Surging into Wonderland

[Vyan]

From the BBC and Raw Story.

US President George W Bush intends to reveal a new Iraq strategy within days, the BBC has learnt.

The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces.

The US president arrived back in Washington on Monday after a week-long holiday at his ranch in Texas.

The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week.

Its central theme will be sacrifice.

Sacrifice? For whom? For another 3000 dead Americans (more than died at Ground Zero)? Are we talking about Sacrifice by American the Sheeple or (and possibly of) the Iraqi people?

The Death Toll in Iraq is punching it's way through the roof - and President Chimpy is planning to ask us for Sacrifice. That's just priceless.

But we shouldn't be surprised right?

"We'll succeed unless we quit," Bush told reporters. "We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take awhile.”

"Instant Success" - he says about a War that's already lasted longer than our involvment in World War II. And speaking of WWII the AP wants to know when and where we all became wimps.

The country largely kept the faith during World War II, even as about 400,000 U.S. forces died - 20,000 just in the month long Battle of the Bulge. Before turning against the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Americans tolerated thousands more deaths than in Iraq.

Has something changed? Do Americans somehow place higher value on the lives of their soldiers now? Do they expect success at lower cost? Or do most simply dismiss this particular war as the wrong one - hard to understand and harder to win - and so not worth the losses?

Yeah, why in the world should we get upset when a measly 2 or 3,000 thousand of our citizens disappear in a puff of smoke It's not like it's even 1/1000th of 1% of our total population. It's not like we'll miss them or anything - we've 900 times as many people in our prisons don't we?

Well, that's what happens when you play Whack-a-mole!

“We could not clear and hold,” Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser, acknowledged in a recent interview, in a frank admission of how American strategy had crumbled. “Iraqi forces were not able to hold neighborhoods, and the effort to build did not show up. The sectarian violence continued to mount, so we did not make the progress on security we had hoped. We did not bring the moderate Sunnis off the fence, as we had hoped. The Shia lost patience, and began to see the militias as their protectors.” Yet if Mr. Bush does send in more American forces, historians may well ask why it took him so long. Some Bush officials argue that the administration erred by refusing to send in a bigger force in 2003, or by sufficiently bolstering it when the insurgency began to take hold.

This year, decisions on a new strategy were clearly slowed by political calculations. Many of Mr. Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.

You mean a political catastrophy like losing both the House and the Senate to Democrats?

This just shows how backwards these people think - just as Shepard Smith on Fox News pointed out this past October in a rare moment of off script truthiness.

KRISTOL: Well, I've said that many many times, so often I've been ridiculed for saying "more troops, more troops, more troops." I hope the president...

SMITH: If they really want to win it!

KRISTOL: I agree...I hope...

SMITH: But I think they are just paying lip service to all this!

KRISTOL: Well, I hope not because it really wouldn't be the right thing to do and I think President Bush wants to do the right thing and I think he knows there's a problem. He can't probably do anything until election day. I very much hope after election day he takes a fresh look at Iraq, sends enough troops, surges the...goes on the offensive there and plays for victory because..

SMITH: Bill..

KRISTOL: it's just too important to just, you know...

SMITH: It's horrifying that you just said he can't do anything until after the election. We've got men and women over there who are dying every day and you just said that the man who you support can't do anything even though you believe he knows it's wrong.

The irony here is not just that they waited until the situation was far past critical to do anything - the ability to "clear and holld" was always predicated on Gen Shinseki's original request for 400,000 troops or more. Yet we all know that without a draft or massive increase of involvement by other nations any -surge- escalation we attempt will be far too little and far too late.

And it's not like we haven't been here before.

One of the lessons the president might have learned when he visited Vietnam was about the number of “surges” Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson delivered from 1961 through 1968. The first American troops arrived in the country in strength in 1961, although advisers had been there since the early 1950s when the French left after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

By 1965, troop strength had “surged” to 125,000 from 75,000. At the end of the year, they had surged again, to 200,000. By January 1957, they had surged to 389,000. By July 1967, troop strength had surged to 475,000.



And, of course, by January 1968, they had surged to more than 500,000, when Gen. William Westmoreland, the military commander at the time, was reporting that the Vietnam insurgency had largely been quelled. Then the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong staged a surge of their own during the Lunar New Year. An estimated 165,000 civilians are believed to have died, creating millions more refugees. Hundreds of GIs and Marines died as the Viet Cong fought their way to the US Embassy in Saigon. The battle for the old imperial capital of Hue killed hundreds of US Marines and virtually destroyed perhaps the most beautiful city in the country.

Westmoreland asked for another 200,000 troops. At that point, Johnson, beleaguered in the White House as Bush has never been over Iraq, brought in Clark C. Clifford, a long-time Washington, DC insider, as Secretary of Defense to reexamine the US mission in Vietnam. After several weeks, Clifford concluded that “there is no concept or overall plan anywhere in Washington, DC for achieving victory in Vietnam.”

