Gen Petraeus caught lying to Congress

[Thorgrim]

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

Why?

There were only two major success stories out of the surge:

Anbar and Baghdad

Because it's not politically correct to do so, no one in Congress questions the Anbar success, even though it was brought up to GenDP by Sen. Webb that the awakening and troop cleansing of Ramadi, etc...all started in 2006 and so had nothing to do with the surge...there is absolutely no proof that anyone in the insurgency or US military noticed the increased number of soldiers when they were already conducting a successful operation that was not undermanned in anyway

In Baghdad, it's also not PC to say our soldiers came in after the dust was settling and the battle was over, so GenDP was able to put up slides showing obviously wrong information about how many Sunnis were still in Baghdad, the Shia cleansing of Baghdad was widely reported and indeed one of the reasons (if not the main reason) soldiers were sent to Baghdad and not say, Mosul

Using slides that showed over-reprensentation of Sunnis, it looked as though US soldiers came in, stopped the cleansing and the US troops won the battle and secured the peace...however the shia militias had already won, and those sunnis were long gone, some have come back, but the Shia completely over ran every mixed neighborhood they had their sites on...the Sunnis were on their last leg, but the Shia didn't have the manpower to conquer all of Baghdad, it's a militia not an army, they had what they wanted, the Sunnis were reeling and most of them fled, and there was little to fight over anymore, it died down and then US soldiers rushed to the scene, for months while Baghdad was calm, shia warlords lived in luxury off the property of Sunnis who had fled to Syria or elsewhere, the US simply put up more barriers and then secured places the Shia had already stopped attacking

So in this light, there was no "surge" success in Iraq, there was a 2006 success that had many many lucky turns afterwards, all of which required ZERO more soldiers

The 2007 "success" was all luck by the generals and some hard work by americans the already established awakening councils, but iraqis we pay, to this day, claim they did all of the work

The proof of his lying is shown simply by the fact that he changed the slides so they were accurate this time around, but no one dare attack the general