It is not the military surge that has brought peace to the areas of Iraq where it has "succeeded." It was a surge in sectarian cleansing. The night time lights in Iraqi cities were analyzed and it was found that, starting before our "surge" began, the level of light in various ethnic areas of the cities were dimming. Why? Because as they fled, the victims of this cleansing turned out the lights. We have "achieved success" in Iraq by letting the Sunnis to run the Shiites out and the Shiites to run out the Sunnis. What was that about us not being able to leave because there would be a civil war and horrible bloodshed? Mightn't it have been quicker, cleaner, and a hell of a lot cheaper to have just let them take care of this themselves? They did it anyway, but we were trying to stop them.
*Actually, conservatives will ignore this information (if they ever encounter it as I doubt it will be reported on Fox Noise without a mighty heapin' of venomous scorn) is because they were first told that the "surge" has "succeeded." (Why do I feel it so necessary to put sarcastic quotes around all the key words used by this administration?) I think you should listen to this story from the fantastic radio program On the Media from WNYU for a better explanation than I can give in short here. Here's a short excerpt from the transcript that speaks specifically to why I think conservatives would probably ignore this study of night lights in Iraq:
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The researchers, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, brought in a bunch of Republicans and told them about the Bush Administration’s claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the 2003 U.S. invasion. And then they provided the volunteers with essentially a correction of that information.
About 34 percent of conservatives believed that Iraq had either hidden or discarded the weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion, but after they heard both claim and refutation, 64 percent of conservatives believed that Iraq had had the weapons of mass destruction.
In other words, the refutation caused more people to believe in the Bush Administration’s claim than they did before.
There are more studies about that show that conservatives respond differently to the world than liberals (or non-conservatives), specifically in the case of new or contradictory information. Now if I were to hear I was likely to deny the truth this week just because I believed something wrong last week, I would try really hard to correct for that. Conservatives can't work like that, at least not easily.
There is so much about this out there. Odd how Fox Noise (or any major media outside of NPR) has completely failed to report on this. The findings really are quite striking and if you look at the studies, they're very well done. The right wingers are, as always, impuning the messenger and the message but what doubt I've seen has been towards individual tests. It seems odd that so many different studies could reach the same conclusion. If you've ever had any involvement in science you know that one spends a great deal of time removing any external cues or prejudices in the design process of the test. Here is a case where there may be a small bit of doubt as to whether the analysis is biased. I kind of don't think so. (I wonder if that makes me a conservative?)
And I think this is really interesting:
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