So tonight our president is poised to announce his plans after painful weeks of “decider” mode: deploying 21,500 extra troops to Iraq, mostly into the cauldron of Baghdad. I suppose tonight he’ll lay out some ostensible reason or goal for putting that many more Americans in the middle of an Iraqi civil war, but I hold little hope we’ll get much beyond the same shopworn bullshit about standing up and sitting down.
Of course, it’s thought one reason for the escalation is to dismantle the Mahdi Army, lead by Muqtada al-Sadr. You know, the same guy Saddam Hussein’s executioners were cheering at the hanging supposedly administered by Iraq government. The strongman undoubtedly helps the meager Shiite government there hang on to power. That’s gotta put president Nouri al-Maliki in an odd spot – not to mention the troops sent over there. So are they risking their lives to take out one of the president of Iraq’s supporters? What exactly are we supposed to accomplish over there?
It’s not surprising that Bush, who claims to administer war plans based solely on Army needs and demands (but promptly canned his top general after he said escalation was a bad idea), has basically been reduced to bribing them into going along with his face-saving plans to escalate, dump the whole mess in his predecessors’ lap, and claim that he didn’t lose Iraq. It’s obvious what Bush is trying to do, but I repeat: what the hell else are we doing in Iraq?
UPDATE: So this is how billion dollar, life and death decisions are made: the “surge” was trumpeted by Bush in part to spite the Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group. For shame.
This article appears in 2006.