THE SURGE IS WORKING. ...or so Max Boot declares in the midst of a hopelessly dishonest op-ed in the LA Times last week. Boot doesn't even bother to wade into the statistical morass of casualty figures, instead asserting simply that a guy he knows in Baghdad told him that casualties are down. No time frame, no specifics, but this is what passes for military analysis among the conservative commentariat. Boot is probably smarter than what he writes, as some of his books have been fairly well-informed, but smart is irrelevant when it's not accompanied by even the most tenuous commitment to tell the truth. Someday the scribblings of Boot and his ilk will provide fodder for a great doctoral dissertation, one that examines how a group of people managed to convince themselves that a military operation that started in February 2007 was responsible for events in September 2006, yet substantially unconnected to the massive increase in US casualties that occurred between March and June 2007. Unfortunately, while there's no indication that the Surge has worked in a military sense or that it's budged the political situation in Iraq, it has done its work in Washington. Joe Biden's newfound fortitude aside, prospects for ending the war seem bleaker now than they did three months ago. The only success of the Surge has been in elite-circle PR; it hasn't notably dented anti-war feeling in the general U.S. populace, but it does seem to have quieted some wavering Republicans and worried some rightish Democrats. My one small ray of hope is that the "success" of the Surge will lock the Republican Party into the ruinous path that it's chosen for another year or so. Political parties in the U.S. usually manage to pull themselves out of nosedives that are associated with terribly unpopular policies, but the apparent indifference of the Bush administration to long-term Republican prospects has meant that the balance isn't being re-ordered. While the Democrats haven't covered themselves with glory, they're still associated with war opposition (in no small part because of Republican efforts to paint them as anti-war traitors), and the longer this war goes on, the more dividends that association will pay. --Robert Farley
