Success

John Mccain recently said we are "winning" the War in Iraq, based on the great "successes" that have been achieved as a result from the surge of troops sent in last year.

To be able to understand what winning means, we must first define success. Baghdad has become a city of ethincally cleansed neighborhoods separated by ten foot high concrete barriers. There are no more mixed areas of Sunni living next to Shiite. That simply does not exist.

Ok, so I was going to write this long piece how life sucks in Iraq and how silly it is for Mccain and Bush and the rest to use words like victory and success, but I just saw on the wire that 51 people killed in a suicide car bomb in Baghdad. Thats so successful, you know.

The kind of success and progress being made in Iraq go like this:

I heard on the news that there was a house break in somewhere in Chicago. So in a preemptive move, I decided to burn my neighbors house down, lest the thieves decide to come to our area. Now, when he is obviously pissed at me, I dig him a ditch to live in. Hey, its offers some shelter. See, makin progress.

Is al-Qaida in Iraq led by foreigners?

Recent documents obtained by CNN appear to contradict another one the Bush Administrations claims about the War in Iraq, specifically that al-Qaida in Iraq is(AQI) a foreign led organization. These documents show that Iraqi's are the ones giving orders, while foreigners are more involved as front line soldiers, such as suicide bombers.

For the past 5 years, the U.S. has made the claim, presumably based on intelligence gathered in Iraq, that AQI's ranks wee made up of Iraqi's with foreign leaders, mostly Saudi's. Now we learn from these documents the opposite.

What to make of this? Well, there are several conclusions to make. The most troubling, yet most plausibe, given recen intelligence failures, is that the U.S. simply got it wrong again. They fit the intelligence to make the narrative that suited them best for public consumption. AQI being a foreign outfit makes it seem more scary, more "bin Laden'ish" as it were. See, having a bunch of Saudis strapping belts of explosives wrapped with ball bearings on the poor helpless Iraqi's is far more insidious than if it is Iraqis giving the orders.

That way, we are fighting the "war on terror" as Bush sees it, as opposed to Iraqi's fighting a foreign occupation.

I am curious to see how Bush spins this one. Their has been little reaction, of course, from Bush and his minions, because they would have to admit a mistake, and we know all about how much the devout born again Christian Bush likes to admit his failings and try to atone for them, as any good Christian is faith bound to perform.