The surge is working - or not

McCain claims to have supported the increase of U.S. troops in Iraq
when no one else did, and he says it is working.

So, is the surge really working?

Not according to an NPR report dated January 8, 2008.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17899543

The report says military officials disagree on the impact of the surge.

According to the report, some officials believe the decrease in
violence is occurring because the U.S. military is paying Sunni
insurgents to be its allies.

Here is part of the NPR report.

"Petraeus [the U.S. commanding general in Iraq] seems to have
concluded that it was essential to cut deals with the Sunni insurgents
if he was going to succeed in reducing U.S. casualties," [Retired Army
Colonel Douglas] Macgregor says.

The military now calls those "deals" the Concerned Local Citizens
program or simply, CLCs.

It's a somewhat abstract euphemism. The CLC program turns groups of
former insurgents, including fighters for al-Qaida in Iraq, into paid,
temporary allies of the U.S. military.

[General Barry] McCaffrey just got back from a five-day trip to Iraq
where, he says, he "went to a couple of these CLCs, you know, five
awkward-looking guys with their own AKs standing at a road junction
with two magazines of ammunition — and they're there as early warning
to protect their families in that village. I think that that's good."

Some 70,000 former insurgents are now being paid $10 a day by the U.S.
military. It costs about a quarter billion dollars a year.

It's a controversial strategy, and Macgregor warns that it's creating
a parallel military force in Iraq that is made up almost entirely of
Sunni Muslims.

"We need to understand that buying off your enemy is a good short-term
solution to gain a respite from violence," he says, "but it's not a
long-term solution to creating a legitimate political order inside a
country that, quite frankly, is recovering from the worst sort of
civil war.