Surge of what?

A prediction: Most of this week’s one-year-after stories about the ‘surge’ will take as their point of departure the implicit assumption that the country of Iraq belongs to us. Therefore, the important issues will be, in descending order: (1) level of U.S. casualties; (2) level of Iraqi military casualties; (3) overall number of violent incidents; (4) ‘pacification’ of previously dangerous neighborhoods, enabling little boys to go out and play where no kites have flown before; (5) return of smiling Iraqis to their bombed-out domiciles; and (6) that’s about it.

There will no discussion of the substantial portion of the population living in desperate squalor in Syria and other less-than-appealing holiday destinations. Nor will there be much of a nod to the ignominious failure of the main thesis behind the ‘surge’ in the first place: progress toward a political settlement.

I don’t pretend to know much about the country, but it strikes me that that goal is impossible no matter happens, based on the assumption that people tend not to trust quislings who collaborate in the foreign occupation of their country. Maybe things are bad enough at this point that those Iraqis still inside the country would warily follow the lead of the Green-Zone regime if it were to miraculously become functional.

Given the low likelihood of that happening, someone will have to explain to me exactly how the Iraqi ‘government’ is unlike the South Vietnamese Thieu-Ky regime of the 1970s and why it will end any differently.