Time: Is the Surge Backfiring?

Is it backfiring? Of course not. Fred Kagan developped the plan and lied about the outcome. It's what neocons do. The idea was and is to create more chaos. Got to keep the Gulf States scared of strife overflowing into their lands. The US becomes the protector of last resort. Nothing is what it seems to average Joes in politics. Too bad the press plays along with the BS. An infantalized America is getting pretty tiring, you know?

Related
Why Walls 'Don't Work' in Baghdad
Regional players don't want the US to depart Iraq
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Tuesday, Apr. 24, 2007

Is the Surge Backfiring?

By Mark Kukis/Baghdad

You never get much sleep at a patrol base at night. In Ramadi, where Marines man several combat outposts amid the inner city, darkness often brings fear as Iraqi security forces come and go, leaving some Marines wondering whether they are among friends or enemies. In Ghazaliya, a violent neighborhood in western Baghdad with similar combat outposts, nearby gunfire cracks through the inky blackness outside seemingly every time you drift off. And in Diyala Province, where nine U.S. soldiers died Monday, troops stand watch on rooftops overlooking stretches of palm groves where they know insurgents dwell, waiting for the right moment to strike.

Increasingly across Iraq, U.S. forces are leaving the comfort and safety of their fortified mega-bases and establishing small combat outposts and patrol bases like the one insurgents struck outside Baquba that left 20 soldiers wounded as well. Some patrol bases are well protected with blast walls and large numbers of troops. Others are little more than abandoned houses that a few platoons circle with Humvees while hunkering down inside. As a reporter frequently embedded with U.S. forces, I've visited many such patrol bases, and the sense of vulnerability at them is all too palpable. The paratroopers tasked with controlling the volatile territory on the outskirts of Baquba knew they would face attacks from insurgents in the area as they stepped up their presence by manning such patrol bases. But they saw little choice, since the ongoing surge strategy calls for U.S. forces to abandon the old notion of return-to-base patrols in favor of living full time in deadly areas.

Word of yesterday's deadly assault in eastern Diyala Province spread quickly among U.S. troops as far away as the western city of Tikrit, where soldiers with the 82nd Airborne kept a close watch on reports of their comrades sent to the Baqubah area to deal with rising violence there. The strike was what U.S. soldiers call a complex attack, one involving elaborate planning to maximize casualties. Initial assessments suggest that first a suicide car bomber rammed a vehicle into the gates of a small U.S. patrol base outside Baquba in the same area where single car bomber attacked a patrol base last month. A second suicide car bomber apparently followed the first in yesterday's attack, however. And at the same time insurgents fired small arms and rocket propelled grenades, according to soldiers from the 82nd Airborne. In the end, the patrol base was all or mostly destroyed, with several soldiers dead beneath the rubble.

At least one other U.S. patrol base remains in the same area of the Diyala River valley as American troops struggle against insurgents who appear to be increasingly bent on turning the territory around Baquba into the most deadly front of the war in Iraq for U.S. forces. It remains to be seen whether the dozens of other combat outposts popping up around Iraq amid the surge will come to face similar attacks aimed at sending U.S. troops back into heavily fortified compounds and, in the hopes of insurgents, ultimately home to the United States in defeat.

Bush just lied in his press conference about Iraq; said our military commanders came up with the surge, in fact they opposed the surge, all of them

Tuesday, April 03, 2007
4/03/2007 10:38:00 AM ET

Bush just spoke to the nation, trying to convince the public to support his Iraq quagmire, and he claimed again that the surge, the escalation, was the idea of his commanders in the field, and he's just following their advice.

In fact, all of the Joint Chiefs, the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, ALL opposed the surge.

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, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intense debate.

And our commanders in the field opposed the surge, so Bush fired them and replaced them with someone who would rubber stamp his surge plan.

In devising his new strategy, Bush again turned to the neoconservatives. The so-called surge strategy is the brainchild of Frederick Kagan, a military historian at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute who has never been to Iraq. And once again, President Bush dismissed the views of his military advisers. General George Casey and General John Abizaid, the commanders in the field, doubted that additional troops would make any difference in Iraq. They were replaced by surge advocates, including Lieutenant General David Petraeus, now the top commander in Iraq.

