THE BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG BUSH

"A great war leaves the country with three armies--an army
of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves."
--German proverb
President Bush will unleash the latest formula of folly in Iraq: the "surge" doctrine, embroidered with a theme of "sacrifice." Voices of the dead scream in silent sorrow, and the world watches aghast at the fiery failure…The coming speech matters little…The words will be nothing more than the rush of wind and the tinkling of brass, because in the end this is the ghoulish price of the Iraq War.

Three thousand dead--plus one gaping hole in the heart of New York City and America. It is an abyss deep enough to bury truth and sanity in the ink-stained darkness of fear, with the echoes of hollow men who seek to capitalize from such catastrophic pain.
--"Three Thousand Plus One," John Cory, truthout.org, January 10, 2006


This war is not worth fighting. And if there were ever serious talk about enacting a draft or raising taxes to fight it, you'd see quickly enough that the vast majority of Americans would not find it worth fighting.

There must be a leader somewhere who can shake the U.S. out of this tragic hypnotic state, who can see that it is beyond crazy to continue our involvement in this war indefinitely, to sacrifice another 1,000 young lives, and then another thousand after that.

All of the tortured, twisted rationales for this war--all of the fatuous intellectual pyrotechnics dreamed up to justify it--have vaporized, and we're left with just the mad , mindless, meaningless and apparently endless slaughter.

Shakespeare, in "Henry VI" said, "now thou art come unto a feast of death."
--"Another Thousand Lives," Bob Herbert, New York Times, January 4, 2007


According to the BBC and a rather gushing series of carefully choreographed White House leaks, the president's speech tonight is supposedly going to state as its centerpiece that Americans should be prepared to continue making greater sacrifice for the global war on terror--(read, Iraq)--for the sake of our nation's security. He's going to talk about a temporary "surge" of troops--(read, escalation of more than 20,000 troops for up to two years, just before the next elections)-- to secure Baghdad so that the baby government there can survive and go on to build a thriving democracy that will protect American interests--(read, oil)-- in the Middle East.

He's going to say that "victory" is still possible (he says that's "a word Americans understand," as opposed to, say, "quagmire" or "stalemate"), and that this time it's going to be different because he has a whole new bunch of generals to fight this war and because he will be implementing all these great new ideas to stabilize the country politically--expect him to use such words as "microloan," which recently drew worldwide media attention when a Nobel-prize-winning economist implemented microloans in Indonesia, to great success.

Expect him to make a big deal of enumerating all the experts he has met with in his "listening tour," (which, by the way, was a term coined by Hillary Clinton when she first went around upstate New York, listening to potential constituents at places like county fairs and coffee shops, prior to her first election as a U.S. Senator in 2000.)

Expect him NOT to mention that, in spite of all the people he supposedly "listened to," the only ones he actually HEARD were the same neocons who got us into this debacle in the first place, but I'll get into that later.

Expect him to sing the praises of the new command structure he has put in place to run the war; expect him NOT to mention that, although their retirements were due, he hastened the departure of generals who publicly disagreed with him on escalating the war, and put in their place generals and an admiral who like the idea. Sound familiar?

I've spent the past several weeks reading everything I could get my hands on about the so-called new strategy. I've read stuff by such neoconservative voices as William Krystol, Frederick Kagan, and General Jack Keane, moderates like Democratic Senator Joe Biden, and some liberals, such as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert.

I have deliberately avoided even READING things by such inflammatory liberals as Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, because I wanted my consideration to be fair and even-handed. I was looking for facts, not emotional rhetoric--on either side.

As I have stated soooo many times on Blue Inkblots; I have my opinions about this war, and I keep hoping and praying that I might be proved WRONG.

My son fought with honor and bravery in that bloody desert country; once during the now-famous Battle of Fallujah in November of '04, and again more recently, in locations scattered throughout the Anbar province. He saw one friend get both legs and an arm blown off, another lose a hand, another get killed by a bullet to the head, and more horrors than he would be comfortable knowing I was writing about in such a public place. He also once drove a Humvee over an improvised explosive device that blew up beneath him. He was medivacced out, checked over, and sent back into combat.

