Going Forward Wrongly

It is looking more and more like Bush is going to try and 'double down' in his effort to salvage his vision of a legacy in Iraq. St. John McCain is calling for more troops and so is Lieberman.
The calls for 40,000 thousand more troops in Iraq and $100 billion more to surge and 'win' is a most vicious pipe dream on the part of the neo-cons and Bush.

The problem in Iraq is a 500,000 man job and an additional 40,000 feet on the ground is just going to piss the Iraqis off. I guess it is human nature not to admit defeat but to think that we have any choice in what is going on in Iraq is delusional. There are 27 million Iraqis, and some 6 million of them in the Sunni Arab areas. 40,000 US troops is a drop in the bucket. Some of the insiders have now decided that the US should try to destroy the (Shiite) Mahdi Army. We might have had a chance and marginalizing them 3 years ago but since that time the Mahdi Army has grown and is now an urban social movement. It is almost impossible to destroy such a movement by conventional military means. If Bush takes this track we will see a real disaster compared to the last four years.

We have come to the point where all you can say is that we are now officially in an 'elective dictatorship". In spite of the overwhelming call for backing out of Iraq issued by the voters in November we are looking at just the opposite. We are currently spending $2 billion a week in Iraq according to recent estimates but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Both the Army and the Navy are saying they each need an addition $20 billion next year to fix the damage caused by the war and replace equipment and the Air Force is looking at a shortfall of $160 billion over the next 6 years. This is on top of the current $514 billion dollar defense budget. This is more spent on defense than the rest of the world combined. We now hear that Bush is going to ask Congress for an additional $100 billion early next year for Iraq. It is absolutely insane.

We are closing in on 3,000 American soldiers dead in Iraq and over 22,000 wounded. The illusion that there is a military way out of the quagmire is seen by the American public for the delusion that it is and they voted to end it. We are now about to see George Bush ignore the clear will of the people and continue to stay the course. I never wanted to live in an empire.