Surge In Iraq May Last Longer Than Originally Announced

According to David S. Cloud and Michael R. Gordon in the International Herald Tribune, Additional U.S. troops in Iraq may need to stay until 2008

... or beyond ...

The day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq has recommended that the heightened American troop levels in Iraq be extended through February 2008, military officials said.

That's what they are saying now. Watch what they say in February of 2008.

The confidential recommendation by the commander, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, reflects the military's new counterinsurgency doctrine, which puts a premium on sustained efforts to win over a wary population.

"Sustained?" Sustained all the way till almost a year from now? Such wordplay would make me laugh were it not so tragic. But there's nothing funny about this bloody extension of a monstrous war crime.

The last of the five additional combat brigades being sent to Iraq as part of what the White House calls a surge of force will not arrive and begin operations in Iraq until June.

The current schedule calls for American troop numbers in Iraq to begin declining by September unless additional units are sent and more are held over.

So let's get this straight. The troops of the surge won't all get there until June -- this is the slowest surge in history -- and our military's new counterinsurgency doctrine puts a premium on sustained efforts, so the slowest of the surge troops may have to sustain their efforts for a whole eight months!

... IF we can swing it:

Any extension of the troop buildup would add to the strain on army and marine forces that are already stressed from years of continuous deployments, and would leave fewer troops available to respond to unanticipated crises.
...
If the Bush administration did decide to extend the troop increase, the pressures on the army would become particularly acute in November, when several army combat brigades are scheduled to leave Iraq.

Decisions must be made soon, army officials say, to identify potential replacement units or extensions.

A Pentagon official said that if the surge was extended, the army would be forced by the end of the year to send back to Iraq units that have spent less than one year at home...

So there's the rub. Or one of 'em, anyway.

The big problem, of course, is that we don't belong in Iraq in the first place. Iraq had never attacked us; it never even posed a significant threat. The Iraqi people lived under a brutal dictator -- but so what? People in countries all over the world live under brutal dictators. Is the proper role of the United States to invade all these countries and overthrow their brutal dictators? Of course not. The irony alone would be insupportable, because so many of these brutal dictators are currently in power -- as was Saddam Hussein -- thanks to overt and/or clandestine support from the United States.

But as a propaganda ploy, the surge may be the best idea yet. Rather than talking about how the administration deliberately fabricated the "intelligence" and other lies it felt were necessary to start this war; rather than talking about the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent trying to sell these lies to the American people; rather than talking about the thousands of dead American troops and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians who would be alive today if not for the unprovoked invasion and the illegal occupation that followed; rather than talking about who set up the sectarian death squads that now range freely in Iraq, death squads established in a deliberate attempt to destabilize Iraqi society; rather than talking about the tens of thousands of innocent people who have been arrested, tortured, and in many cases killed -- since we supposedly rid Iraq of its brutal torturers; rather than talking about the long-term effects of depleted uranium, the Pentagon's favorite munition, which just happens to cause cancer and birth defects; rather than talking about the trillions of dollars worth of oil that lie under Iraq's hot, dry, and now radioactive sand, or of the oil law the Americans are trying to force on Iraq, which would give control of all that oil to the foreign energy companies; rather than talking about the companies that are making the most money from this war, and the people who connect those companies to the policy-making (and war-making) center of the US government; rather than all of this, rather than any of it, in most cases, the debate tends to swirl around questions such as how many additional troops constitute a proper "surge", and how many months a proper surge should last.

What we should be talking about, of course, is how to get the mass murderers out of the White House and into holes in the ground.

Have I mentioned guillotines lately?



They truly do not deserve to be IMPEACHed!