Surge To Nowhere

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent.The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs.
Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the United States is tacitly abandoning its efforts to create a truly functional government in Baghdad - by offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents-an initiative that has been far more important to the temporary reduction in the level of violence than the influx of additional American troops.U.S. forces have affirmed the fundamental irrelevance of the political apparatus bunkered inside the Green Zone.First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: "We're paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?' Or the militias get tired of the US Army shooting them by mistake.