[Peace-discuss] Acquiescence

[C. G. Estabrook]

[1] The troop surge in Iraq has been more successful than anyone could have
imagined, Barack Obama conceded Thursday in his first-ever interview on FOX
News...

As recently as July, the Democratic presidential candidate declined to rate the
surge a success, but said it had helped reduce violence in the country. On
Thursday, Obama acknowledged the 2007 increase in U.S. troops has benefited the
Iraqi people.

“I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,” Obama
said while refusing to retract his initial opposition to the surge. “I’ve
already said it’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”


[2] In an interview with In These Times published on July 29th, Noam Chomsky 
summed up the success of the so-called surge of U.S. forces in Iraq as follows:

“Most of the educated class [in Iraq] has either been killed or fled. The 
country is an array of militias, of warlords and gangs, of which the U.S. is 
just the biggest and most powerful militia. They call the Iraqi Army its 
sub-militia. We’ve just destroyed the country, and it may never recover. So 
that’s the way that the surge has succeeded.”

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