Spengler on the Costs of the Petraeus Surge

“‘May his name be blotted out!’ declares the most terrible Hebrew curse,” begins the latest Spengler column, written by our senior editor David P. Goldman.

History has devised a curse more terrible still, that is, to have one’s memory blotted out, all except for a name that popular usage links to disaster.

This may be General Petraeus’s fate, he argues in Why Not Call it a Petraeus Village? , because after the “surge” he created by putting Sunni soldiers on the American payroll,

Sectarian war is playing out in the predictable way, and America will have nothing to show for a trillion dollars’ worth of “nation-building” and several thousand dead soldiers except a civil war much bloodier than might have occurred without America’s provision of money and guns to the Sunni Awakening.

His analysis goes on, and gets worse, from there.