“A medical source at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad said eight bodies had been brought in from a southern neighborhood after U.S. helicopters targeted a building. A police source put the toll at 10, saying many were believed to be civilians.”
Reuters Translation: “We looked all over for ANY source that claimed it was civilians.”
Pretty much everybody we’re fighting over there is a “civilian”. There is no opposing army out there to shoot at.
Since there isn’t a declared army in uniform opposing our forces in Iraq, ever person they kill is technically a civilian. This far into the war, the media continues to confound us with their illiteracy.
OK the surge has shown so much progress that the media must continue to invent its own FACTS instead of relying on truth....
A tipping point is coming soon... Good news cannot be ignored forever and the Dems are going to go nuts when reality and victory crash their party...
God Bless our Military and George W. Bush...
Huge bump for our awesome military!
Reuters, OTOH, can go pound sand.
What the hell is a "surge unit"? Are they specially labeled as parts of the "surge, not the military presence"? Do they wear different uniforms? Do they wear a "surge" badge/medal/bars of some kind? Is "the surge" now a separate and distinct branch of our military?
I think one of the stupider spectacles we've been subjected to regarding this military effort has actually been Bush's fault: the weird branding involved in calling an increase in troop levels "the surge", as if troop levels being increased somewhere is somehow unusual or extraordinary, and as if the troops involved in the "surge" are part of something separate and different from the other troops there.
We have had some number of soldiers stationed in Iraq since 2003. Contrary to what some people seem to think, the exact number is not something set in stone or by law. It has varied up and down over time. And this is normal. No one should expect otherwise. It would be weird if it were otherwise - imagine an act of Congress reading "For as long as we have a military presence in Iraq, there shall be One Hundred And Twenty-Two Thousand, Seven Hundred And Thirty-Six soldiers stationed in Iraq at all times". The way some people talk it's almost as if they think there is such a magic number. There's not.
Well, earlier this year, that number was adjusted upwards. I have no idea why the hell Bush and his admin. decided to call this action a "surge" as if adjusting the number upwards was a new thing requiring new debate. All this accomplished was to hand opponents of the military presence a new talking-point - a new thing to make a big deal of.
And now we're seeing the end result. The number is being adjusted downwards slightly, and this gets reported as the "first surge unit" leaving Iraq (as if the notion of being a "surge unit" is at all meaningful), rather than as "the number stationed in Iraq was adjusted downward slightly", which is a more neutral way to phrase it, but which wouldn't really sound like interesting or significant news at all. Because it's not.
There's also a practical ramification here. As I understand it, we are withdrawing a "surge unit" - which, if it means anything, denotes a unit that only shipped to Iraq recently when "the surge" (*eye roll*) was ordered. Question: if our intent here is to reduce our military presence in Iraq slightly, why would the "surge units" be among the first to come home, rather than other units who've been there longer? What about the guys who've been there on several tours? Why not bring some of them home first? Last in-first out, does that make sense? Are we withdrawing a "surge unit" solely for some sort of (perceived) political benefit of being able to say "the surge is winding down", and meanwhile leaving the other guys there in the lurch?
Or maybe I misunderstand and there's no "surge unit" coming home at all, it's just the ignorant phrasing of a newspaper person who wants to call attention to the "surge is winding down" angle of the story and thinks in silly terms like I've outlined above - "the number is being reduced from 160k to 160k minus N, therefore those N are the 'first surge unit coming home'", because anything above the "normal" (eye roll) level of 120k (or whatever the magic number supposedly is) is part of "the surge"?
but that just illustrates precisely the idiocy of thinking in terms of putting some soldiers in a specially-labeled, separate box artificially-labeled "the surge".
In reality, there's no such thing as "the surge". There are some soldiers in Iraq, who have been sent there at different times. The number has gone up and down. A while ago it went up by like 15% or so, and stayed there for a while. Well, I guess now there are a few less, because some of them are coming home. This, of course, is something that has happened off and on throughout the occupation: soldiers sent to Iraq, soldiers coming home. That's the more accurate way to say it. It also illustrates why it should be viewed as a complete non-story.