Which happens to be exactly where we are with Iraq - except that W is still too busy wandering through Poppy fields on his way to the Emerald City to notice.

Mr. Bush came to worry that it was not just his critics and Democrats in Congress who were looking for what he dismissed last month as a strategy of “graceful exit.” Visiting the Pentagon a few weeks ago for a classified briefing on Iraq with his generals, Mr. Bush made it clear that he was not interested in any ideas that would simply allow American forces to stabilize the violence. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commandant, later told marines about the president’s message.

“What I want to hear from you is how we’re going to win,” he quoted the president as warning his commanders, “not how we’re going to leave.”

Well, one idea apparently is to unleash the Gays of War!

Saying "we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job," General John M. Shalikashvili, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the law that requires lesbians and gays to remain in the closet if they choose to be a member of the nation's armed forces. Shakikashvili, who served as Chairman from 1993 to 1999, is the nation's highest ranking retired or active duty military officer to call for the law's repeal.

In an op-ed in Tuesday's New York Times, Shalikashvili writes that it is likely that Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy will be part of a larger discussion of President Bush's goal of increasing the size of the military.

Watching neo-con heads explode as their inate atavistic inner homophobia battles their bloodlust for some fabulously accessorized new fodder for the cannons - could become the new extreme sport for '07.

There is of course, one tiny - teeny - itsy bity road block in front of this pink and shiny new offensive against the "enemies of freedom" -- and that would be ..um.. Congress.

And I'm not talking about the Democrats.

From CNN.

WOLF BLITZER: Can you justify deploying more U.S. troops into what you believe is a civil war?

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER (R-PA): On this day, for the record, Wolf, I would say no.

From Novakula in the WaPo.

President Bush and McCain, the front-runner for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, will have trouble finding support from more than 12 of the 49 Republican senators when pressing for a surge of 30,000 troops. "It's Alice in Wonderland," Sen. Chuck Hagel, second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me in describing the proposal. "I'm absolutely opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly."

From Fox News Sunday.

If Bush ignores Congress, Lugar said he should expect “a lot of hearings, a lot of study, a lot of criticism,” and “demands for subpoenas.” Fox host Chris Wallace said, “You’re saying this could get ugly.” Lugar replied, “Yes, it could.”

And why should it get "ugly" - it's not like the Bush Administration has lied about what our Generals have to say about the Surge?

Oh wait.

The longer we in the U.S. forces continue to bear the main burden of Iraq’s security, it lengthens the time that the government of Iraq has to take the hard decisions about reconciliation and dealing with the militias. And the other thing is that they can continue to blame us for all of Iraq’s problems, which are at base their problems. ... It’s always been my view that a heavy and sustained American military presence was not going to solve the problems in Iraq over the long term.

The Troops are against it. The Joint Chiefs are against it. Some Military official believed that the Administration tried to buy their support.

But here's the kicker - considering what we already know and have already seen from President Bush - does any reasonable person believe that he'll be deterred from announce his new strategery of Pro-Surging against the In-Surgents?

It's really just a matter of finding a way to sell-it, not justify it.

The AP "Wimp" article is just the beginning. We need to be ready for a full-court press, dozens of arguments will be launched that we need to at least try to win - conveniently ignoring the fact that this War has long ago been lost when we lost the support and confidence of the Iraqi people due to our arrogant incompetence - and if we don't continue to try the impending failure of Iraq which dangles over the Bush Administrations Legacy like the 19 square mile piece of ice that just broke off the Artic shelf will be magically teleported over the heads of all the naysayers and critics. Four years of Bush Administration fuck-ups will be laid at the feet of those who simply stood up and pointed out those failures while their own suggestions - like those the Iraq Survey Group - are tossed under the bus, then backed-up over - repeatedly.

They have no intention of actually implementing a surge because even they know it won't work. Their only goal in bringing it up is to shift blame when the inevitable house of cards that has been their entire Iraq strategy crumbles under them as the Saudi's come surging across the border to end the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis and we have a full-on Saudi/Iranian Al-Qaeda/Hezbollah War on our hands.

Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have totally screwed the pooch from Day One and they'll do everything in their power to blame it on someone - anyone - else.

That's all they have left. We have to make sure this B.S. gambit doesn't work, because sadly - it just might.

Vyan

Crossposted from Truth 2 Power Project

[Clarkie1]

1. Thanks for the rawstroy/BBC link. It's what we all suspected was coming, unfortunately.

I hope the Congress does thier job this time around.

[dave_p]

2. Sacrifice

1. Slaughter of animal or person, surrender of a possession, as offering to a deity.

That sounds about right. So who'll be the deity?