended has been what has resulted.

Even some Bush-ally Republicans have grown restive, saying that if Baghdad doesn't accomplish SOMETHING by the end of the year, then it'll be time to start pulling out.

I even read one source who had the UNMITIGATED GALL to say, in all seriousness, that al Maliki and his government would simply HAVE to start getting serious about governing NEXT YEAR.

Sometimes, when I read this stuff, I start screaming.

I mean, really.

I started screaming, "DO YOU KNOW WHAT NEXT YEAR MEANS TO A MILITARY FAMILY YOU IDIOT?"

Honestly, they throw around these terms as if the U.S. military is some sort of trusty old hammer they can hang from a tool belt around their waist and just keep pulling out to pound down all those loose nails that keep cropping up all over Iraq.  Like they're not living breathing human beings with families, a majority of who, according to the L.A. Times, now think the war was a mistake and want out.

I could do a whole post on the decimation of the U.S. armed forces by this war; how they're forced now to let in high school drop-outs and those with criminal records and those with low test scores and those over 40, how even West Pointers aren't re-upping when their commitment ends, how they're losing junior officers in droves, how divorce rates, family violence, child abuse, drunk driving and other signs of stress have sky-rocketed in the military.

Also, how brain injuries directly resulting from getting "blown up" have been underreported, they now know, by 20,000.  How health costs and mental health costs due to the war will run into the trillions in future years.  How we're in hock up to our eyeballs to China, for one, to pay for it.

Oh, I could go on, but I digress.

It all boils down to this:  Senator Jim Webb, one of my heroes, who not only served with honor and distinction in Vietnam infantry himself, but whose son has fought in Iraq with the Marine Corps, and who has an uncompromising grasp on this war, recently made a trip of his own to Iraq.

On Meet the Press a couple weeks ago, referring to the recent slow-down in violence, he told Tim Russert, "The U.S. troops have given us this moment."

He meant that right now, in this one, precious, glimmering shimmering moment...while violence is down, the Shiites are laying low and the Sunnis are quiet and al Qaeda is on the run--we need a HUGE push, diplomatically, on all fronts, from the Iraqi government to every Middle Eastern country affected by Iraq--friend and enemy alike--to take what the American troops have given, and use it to separate out all the complicated threads of this Gordian knot of sectarian rivalries and shadow-governments, to set up some kind of working system, and to begin to rebuild that country.

"We've given them the underpinnings," he said.  The breathing room.  The net below the trapeze--whatever metaphor you want.

U.S. commanders have been begging for this for months.  They've been begging the State Department to do SOMETHING, but the State Department can't even drum up people to serve over there without forcing them.  They've been begging the Bush administration to do SOMETHING.  They've been begging for an international effort, and not just a hit-and-run weekend photo-op conference like Rice put together for Israel and Palestine.

There should be an aggressive effort going on RIGHT NOW, if not in Baghdad, then in some neutral place--we used Paris for Vietnam.  We can use Melbourne, maybe, or Moscow--I don't care, but a meeting place SOMEWHERE, with all players present, to dissect, analyze, negotiate, compromise, and hammer out a solution with something other than U.S. troops.

Bush should be muscularly present for this, he should put his stamp on it.

But no.

Like every other shining moment provided by the blood and guts of American troops to prop up this phony president, this one, too, is slipping away.

One source I read said something to the effect that, we can provide peace enough for the next U.S. elections, but after that...

Ah.  And there you have it.  All that really matters to Bush is to be able to SAY, "We've won.  The surge is working.  Blah-blah," on the campaign trail long enough to put as many Republicans in congress or the White House as is possible.  Then, he can turn the war over to people who will continue his policies after January 2009.

And then, when the ants come swarming up out of their underground pockets, spreading poison all over that country while the U.S. military scrambles with what's left of its forces to fight the same war all over again five years in--they can go around on the speaker's circuit and the talk-show roundabout and say, "No one could have foreseen this happening."

I am deeply proud of my nephew, my son, and my other nephew, and all of our fighting men and women who have sacrificed so much for so little in return. 

The U.S. military has been brilliant.  They have done everything that has been asked of them.

They have given us this moment.

And it's not about whether the surge is "working" or not.  It's about WHAT YOU DO WITH IT.

And right now, nobody is doing a damn thing with it.

The moment is slipping away.

Decades ago, we were told that the war we were fighting would work itself out in the next year.

It dragged on for ten.  Almost 60,000 Americans died.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, back in 1968, I think it was, released a song called, "Happy Christmas, The War is Over."

They took out huge billboards in countries all over the world that said, in bold letters: THE WAR IS OVER (translated into the language of the country) and in smaller letters beneath:  If You Want It to Be.  Happy Christmas, John and Yoko.

Go and watch this song and the video that accompanies it.

In that sense, Thomas Friedman was right.

The war is over, if you want it to be.

Happy Christmas.