The Surge Is Working!

As the members of the Bush maladministration and John McCain continue to assert that the surge is working, here's this from NPR:

A day after the U.S. military announced that overall violence was down in Iraq, eight American soldiers were killed in a pair of attacks. That's the highest single-day toll in months, and it's not the only recent incident of violence.

Bombings throughout Iraq killed and wounded numbers of Iraqis, including members of the Awakening Council in Fallujah, and 20 bodies were found in a mass grave near Samarra.

And this from the AP via Yahoo News:

The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the "burn" rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

But how much longer will the flow of blood remain at ebb tide? Perhaps, even now the tide is beginning to turn. I pray not.

The flow of money will continue until Bush runs out the clock in his term in office and beyond, as he leaves the task of cleaning up his messes to the next president.

These numbers don't include the war's cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion — with its devastating air bombardments — and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.

No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.

So. This is what we have wrought by "liberating" the Iraqis from the cruel despot, Saddam Hussein. This is how the surge is "working".