Now, he's finding out that Marines like him who are "short-timers," completing their final year in the service, are being badgered and harassed and downright threatened in an attempt to force them to go back to Iraq, even if their own unit is not scheduled to do so. Marines in Dustin's unit, for instance, are being told that if they don't re-enlist in order to deploy with their own units (which aren't scheduled to go back until they are out of the Marines), then they must actually join other units that are scheduled to return soon.

Younger, more vulnerable Marines succumb to such pressures, and now, due to the new "surge" policy, those Marines will be deploying a full month ahead of time and held over for FIVE MONTHS longer than their usual tours. (If, of course, they survive that long.) And they won't even be with their buddies they served with before and upon whom they have come to rely for their lives, because they were pressed into another unit that was due to deploy soon.

This is happening because the Marines are being pressured to come up with thousands of troops THEY DON'T HAVE for this so-called, politely-worded "surge."

I don't blame the Marines. I blame their commander in chief.

When Rumsfeld finally left, when the Iraq Study Group came out with their recommendations, when the Democratic party was returned to power in a clear voter mandate of protest against the way this war has been prosecuted, I even felt a few days of peaceful hope that maybe, at long last, we could come to some sort of resolution over there that would make it all worthwhile.

For instance, when I first read of the proposals for such measures at the microloans, I felt even a glimmer of hope that maybe Bush was, at long last, onto something. I'm sure many folks listening to his words tonight will think the same thing.

This is why I chose to write now, before the speech, to let you know ahead of time that (a) there is nothing new here (b) it's all been tried--IN IRAQ--before and (c) it's too little, too late.

I am not trying to be obstructionist here just because I don't like George W. Bush.

I am trying to point out what needs to be known, for anybody out there who cares to educate themselves, because my son's life hangs in the balance, and the lives of his buddies, and all the other buddies and all the other sons and daughters who have been forced to sacrifice so much more than they ever dreamed when they took their oaths.

There isn't a whole lot Americans can do to stop a commander-in-chief if he is bound and determined to fight a war of ego. One need only to look back at a Democratic president--Lyndon Johnson--to know that. There isn't a whole lot Americans can do when a president chooses to fight a war for political purposes--just look toward Richard Nixon. There isn't a whole lot Congress can do, frankly, and they know it.

But I will not stand silently by while he lays on platitudes and patriotism and layers the sugar-coated frosting over a stale and rotting cake, and watch while Americans get hypnotized into going along once more.

All we can do, in the long run, is raise our voices to the rafters, and create such a howl and such a noise that those craven slavering politicians who will say or do anything to get elected will realize that they're not GOING to get elected until they stand up to the madness.

It starts with us.

I am going to divide this blog post into five sections: Surge, Sacrifice, Strategy, Surrounding & Stopping Bush, and Bush's Last Stand. You can scan down and read what interest you, or study the whole thing. It represents weeks of research and the best information I can find.

You can agree or disagree with my conclusions. The facts, well, they stand alone.


SURGE


Those who've sacrificed the most--America's Army and Marine ground forces and their families--will be asked to continue bearing the burden and paying an even higher price in dead and wounded for a president's ego and intransigence.

The very troops who will make up the temporary bump in U.S. forces in Iraq are those who've already paid that price over and over. They'll be found by a sleight-of-hand maneuver: ordering units already tapped to return to Iraq to go there earlier than scheduled.

That isn't even robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's robbing Peter to pay Peter.

George W. Bush believes that he can buy another couple of years of violent stalemate so he can hand off the disaster to whoever succeeds him in the White House on January 20, 2009.
--"More Troops for Iraq--Bush's Next Flight from Reality," Joseph L. Galloway, editorandpublisher.com, January 6, 2007. Joseph Galloway was awarded the Bronze Star for actions in Vietnam, and was co-author of the book, "We Were Soldiers Once…and Young."

The report calls for accelerating the arrival of four Army brigades and two Marine regiments that are already preparing to go to Iraq in early 2007 and delaying the departure of the 15 brigades now in Iraq by three months each. That is not a surge of new troops. That is a three-month overlap of scheduled troop departures and arrivals.

