"The Surge Has Been Completely Useless"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-surge-has-been-comple_b_63111.html

I found this blog on The Huffington Post by Cenk Uygur titled, "The Surge Has Been Completely Useless." It clearly uses the they say/I say method since its opening paragraph declares, "It's maddening how effective Bush administration propaganda is. They say the surge has been working. They repeat it a million times. Then they get a couple of their cronies inside think tanks, who are paid to say how great they are, say the surge is working. Then they get a couple of generals, who were promoted to say how great they are, say the surge is working. And voila, all you hear in the news is how well the surge is working." The next paragraph the author then says how he feels about the surge, "This so-called surge is a disaster, with zero results. Yes, I said zero."
I agree with the author's view. This is because what everyone seems to be forgetting about the surge is that it was never supposed to be a military tactic but a political one. The ultimate goal of the surge was to secure a stable Iraqi government. This has not happened. The Sunnis have left the government, and the remaining politicians are still on vacation. Yes, there has been a decrease in insurgent violence in areas such as Al Anbar province. No one is arguing with that. America does have the greatest army in the world, so it is to be expected when an increase in our troops are deployed to a certain area. The problem is that we are not fighting an army in the traditional sense. This isn't World War II where it was obvious that the Nazis were evil people, and they had an army that we would have to defeat in order to end their reign. In Iraq, we are fighting militia groups with no central unity, and because of this we will never be able to truly defeat them. It's like a game of Whac-a-Mole. We lower the violence and opposition in one area, and it just pops up in another. The time has come to admit that we will never outlast the insurgents. These are people who are still arguing over who was supposed to inherit Muhammad's throne 1400 years ago. Plus, we don't have the amount of troops it would take to keep the surge going. Some of our troops are on their 5th deployment already. Our enemies don't have this problem. In many areas across the Middle East young boys are brainwashed from an early age and raised to fight for groups such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, among many other fundamentalist terror groups.
It's because of all of this that it has become even more clear that the War in Iraq was never a military battle in the first place. It was always a diplomatic one. But because of poor strategy the Bush Administration believed that America would be welcomed as liberators. And here we are again being led to believe that there is hope in this quagmire we got ourselves into. Over the past couple of years the government has kept trying to make believe that there is an end in sight. It's sad that they are doing it again and everyone seems to be falling for it. General Petraeus is going to give his report (through the White House speech staff of course) in two weeks, and he will say things are getting better and that we just need six more months. And people will fall for it, and in six months it's going to be another false hope that dupes the American public into allowing more time and casualties for an un-winnable conflict.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070907/ap_on_re_au_an/bush_bad_day_at_theater_1

This article I found on Yahoo News doesn't use the they say/I say method. The writer does talk about what Bush said at the forum, but he doesn't contrast that with something he is saying. He is just simply restating Bush's gaffes and explaining the context they were said in. Even though it is obvious that the author is not a pro-Bush guy, he actually keeps himself out of it. Maybe he realized Bush's mispronounciations were so bad, that he didn't need to comment on them to make the point.