"Even": not just a little word

Steven. R. Hurst writes for AP, under the tantalizing headline "Petraeus prepares troop reduction plan":

The general issued his comments to a small group of reporters who accompanied him to the headquarters of a group of former Sunni insurgents who are now working with American and Iraqi forces against al-Qaida in western Baghdad's Amariyah neighborhood. "You have to pinch yourself a little to make sure that is real because that is a very significant development in this kind of operation in counterinsurgency," he said. "It's all about the local people. When all the sudden the local people are on the side of the new Iraq instead of on the side of the insurgents or even al-Qaida, that's a very significant change."

It is significant, but I wish Hurst had commented on - or that one of those reporters had questioned - that "even".

"Even" al-Qaida.

There's a world of assumption - and assertion - built into that statement by that particle. It's the claim that the local people are - or at least have been - primarily on the side of al-Qaida in the past, rather than the insurgents or the new Iraq. It's the claim that al-Qaida is the original primal force in Iraq.

It's the same lie we've been told for five, six years now. All contained in one neat, unobtrusive little word.

And it doesn't make me hopeful - not that anything in his past did - that Petraeus is likely to tell us next month anything that Bush doesn't want him to.