The report…has no concrete plan for 2008 and beyond. Only then will the real damage from the American Enterprise Institute proposal surface…

If the AEI recommendations become reality, the balance will tip, readiness will spiral downward, and the cost and time to reset units will spiral upward. In exchange for one last rush at the objective, this proposal risks our ability to fight the long war necessary for success in the region. The report suffers from THE SAME CASUAL DISMISSAL OF UNDESIRABLE OUTCOMES THAT CHARACTERIZED POST-COMBAT, RECONSTRUCTION PLANNING IN IRAQ. (emphasis mine)
--"The Troop Surge that Isn't," Kevin Ryan, Boston Globe, January 6, 2007. Kevin Ryan is a retired Army brigadier general and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Under the plan, for instance, Army brigades would leave for Iraq sooner than planned, meaning soldiers would have less than 12 months at home to train and rebuild between tours--a "red line" that outgoing Army chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker said he did not want to cross, according to a senior military official.
--"Critics say 'Surge' is More of the Same; Past Troops Buildups Have not Quelled Iraq," Michael Abramowitz, Robin Wright, and Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, January 7, 2007.


The bottom line, here, is that, once again, the White House has dominated the terminology in use for the media, and once again, most of the media has trotted along like loyal lap dogs, providing the frame for the administration's latest pretty picture.

This is no SURGE. Get that idea out of your head. Even Senator Harry Reid, the new Democratic majority leader, said a couple of weeks ago that he was okay with a surge if it just lasted "a couple of months or so."

It's not going to be a "couple of months." It is going to be AT LEAST 18 MONTHS TO TWO YEARS.

The strongest proponents of troop escalations to Iraq, such as Sen.. John McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman, as well as the neocons at the American Enterprise Institute who dreamed up this war in the first place and still have the president's ear--all say that the escalation SHOULD BE LONG AND SUSTAINED.

Understand. They want MANY MORE THAN 20,000 TROOPS. IT'S JUST THAT WE DON'T HAVE THE TROOPS TO GIVE THEM. John McCain has said he wants 100,000 additional troops. General Keane, who has planted this seed in Bush's mind, wants 75,000.

The only reason Bush is asking for slightly more than 20,000 is that we still haven't filled the slots left from the LAST 20,000 we sent to Baghdad, just last summer. The military doesn't have them. So they have to send over early the ones already slated to deploy and keep others in-country when they are scheduled to go home, like they did to the army's Stryker Brigade last summer.

Army troops, told they'd be deployed a year, are now going to be deployed fifteen months. And Marines, who typically are only deployed for seven months because their deployments are so grueling and are under almost constant combat conditions, will now be asked to remain in those combat conditions for a full year. This, on top of multiple deployments most all of them have had already.

So there is no surge. There is an escalation of the war. And the only people making sacrifices are the very same people who have had to make the sacrifices all along.

The bottom line is this, and it is a crucial one: HE HAS TO ASK FOR MORE TROOPS FOR BAGHDAD BECAUSE THE IRAQI ARMY FAILED TO SEND FOUR WHOLE BRIGADES OF IRAQI ARMY TROOPS THAT WERE REQUESTED WHEN WE ESCALATED INTO BAGHDAD THE FIRST TIME, LAST SUMMER.

WE HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO "CLEAR AND HOLD" BECAUSE THE IRAQI ARMY REFUSES TO DO THE HOLDING.

SO WE HAVE TO COME IN AFTER THEM AND DO THEIR JOB FOR THEM.

HENCE, THE "SURGE."

My question is this: If we are fighting their war for them now, then what happens when we do leave? And if the same thing is going to happen now or five years from now, when we do leave, then how many more Americans have to die for us to admit that and just get the hell out?


SACRIFICE


"The fatal flaw was when, right after September 11, the president asked everyone to go on with their lives. That set the stage for no one sacrificing," said a Special Forces team sergeant who recently served in Iraq. "That's why they aren't behind it, because they don't have a stake in this war. They aren't losing or gaining anything. If you don't see it, smell it, feel it, how are you connected?"
--"With Iraq War Come Layers of Loss: As Troops Lives are Forever Changed, Much of U.S. is Largely Unaffected," Ann Scott Tyson and Josh White, Washington Post, January 2, 2007.

The only real question about the planned "surge" in Iraq--which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation---is whether is proponents are cynical or delusional.

Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks they're cynical. He recently told the Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be "the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof."

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they're delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Johnathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administrations unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one's losses--the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

Of course, such gambling is easier when the lives at stake are those of other people's children.

