DETROIT -- The nation's emergency military call-up system is being tested. It's just a test, the Busheviks assure us. They have no intention of reviving the draft. This is just a test. Sure.
President George Bush is determined to send a surge of troops into Iraq. What his military commanders say about more troops is meaningless. Bush decides first, then his minions fall into line, fabricating facts to support whatever fantasy the Great Decider has conjured up.
The delusional Bush remains convinced more military action will bring "victory" and more troops will make him "successful" in Iraq. Bush -- like Lyndon Johnson before him -- is a self-anointed Carl von Clausewitz, in his twisted mind a superb military strategist who knows more than the generals.
The Washington Post reports, "The Bush administration is split over the idea of a surge in troops to Iraq, with White House officials aggressively promoting the concept over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."
Bush, whose own military career was largely spent AWOL -- blacked-out in bars in Texas and Alabama, and ducking drills and a required physical for pilots -- is now calling the shots and ignoring the commanders. Bush always trusts his "gut" over wise advice, facts and truth.
Bush is crazy enough and poised to order U.S. forces to square off with Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia. Those fighters, 60,000 strong, are now systematically killing and displacing Sunni residents of Baghdad.
A new Pentagon report notes the Shiite militia has replaced al-Qaeda as "the most dangerous accelerant of potentially self-sustaining sectarian violence in Iraq." A United Nations survey found 40,000 people are fleeing Iraq every month for Syria alone.
Bush thinks sending in more troops for a confrontation with the Mahdi militia would help stem the sectarian violence and prevent the cleansing of Baghdad's Sunni population. He wants to gamble that U.S. troops deployed into the streets of Sadr City, the Shiite stronghold in Baghdad, can forcefully extinguish the civil war.
Rep. Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat and the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, considers a troop surge far more soberly than trigger-finger Bush. Skelton told The New York Times, "Everything I've heard and everything I know to be true lead me to believe that this increase at best won't change a thing and at worst could exacerbate the situation even further."
Iraq is quickly fragmenting into a failed state that could ignite a regional conflict, drawing neighboring nations into a proxy war. The International Crisis Group, based in Brussels, offers a bleak assessment of Bush's experiment in nation-building: "Hollowed-out and fatally weakened, the Iraqi state today is prey to armed militias, sectarian forces and a political class that, by putting short-term personal benefit ahead of long-term national interests, is complicit in Iraq's tragic destruction."
Bush and the neocon crazies whose lies, arrogance and messianic madness brought us "Iraq's tragic destruction" are equally complicit, along with the other politicians and cheerleaders in the media who rooted them on.
The week between Christmas and New Year's Day presents many overworked and underpaid Americans a chance to relax, get together with families and friends, have a few gentle libations, chat and catch up on what everybody's been up to.
I certainly don't want to spoil the tranquility of such moments, but the tumultuous times we live in require reflection on serious life-and-death issues. Bush's war should be topic No. 1.
Make it into a parlor game. Let's have a show of hands. How many want their parents, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, cousins and friends to join the military and go to Iraq to fight in Bush's war? How many think Americans you don't know should continue to pour into Iraq and be placed in the crossfire of a civil war and the unrelenting sectarian violence the invasion and incompetent occupation have fostered?
"A lot has been sacrificed in Iraq, a lot has been invested in Iraq," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Associated Press last week. "But the president wouldn't ask for the continued sacrifice, the continued investment, if he did not believe, and in fact I believe as well, that we can in fact succeed and in fact that it's imperative we succeed."
Bush, Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney will sacrifice countless more Americans and Iraqis in their desperation to save face and salvage their eternally stained reputations. They lied their way into an unnecessary war that is now a hopeless fiasco. They are willing to see more Americans die trying to rescue their investment.
Legendary war correspondent Joseph Galloway says Bush's "move is 'doubling down,' a gambler's term for upping your bet when you've already lost a bundle."
Galloway says if Bush chooses the troop surge option, "it will be against the best advice of the American military commanders on the ground, the unanimous opposition of the service chiefs in the Pentagon and the most thoughtful military analysts in and out of uniform."
Let's have another show of hands at your holiday gathering. How many have confidence in Bush as a military strategist? How many want your children's future in his hands? How many think Bush is a madman incapable of recognizing and admitting his mistakes?
We are now spending $2 billion a week on the war, and next year the total could top $170 billion. Before the bloodshed is over, U.S. taxpayers may drop $1 trillion into Bush's hole. Working-class people whose payroll checks are taxed are paying inordinately for the war that is largely financed through deficit spending. Fifty million Americans have no health insurance, while we pay for state-sponsored coverage in Iraq.
Another show of hands. How many favor paying more taxes to pay for Bush's war out front rather than tacking the costs on the national Visa card? Would you rather see the government do more to reduce the cost of student loans for college or spend that money on Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq?
As Bush plots more violence, more and more of the former supporters of the war are renouncing it. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., is abandoning Bush as she prepares to make a run for the White House. After voting in 2002 to authorize Bush's attack on Iraq, Clinton is now backpedaling, telling NBC's "Today" show, "Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."
Hillary has long defended her vote in favor of he war, never apologizing for it. She just blamed Bush after things soured in Iraq, claiming the mistake was "the way the president used the authority."
One more show of hands. How many believe Hillary is just an opportunist, jumping off the war bandwagon to save her own political hide?
The great Irish writer Oscar Wilde once quipped, "As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it's looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."
I guess for Hillary Clinton, the war she long supported has reached a vulgar point.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 27 2006 |