Ceci n'est pas une surge.

This kills me.

In April, during the congressional debate over war funding, Gen. David Petraeus pushed back against a withdrawal timeline from Iraq “because we’re only about two months into the surge,” assuring Congress that he would be able to report on progress in September:

"We’re only about two months into the surge. We won’t have all the forces on the ground until mid-June and I pointed that out to them, and noted that Ambassador Crocker and I would be doing an assessment in early September and provide that to our respective bosses at that time."

But now that the debate on timelines has passed, Petraeus is asking for even more time. Today in an interview with Lara Logan of CBS News, Petraeus tried to argue that the surge hasn’t even started yet:

"We haven’t started the surge — the full surge — yet. So let me have a few months."

These are the same people who say that the only reason that the death tolls for American soldiers are rising is because we're in the midst of a surge. It's "surge for me but not for thee."

Maybe they decided that they haven't started the surge yet because what they're doing now isn't working.

An internal US military assessment indicates that three months after the beginning of a troop "surge" in Baghdad, the military has been able to establish tentative control over fewer than one-third of the city's neighborhoods, The New York Times reported on its website Sunday.

The newspaper said that the assessment, which was completed in late May, found that US and Iraqi forces were able to "to protect the population" and "maintain physical influence over" only 146 out of 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face "resistance," according to the one-page assessment, which summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad, the Times report said.

Let us know when it begins. Somehow I have a feeling it'll only start when they decide it's working.

UPDATE: Doesn't Ricardo Sanchez know that the surge hasn't started yet?

“I think if we do the right things politically and economically with the right Iraqi leadership we could still salvage at least a stalemate, if you will — not a stalemate but at least stave off defeat,” Sanchez told the San Antonio Express-News. “It’s also kind of important for us to answer the question, ‘What is victory?’, and at this point I’m not sure America really knows what victory is.” […]

“I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time and we’ve got to do whatever we can to help the next generation of leaders do better than we have done over the past five years,” Sanchez said, “better than what this cohort of political and military leaders have done.”