John McCain can’t get enough when it comes to fallaciously boasting of the success of the surge. He even claimed at a Town Hall meeting on May 28, 2008, “I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels,” which was of course a blatant lie, considering at the time the US had 155,000 troops in Iraq, compared to 128,569 in January 2007 before the surge. Now a UCLA study which will appear in the October issue of Environment and Planning A finds that the surge may not have been all that effective.

Media Newswire notes:

By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year's U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

 

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery.

 

"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. "By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left."

… The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge.

McCain will continue to claim the surge’s efficacy, though the UCLA findings demonstrate that the decline in violence was more attributable to the fact that the Shiites had essentially killed a load of Iraqis before they could kill anyone else. Perhaps the study will bring Americans to realization that the real preemptive strike has been the brutal and decisive force exercised by the Shiites. In the meantime, I’m sure Sarah Palin will be more than willing to stand by her man and make shamefully stupid statements such as when she told Sean Hannity of Obama’s questioning of McCain’s statements on the economy, “that was an unfair attack based on verbiage that John McCain used.”

But no, the McCain campaign isn’t attempting to shield Palin from reporters because they’re afraid she’ll blunder. Or something.