…Iraq has become a quagmire of the vanities--a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of men who won't admit they are wrong.
"Quagmire of the Vanities," Paul Krugman, New York Times, January 8, 2007

It has gotten many of us used to the idea--the virtual "white noise"--of conflict far away, of the deaths of young Americans, of vague "sacrifice" for some fluid cause too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrase, the "war on terror."

And the war's second accomplishment--your second accomplishment, Mr. President--is to have taken money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield, and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers.

Because if you sell the Army a thousand Humvees, you can't sell them any more until the first thousand have been destroyed.
--"Countdown with Keith Olbermann: Special Comment about 'Sacrifice,'" Keith Olbermann, msnbc.com, January 4, 2007


A recent very revealing poll in the military's own Army Times, showed that, for the first time, an overwhelming majority of active-duty American troops now believe that this war was fought for all the wrong reasons, that this administration has completely screwed up the fighting of it, and that it's time for them to come home.

When I hear anybody from the White House DARE to use the word "sacrifice," when not a single damned one of them has the faintest notion of the meaning of the word, I get almost hysterically angry. I have to literally take deep breaths and calm myself down.

NOBODY is making ANY sacrifices for this war, except the SAME FAMILIES, OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

If you don't think that is true, just compare the state of college campuses during the Vietnam war and now. Yes, the country was on fire as college campuses erupted into massive war protests, culminating in the National Guard shooting of unarmed kids at Kent State in 1970, killing four students.

But there was a draft, then. Every young male who turned eighteen was notified by their draft boards that they were being considered for military service. Yes, students had deferments--which Dick Cheney took full advantage of--FIVE TIMES--but should their grades ever dip below passing, they were snatched up and almost always sent off to war, where 58,000 of them died. When my husband was deployed as a young lieutenant combat platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in 1970, the death rate of lieutenants was 50 percent.

But there is no draft, now. Now, all most college kids care about is the latest kegger or whether or not this ipod is better than that one. They say they care about the war but they really don't. It just does not affect their lives one way or the other.

Yes, this is a volunteer military, but the vast overwhelming majority of enlistees come from impoverished backgrounds; most of them are from patriotic red-state rural areas. MANY of them signed up after 9-11, thinking they'd be fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Nobody volunteers to be sent over to Iraq again and again and again. If you don't think that is true, consider the Marine Corps' own policy. Any Marine who actually VOLUNTEERS to return to Iraq for a fourth deployment is immediately ordered to get a psychiatric evaluation.

In other words, even the Marines think you are crazy if you volunteer to return again and again to Iraq.

Taking battle-exhausted troops who are due to go home and force them to remain in-country for months and months longer is CRIMINAL. Yanking them out of training early to send them to war is CRIMINAL.

It is not a "surge" of fresh troops. It's the same worn-out ones.

That is not patriotic. It's criminal.

Here's a sacrifice for you from the family values people who brought us this war:

More than 56,000 marriages have been broken by the Iraq war, according to a 2005 Defense Dept. report, which does not include Marines, Navy sailors, or Air Force airmen.

Divorce rates have skyrocketed since the Iraq war began, with a 28 percent increase in enlisted, and a whopping 80 percent increase among officers…Experts estimate that there will be at least 100,000 war-related divorces by the time this war ends.

The cost, in taxpayer dollars, to the American people, of disability claims from wounded soldiers and Marines over the course of time will bring the cost of this war to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.

How's that for sacrifice?


STRATEGY


Some administration officials consider the economic package the most important of the three components. But, even if it's not too late, it seems clear that projects of this type will be largely useless without security and political reconciliation. And the al-Maliki government seems paralyzed to confront these realities.

As to the nature of the economic initiatives themselves, there is certainly nothing new or innovative here. These kinds of projects have been used by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) virtually since the agency was founded more than 40 years ago.

Short-term work programs that would follow up a military sweep by immediately hiring people in the neighborhood to clear up trash or do other small civil-affairs jobs…might prevent some Iraqis from joining armed gangs, but it is unlikely to change the allegiances of the thousands who have already made that bloody decision.

…Will microlending, for instance, work in war zones, where vendors are afraid to take their handicrafts and other wares to the markets that are prime targets for suicide bombers and IEDs? Will it work in towns where there is no electricity to, say, power the sewing machines needed to turn out the inexpensive T-shirts and other garments that are traditional products made with microloans?

