Matt Taibbi: Waiter, There's a Surge in My Soup

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted January 10, 2007.

Bush's announced 'surge' is one of the more outrageous media deceptions in the history of an Iraq war that has been rife with them.

Proponents of escalation cite the example of Tal Afar, a town in northwestern Iraq. U.S. forces there have met some genuine success since September 2005 with the 'clear, build and hold' strategy that Mr. Bush apparently now favors for Baghdad.

But Tal Afar is only about one-thirtieth the size of Baghdad, and it isn't even Arab: its people are mostly members of the Turkmen minority. Trying to replicate that (limited) success in Baghdad is a fool's errand.

In Tal Afar, there was one U.S. soldier for every 40 residents. Using the same ratio in Baghdad would require 150,000 troops, sustained for more than a year. That's impossible. -- Nicholas Kristoff, New York Times

I was in Tal Afar, Iraq's "genuine success" story, over the summer. It was such a success story that the city's neurotic, hand-wringing mayor, Najim Abdullah al-Jubori, actually asked American officials during a meeting I attended if they could tell President Bush to stop calling it a success story. "It just makes the terrorists angry," he said. At the meeting he pointed to a map and indicated the areas where the insurgents held strong positions.