Comments on: Quiet in Iraq is Not Success, and the “Surge” Didn’t Cause It

By: Video: Six Years Later, We Remember

Video: Six Years Later, We Remember — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:53:22 +0000

[...] We remember ethnic cleansing we didn’t stop. We remember planting a flag on the pile of bodies and declari… [...]

By: The Day After Tomorrow « Return Good for Evil

The Day After Tomorrow « Return Good for Evil — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:09:01 +0000

[...] dynamic continued to play out during the “surge.” The military claimed the surge brought a reduction in violence, despite clear evidence that a brutal… (which tends to happen when one group slaughters their opposition). But despite the fact that our [...]

By: The Surge: Too Vague to Fail « Return Good for Evil

The Surge: Too Vague to Fail « Return Good for Evil — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:26:17 +0000

[...] surge in Iraq not only failed to bring about needed political reconciliation, but it also failed to stop ethnic cleansing. Flooding Afghanistan with weapons and bribing people not to use them is the foundation for a [...]

By: False Correlation « Return Good for Evil

False Correlation « Return Good for Evil — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:22:49 +0000

[...] The U.S. government drew all the wrong lessons from the fall in violence following the ethnic cleans…, and insist on imposing their frame on Afghanistan. The surge did not cause Iraq violence to drop. The Sons of Iraq did not cause the violence to drop. Iraq underwent ethnic cleansing and fell silent in the aftermath, but all the noise about the “surge” masked the true cause of the silence. This is correlation, not causation–post hoc, ergo propter hoc. [...]

By: The Wrong Measure of Success in Iraq « Return Good for Evil

The Wrong Measure of Success in Iraq « Return Good for Evil — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:19:54 +0000

[...] story continues the “drop in violence = success in Iraq” theme, which, as I pointed out earlier, is flawed and amoral. A drop in violence due to ethnic cleansing is not success. For more on [...]