……Most of these initiatives--and many others--have been tried before, only to go down in flames under supervision of the inexperienced, ideologically driven political appointees sent to Iraq to supervise the "reconstruction" of the country--at a cost well in excess of $20 billion.
--"This Strategy is New?" William Fisher, truthout.org, January 3, 20007. William Fisher has worked for many years in international aid programs worldwide.

Many officials at the State and Defense departments also doubt that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is capable of making the necessary reforms, given its track record of promising but not delivering…and despite Maliki's assurances in a speech yesterday that he would hold Iraqis accountable for implementing a new Baghdad security plan.
--"Critics say 'Surge' is More of the Same," Michael Abramowitz, Robin Wright, and Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, January 7, 2007

Mr. Bush has previously promised to remake American reconstruction efforts in Iraq, most notably in December 2005, when he said that the United States had learned from the failure of efforts to rebuild major infrastructure, mostly run by American companies. But subsequent efforts to focus on programs that would bring more immediate benefits to Iraqis have also faltered.
--"Bush Plan for Iraq Requests More Troops and More Jobs," David Sanger, New York Times, January 9, 2007

At first, when I heard about the microloans and the small work-crews coming in after the military to clean up after battle, and the reopening of former state-run factories in Iraq to employ some of the hundreds of thousands of angry young Iraqi men, I thought, now THIS makes sense.

That was before I started digging deeply into it, and discovered that every single one of these ideas has been tried, and has failed, in Iraq.

Now, in fact, the security situation is so dire that if anybody DARES to work for anything that remotely smacks of American involvement, they are kidnapped, tortured, and killed, and their families are threatened.

The truth is that Maliki does not want more American troops, and when he heard that Bush was sending more, he presented a "plan" of his own, which basically calls on Americans to help the Iraqi army fight the Sunnis around Baghdad--which is just what they did in an eleven-hour pitched battle in the Haifa area of Baghdad yesterday.

Which means, of course, that we are choosing sides in the civil war.

Watch for Bush to say that he is pressuring Maliki to meet certain "benchmarks" of things they've been talking about for many months, namely, reworking the constitution to be more fair to Sunnis, involving more Sunnis in the government, and spelling out how much oil the oil-poor Sunnis will get in the new government.

Maliki has been promising to do that for more than a year. He will no doubt keep promising.

Meanwhile, when American troops TRY to enforce any kind of justice or discipline or law on Shiite areas--particularly those controlled by Moktada al-Sadr, their archenemy but a Maliki ally, Maliki shuts them down.

The Shiite prime minister turns out Shiite prisoners who have been captured, runs off American army troops from Shiite neighborhoods, and even sent some Shiite Iranian terrorists back home rather than let the Americans deal with them.

Expect him not only to manipulate any troop "surge" to benefit the Shiites and kill off Sunnis, but know that any money that the Americans pour into these reconstruction projects will disappear into the boiling cauldron that is Iraqi graft and corruption.

And Bush wants $8 billion now, but utlimately, he's going to need up to $100 billion more for his war. And that is by no means the total of what will be needed on top of what has already been spent. And at risk of sounding like a flaming liberal in this instance, I have to ask--have you really checked recently to see how many Katrina victims are still waiting for help from FEMA, are still processing claims, still living in trailers, still fighting with homeowners insurance policies that refuse to pay claims? Have you seen how many schools they lost? I'm no isolationist, and I understand all about winning hearts and minds in the Middle East, but the money being flushed down the toilet of Iraq as we speak could damn sure help out here at home.

And don't even get me started on the woeful losses in the REAL war on terror--in Afghanistan--boots on the ground and treasure siphoned off and squandered in Iraq. The Taliban is already moving back in, and the opium trade is stronger than ever. Think what Afghanistan might have looked like by now if we'd stayed the course there instead of chasing after a fool's dream in Iraq.

"Strategy."

"Sacrifice."

They're all just rosy-sounding words, meant to placate a restless American people that there really is a new strategy, when really, it's a do-over. A mulligan. A repeat.

And you know what they say about somebody who does the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

They say that person is crazy.


SURROUNDING AND STOPPING BUSH


Democratic leaders who had hoped to emphasize their domestic agenda in the opening weeks of Congress have concluded that Iraq will share top billing, and they plan on aggressively confronting administration officials this week in a series of hearings.
--"Democrats Revise Agenda to Deal With War in Iraq," Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post, January 8, 2007

This is a political decision, not a military strategy," said Representative Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat of Hawaii who is set to chair a key House subcommittee on the military.

