The only problem is you don’t see the same street before and after. I’m totally for giving our military credit when it’s earned it. This isn’t it.

I have to agree with Robert on this one. You see devastation in daylight shots, commerce in nighttime shots. There’s no median in the devastation shots, there’s a median and fresh pavement in the nighttime shots. Why not make the comparison obvious if the surge was so successful?
Rolling Stone sent its own reporters to see if the “pro-troop” video was true (The Myth of the Surge, March 2008). Now I’m not especially inclined to turn to Rolling Stone as a journalistic source. But what they have to say totally contradicts the video–and who’s bringing in the bigger bucks off this?
The problem is, for Michelle, hating Obama and Biden trumps loving America. It trumps truth. Hating Obama is all Michelle is about. At least the DVD makers are in it for a buck.

The surge accomplished what was hoped it would. Yet while the Iraq-War supporting folks crow about this, I shake my head in wonder at their short-sightedness.
Applauding the accomplishments of the troop surge in Iraq is tantamount to congratulating a misbehaving child for cleaning up the shattered crystal vase s/he knocked over while ignoring your pleas to stop running around like a maniac in the first place.
The entire mess could have entirely been avoided.
That is the larger-picture, and the one focused on by people with the depth of perception to see it.

Nightlad said:
“The entire mess could have entirely been avoided.”
______________________________
I’ve been rethinking the received wisdom on Iraq – that it was a foreign policy blunder, an unnecessary war, etc., and while I do think it was a “war of choice,” it actually has accomplished several very good things.
Here’s my list of Iraq war positives:
First, Al Qaeda and other extreme salafist groups did, in fact, massively marshal their resources and personel in Iraq in an attempt to take the country and overthrow the elected government. Their defeat was decisive and extremely humiliating. They lost a tremendous amount of prestige as a result of it and revealed themselves for all the world to see as first class butchers who are not loath to attack other supposedly “heterodox” muslims. (Also, I think people tend to minimize the strategic difficulty of engaging an ideologically driven, but diffuse and loosely organized enemy. Say what you will, but the conflict in Iraq drew those scattered, anonymous jihadists from all across the middle east and beyond – where they were summarily killed.)
Second: Iran is about to become a nuclear power, and a profoundly hostile and dangerous one, not just to the US and Israel, but to our Sunni allies to the west of Iraq who are absolutely terrified of a nuclear Iran (research the Meccan seige of 1979 for further background on this). Having a standing army deployed on Iran’s western border just might make the Mullahs more amenable to a negotiated settlement than they would otherwise have been. In fact, we have traditionally placed large military contingents and installations in areas abutting hostile nations, especially those with a nuclear capability, in order to “control the discourse” (so to speak). Also, Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, Hezbollah and Hamas, lie on the far side side of a large stretch of territory that we now control, making communication and resupply by Iran more vulnerable and potentially more risky (should we choose to disrupt them);
Third: Oil is power in the middle east. If we were not in control of those northern fields in Iraq, those much worse than us would be – or would be vieing to gain control, causing greater instability and chaos than already exists. They would likely use that power in very damaging ways – from manipulating markets to funding extremist ideologies and insurgencies, as the Saudis have done for the past few decades (read, Freedom House Report: “Saudi Hate Literature Invades American Mosques” for a small taste of the kind of poison being spread across the planet from Pakistan to the UK).
Fourth: we now have a newly emergent, fairly friendly, democratic country in the heart of the ME – an improved state of affairs to say the least. This fact, combined with the regime change in Afghanistan, has the potential to altar the entire character of the region, if given enough time and attention (and assuming Obama doesn’t completely blow it).

I suppose I’m with NightLad … who is familiar with the antics of children …
What did the street look like before 2003?
Matt. 23:15 is just so on my mind these days … not only politically or nationally, either …

Hmm, I have to agree with Steve and Robert here. The day shots for before pictures and the night shots for the after is really suspect.

President Eisenhower warned not to let the military industrial complex take over the government. The whole Iraq war is a scam. We tax payers paid the military industrial complex hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy Iraq’s infrastructure and then paid Haliburton billions more to rebuild it. Also we notice how the government never tries to deny the claim that the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing but a war for oil. That’s because they want us to think that. These invasions are religious crusades (Bush even slipped up a few times at the beginning and called them that) started by the religious right and our evangelical Bible believing Christian president who thinks he speaks for God. These people are doing nothing more than purposely trying to hasten the rapture and the return of someone who never existed in the first place.

I wonder how “cool” the families of over 3,000 dead U.S. soldier and 10,000 permanently maimed and wounded soliders think the Iraq war has been? How about the families of 300,000 dead Iraqis? How about the families of torture victims?
I am baffled by the warmongering blood-lust of someone who is advertised as a Christian.

Michael,
You said: I am baffled by the warmongering blood-lust of someone who is advertised as a Christian.
Boris says: I am baffled at how one could be baffled by the warmongering blood-lust of someone who is advertised as a Christian. These are the same people who were behind the Inquisitions, Crusades, centuries of Witch burnings, the Holocaust and 2000 years of fighting and denying science and defaming and murdering scientists. Christians are and always have been the most violent, oppressive, nasty, culturally prejudiced and scientifically and socially ignorant people on the planet
Look how they’ve made a hero out of John McCain. This war criminal shot up defenseless villages full of women and children in Viet Nam and it was civilians who shot down his plane. He deserved to be tortured and they should have hung him. They did extract this and other confessions from him: “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.” – John McCain
There’s your big tough war hero Christians.

Christians are and always have been the most violent, oppressive, nasty, culturally prejudiced and scientifically and socially ignorant people on the planet
Nice. Kiss your mother with that mouth?

I’m with you, Michael. Beyond sad.