On fighting losing battles

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA11Ak06.html

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SPEAKING FREELY
On fighting losing battles
By Pham Binh

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

Denying the reality of impending defeat and ignoring the advice of his generals, the leader decided on "a last big push" to win the war. For anyone old enough to remember, this was the Battle of the Bulge, Adolf Hitler's last-ditch and temporarily successful counterattack in 1944 to reverse the Reich's fortunes in World War II.

Ignorant of history as ever, US President George W Bush is taking a page from Hitler's book by sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq. Despite all the media speculation about how the Iraq Study Group, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, his replacement by Robert Gates and the victory of the Democrats in the mid-term congressional elections would effect the Iraq war, Bush was already talking to his senior advisers about "a last big push" less than two weeks after the Republicans received their thumpin' at the polls. <1>

The main goal of the escalation is to smash Baghdad's Sunni resistance and neutralize the Mehdi Army, the grassroots Shi'ite militia of anti-occupation cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Once the militias are under control, the United States will be able to cobble together a puppet government with enough Shi'ite, Kurdish and Sunni support to sustain itself.

Mission accomplished. Maybe this time Bush will skip the flight suit and the banner.

As with the Battle of the Bulge, the strategic thinking behind the surge is based on a combination of delusion, wishful thinking and desperation. Short of inventing a time machine, the US cannot undo the process that led to the rise of the sectarian militias in the first place.

[Eric J in MN]

1. The US is going to try to kill both the Shiite militias and the Sunni militias?

If the US isn't hated enough in Iraq, it soon will be.