Surge Protector

Okay so the President has come out and said we need more troops sent into Baghdad. He is calling it a surge, which implies that it will be a short-lived increase, which it won’t be. The Democrats have come out against this intentionally misnamed “surge” and have been calling it an “escalation”. Escalation is the correct term for what the President and the media are calling for. Yet their own Presidential candidate was proposing an escalation of the War in Iraq during his run up to the Presidential election. When I would refer to Kerry’s plan as an escalation, and would instead argue for troop removal, I was met with all these altruistic reasons why we should send more troops. Again this is another example of the bullshit of partisanship. In other words, “Its okay when my guy suggests it but not when the other side does because they are just plain evil.” Unfortunately both sides have been and are wrong about sending more troops into Baghdad.
The President has been saying for years now that this war must be won. He is using terrifying rhetoric about the fate of world resting on the outcome of this war. He talks about how if we fail the forces of evil will haunt us forever. Evil and good make sense in children’s books and the Bible but not in intelligent debate. Killing 3000 innocent civilians or killing 650,000 innocent civilians, which is evil? If one is the other certainly is.
So here we have the President claiming that we cannot lose this war. If we do, basically, our existence as a nation is threatened. Lets just say that he believes what he says and, lets go a step further, actually is right. So we have established for the sake of argument that Bush truly wants to win the war. Fine. If Bush truly wants to win this war, it begs to ask, ‘Why isn’t he fighting it to win?” Generals told him, that in order to win this war and keep the peace, since it is easy to destroy stuff but hard to stop anarchy, we would need hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground. Yet he chose not to listen and now we have utter chaos in Iraq, which is leading to the civil war and disintegration of the country.
So if we are to believe that if we don’t win this war, when we don’t even know what that means, that our country is in danger of being wiped off the face of the map, then why isn’t he trying to “win”. Why isn’t he bringing in the Turks, Iranians and Syrians? If this war is so important for the future of our country then why the hell isn’t he sending 100,000 more troops to Baghdad. Instead he is sending in 20,000 of which maybe 7000 are combat troops.
Another question is why the use of the term “surge”. We all know now that the Right is very careful about the words they use and try to use words to change the debate. For instance, the estate tax, which affects a tiny group of the ultra rich families in this country, is now the “death tax”. Why, because poor people die too and they don’t want to be taxed. Dilation and Extraction abortion becomes “partial birth abortion”. Just image that whore of a women, because women who get abortions are all whores who need to punished by bearing a child, grunting, breathing and pushing in the delivery room. Suddenly the doctor says, “Oh here comes the head,” and the women saying all of a sudden “quick Doc, I changed my mind. Please chop off the baby’s head.”
So why surge? Because a surge is short and escalation reminds people of Vietnam and the lasts election showed that Americans want out of Iraq not more Iraq. Of course, escalating the war was right when John Kerry proposed it last Presidential election; of course he too chose not to use the term “escalation.” The Democrats all went along with it, for one, because they fell into the “anybody but Bush” crowd, and two, because those poor Iraqis need our help to form a country. Which was nothing short of a modern day “white man’s burden”.
Even though the American public wants out and Bush knew that his plan would be unpopular, he still is going ahead with it. This leads me to believe that he really thinks that he is doing the right thing. Of course, the cynical side of me says that he wants the Democrats to be the ones tarnished with the accusation that they lost the war and be able to say that at least he tried. Obviously the architects of the war, the Neo-Conservatives, will be able to claim that they suggested far more troops and the President didn’t listen to them, so then they can try to wipe their hands clean of the whole thing.
In the end though the US will leave Iraq. It may be able to find some face saving measure like having the Iraqi government to ask us to leave or it will start to blame the Iraqis for their problems as if those problems are completely unrelated to the fact that we blew up their country into little pieces. Either way Bush is escalating the war and/or, my biggest fear, he is ramping up for some confrontation with Iran (see my first post on Iran). We are truly in trouble. If we are lucky we will have Ann Coulter around to tell us how the Democrats are to blame for Iraq and how they hate Jesus.