Limited, Inc.

Interesting duel in the Sunday NYT book section. On the one side is that   indefatigable fluffer of all things Petraeus, Dexter Filkins, who gets to tell his favorite surge fairy tale all over again in his review of John A, Nagl's book. I think of Filkins as an exemplary figure, failing ever upwards in an establishment that has been astonishingly unmarked by 13 years of American foreign policy failure, which has mired the US in unwinnable and even incomprehensible wars all over   the Middle East and Central Asia. The Filkins style of indirectly acknowledging this - which is the establishment style of tiptoing the graveyards that its criminality has filled - comes in the fourth graf: "The last Americans didn’t leave Iraq until 2011, after about 4,500 of them had been killed and more than 30,000 wounded. At least a hundred thousand Iraqis died, too." Notice the Iraqi casualty addendum, which is as true as saying, about the Holocaust, that "at least a million Jews died