The Triangle

Issue date: 2/1/08 Section: Ed-Op

Media Credit: Chuck Kennedy-MCT President George W. Bush delivers his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the U.S. House of Representatives chamber on Jan. 28, 2008.

In his final State of the Union Address to Congress, President Bush attempted to lay out his plan for his last year, and talk about his "accomplishments" since he took office in 2001.

In his address, Bush once again painted a rosy picture of an Iraq where liberty and freedom were taking root thanks to his troop surge. Supporters of the surge are quick to point out a few months of lower violence, but not so quick to point out that even with a few months of less violence, 2007 was still the deadliest year for coalition troops in Iraq with 957 deaths. The death toll for coalition troops since the beginning of the war is now more than 4,200, with another 29,000 wounded.

And although the administration and the media have now begun reporting the surge as a success, we have yet to see the reduction of violence establish itself as a long-term trend.

Four months of slightly less violence hardly calls for victory celebrations in a war that has lasted for nearly five years. I could just as easily point to how violence was up in January from December 2007, but it would not give us an accurate idea of the situation unless we looked at the big picture. Similar lulls in violence have occurred in previous years, so there is no way to tell if this is just a part of the pattern of violence, or actually a consequence of a successful surge.

Proponents of the surge also point to peaceful areas once stricken with violence to show the success of Bush's surge. Unfortunately this also misses the big picture. It is hard to deny that these areas of Iraq do exist; however, it is not because the residents have peacefully resolved their differences, but rather because whole areas in Iraq have been ethnically cleansed. In some of these places there is simply no one left to kill.

Regardless of military situation, the fact still stands that the surge was intended to improve the political situation in Iraq, and the Iraqi government has failed to make any substantial progress.

If we want a better future we have to end the wasteful spending in Iraq, and reinvest the money in the American people. Only a fraction of the money in Iraq has been allocated for reconstruction, and those funds have been mismanaged from the beginning.

Continued...

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