"Bush appears to be taking advice from the very same people who advised him in 2002 and 2003," said Chris Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.
"Top Democrats Balk at Troop Surge," Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, January 6, 2007


There isn't a whole lot anybody can do. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid sent a strong letter, signaling that they did not back a troop surge. On "Face the Nation," Pelosi even said that they would separate funding in Congress, sending all the money the troops in-country need, but not funding any new troops. This isn't possible, not the way the "surge" is being conducted, by keeping troops in who are already in. In any event, he will have deployed them before Congress will even have time to discuss it.

And, by the way, do you THINK it's any accident that after weeks of supposedly conferring and thinking about this, Bush ACCIDENTALLY picked the VERY DAY TO MAKE HIS BIG SPEECH THAT THE DEMOCRATS WERE PLANNING TO LAUNCH THEIR 100-HOUR DOMESTIC P0LICY INITIATIVE?

It is positively diabolical. Sure, it knocks the Democrats' agenda off the front pages, forces them to debate Iraq rather than take care of the business they promised the American people, which then gives Bush and his minions ammunition to taunt them in '08, saying that they did not do what they'd promised in their first 100 hours.

It's brilliant, really. Talk about a strategy. What I want to know is how many boys and girls died waiting for Bush's perfect political timing for his speech?

Senator Ted Kennedy wants to pass a resolution that would require all of Congress to sign on their support or opposition to this course, a stinging political pill to swallow for those worried about getting re-elected. Again, that would be symbolic, not anything with real punch behind it.

Withholding money for the war would work, and has been done before, but nobody really wants to do it in this war.

All that can be done is that the American people rise up and ignore Bush when he blames THEM for the war going badly, by saying things like, We will achieve victory in Iraq if the American people just have enough will to stick it out.

Look for the word "will" to be used as often as "sacrifice." And don't buy either one.

As I was updating this post, my son called and said that he was getting frustrated because, if it was true that the American people really did not want a surge, and every news source from Time to Newsweek (which he reads) maintained that it was not a good idea, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and most of the Pentagon was opposed, then why weren't the Democrats fighting harder to prevent it? "I'm getting frustrated with the Democrats," he said.

I explained that there wasn't much they could do, and I explained what they WERE doing. But he indicated to me that he would not mind if they howled in outrage until the cows came home. This is an active-duty service member who actually wants the Democrats to do whatever they can to stop this.

I say this to make it clear: THERE ARE ALL SORTS OF WAYS TO SUPPORT THE TROOPS, AND THEY DON'T ALL INVOLVE YELLOW RIBBONS AND ROBOTIC SUPPORT OF BAD POLICY.

Fight for the troops. Fight for them to be treated fairly and honestly. And let your representatives know they will be held accountable for their actions.

There isn't a whole lot else we can do, frankly. Just don't fall for the lies. Not again.


BUSH'S LAST STAND


But given that nothing in Iraq has gone according to plan, it seems more likely that it won't. That's why many in the military assume privately that a muscular-sounding surge now is chiefly designed to give Bush the political cover to execute a partial withdrawal on his own terms later.

…A retired colonel who served in Baghdad put it more bluntly, "We don't know whether this is a plan for victory or just to signal to Americans that we did our damnedest before pulling out."

There is one more scenario to consider: it may be that Bush won't pull out of Iraq as long as he is president. Whether it works or not, a surge of 18 to 24 months would carry Bush to the virtual end of his term. After that, Iraq becomes someone else's problem. Bush's real exit strategy in Iraq may just be to exit the presidency first.
--"What a Surge Really Means: Can a couple more divisions in Iraq really make a difference? Or is Bush's idea too little, too late?" Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine, January 15, 2007


At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush administration…the new law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works…since before the invasion…

Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in on the…chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives.
--"New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush," Chris Floyd, truthout.org, January 9, 2007. The original article reporting the new oil law was published in a British newspaper, the Independent, last week. So far I have seen nothing about it in the American mainstream media.

War Could Last Years, Commander Says
--Headline story by John F. Burns, New York Times, January 8, 2007
The article goes on to state that the new operational commander in Iraq thinks we may need to stay there for at least five more years. Five. More years.

Chaos Overran Iraq Plan in '06, Bush Team Says
--Headline story by David E. Sanger, Michael R. Gordon, and Jon F. Burns, New York Times, January 2, 2007
The article was the first to begin subtle finger-pointing at outgoing generals Casey and Abizaid, blaming them for failures in Iraq and setting up the media scenario for the new generals to come in and save the day. In truth, the generals were doing what they were commanded to do by the administration.

So it was when the British tried to rule Iraq by giving the country a king, Faisal ibn Husain, who had helped them in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks in World War I…

Sir Percy Cox put it, "The Iraqi government must be allowed to make mistakes and learn by them during this probationary period, provided that such mistakes are not of a nature to lead to disaster, and that British troops and officers are not forced to be instruments of misgovernment."

…At what point are Americans going to be seen as instruments of misgovernment? When does resentment of military occupation trump any good foreign troops can achieve? And how, as Sir Henry Dobbs wondered in the '20's, do we guard that our man is not seen as "a puppet king propped up by our bayonets?"

…When the military tried to appoint a British commander-in-chief of Iraqi forces, the colonial office vetoed it by saying it would run contrary to the goal of "disembarrassing ourselves of Iraq as soon as possible."

So we now have a new cast of characters and a change in strategy for dealing with not only an insurgency, but a civil war in which we risk fighting both sides at once. Unfortunately, a lot more people will have to die before we can disembarrass ourselves of this tragic failure.
--"A Classic Imperial Predicament," H.D. S. Greenway, Boston Globe, January 9, 2007


General George Custer was a man of towering ego and petty vanities who refused to listen to moderate voices that warned him of growing Indian unrest at Little Big Horn. He refused to listen to his own Indian scouts. He trusted in his own brilliance and arrogant sense of father-knows-best when he led a sadly outnumbered Cavalry unit into a massacre that was so overwhelming for United States forces that, to this day, the Battle of Little Big Horn is a term known to most Americans that smacks of the dangers of untrammeled ego in command.

Perhaps if, instead of the politically correct and polite terms like "surge" and "strategy," or the stirring patriotic calls to "sacrifice," the media would simply do us all a great favor if they would refer to this latest Bush ploy as the Battle of Little Big Bush.

People would get it right away. They would understand in one term what took me weeks of research and many hours of writing to get down.

This is not a troop "surge." It is an escalation that will be permanent as long as we've got the troops to supply, and Bush is, as we speak, requesting that the Army and Marines undergo a major expansion in forces, which should be ready to go about the time these exhausted troops are finally free to come home.

This is not a new "strategy." It is recycled old ideas that have been massive failures in the past, and what ideas are good ones--General Petraeus has some good ideas on counterinsurgency that he hopes to implement--are no longer practicable because we don't have the manpower to put the boots on the ground required, and as my Special Forces brigadier general of a brother-in-law made clear, even if we COULD put hundreds of thousands of special forces troops in place in a classic counterinsurgency war, it would take two generations to fully succeed.

This is Bush's Last Stand, and he is not doing it to stabilize the Iraqi government but to SECURE THE OIL FIELDS for Halliburton and others of its ilk. Let's be perfectly clear about that. Will we need the oil in the future? Quite possibly, but we've bungled the job so badly now that in order to TRULY secure it, we are going to need REAL sacrifice--a national draft, hundreds of billions more in treasure, tens of thousands more flag-draped coffins, and blind allegiance to the idiots who caused this problem in the first place.

This is Bush's Last Stand, and he is not doing it to promote democracy and freedom in the Middle East but to preserve his own miserable legacy and place in history and to position the Republican party in a place where, in the next presidential election, they can throw around grenade-words like "cut and run" and "defeat" and "surrender" in order to make themselves look all manly and macho while they frighten the American people with images of blood-eyed al Qaeda terrorists catching a plane in Baghdad for the U.S., and attacking kindergartens in small-town America.

He can say whatever he wants to, but what he will really be saying tonight is, stay the course. I'm sure Custer said much the same thing when wave after wave of Lakota Sioux came pouring over the Black Hills.

This is the Battle of Little Big Bush, and when he goes down, he's taking all the rest of us with him.

Rise up. Fight back. Pay attention. And don't be fooled again.