And remember, it was just a few months ago, that the commanders on the ground were SO opposed to the surge that Bush came out and said, for the first time, that he WOULDN'T listen to commanders on the ground anymore.

This all matters because once again Bush is lying to the American people in order to justify yet another failed extreme policy. He has lied about this war from the beginning, and he and his administration have lied about so many issue that it's impossible to trust anything they say. Bush lies. He doesn't trust the American people to know the truth. He doesn't have the courage or maturity to take responsibility for his own actions, so he blames the generals - you see, it's THEIR idea, not his, it's THEIR fault, not his. "Who me?" Bush can't ever be blamed for this infernal mess because he's just a bystander, you understand. Only problem? It's all one big lie.

The man is a ten year old child. It's time to take away the car keys.

by John Aravosis (DC)

Discuss this post here: Comment s (192)

The triumph of death

© Steve Bell 2006

steve.bell@guardian.co.uk

Cartoon: Steve Bell on George Bush's speech on Iraq.

Gallup: Only 36% Favor 'Surge' Idea

By E&P Staff

Published: January 09, 2007 7:40 AM ET

NEW YORK When President Bush speaks to the nation tomorrow night, he will announce plans for a "surge" or escalation in the number of American troops in Iraq, according to most reports.
But a new Gallup poll, taken over the past four days, finds that "the American public in general opposes the concept of an increase in troops in Iraq."

Asked directly about the idea, 36% back it and 61% oppose. Of that, only 18% "strongly" support the idea.

Gallup also notes that the same poll shows that 54% want a complete pullout within 12 months.

It mentions other polls which shown that "when given a choice between a set of alternative ways of handling the troop situation in Iraq, only about 10% of Americans opt for the alternative of increasing troops. The rest opt for withdrawal of troops either immediately, within a 12-month timeframe, or by taking as much time as needed."

Almost half say that the U.S. can not meets its goals in Iraq no matter the number of troops.

Time to "draw a line in the sand" on Iraq

Jan 8, 2006

There are so many examples of why we are at a critical time in Iraq right now that I won’t list them all here – but certainly any of my prior diaries (or many of the others) over the past few months will give many examples of the rapidly deteriorating situation. So why is this time, RIGHT NOW, a time where a line needs to be drawn in the sand with respect to Iraq?

Simply put - this may be the last opportunity overall for a serious discussion of redeployment and withdrawal before Bush, McCain, Lieberman, the American Enterprise Institute and the suddenly regrouped neocons push this into not only a failed occupation in the midst of a bloody civil war (bordering on genocide) but also a situation where we will be unable to safely withdraw our troops and a situation of many more years stuck in this disaster.

As word leaks out about the proposed escalation plan, more and more information is becoming available that shows the true intentions of those who are so willing to send other people and their families off to kill and die for lies and greed. And even thought we here thought it all along, the intentions are not "short term" or even feasible – but rather, more pie in the sky rhetoric that will only prolong the death and destruction of Iraqis and threaten to drag the entire Middle East down with it.

Last week, Reid and Pelosi sent a strongly worded letter to Bush opposing the escalation. While I was a bit skeptical that there was not much more that would be done, Pelosi surprised me with her strong words yesterday as well. Additionally, the good folks at ThinkProgress are keeping tally of the sane republicans who are coming out against this disastrous idea.

Of course, lost in the shuffle here are the words of those who are truly pushing for endless war in the guise of "defeating the terrorists" and "winning in Iraq". In a post at The Nation, Ari Berman talks about the "real plans" of the AEI, as well as McCain and Lieberman:

An event at AEI yesteday brought together the intellectual progenitors of escalation: military historian Fred Kagan, retired General Jack Keane and Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman. The focus was not on how to clean up the neocons mess, but on how to deepen it.

Berman cited McCain’s comments from Sunday’s LA Times article that discusses McCain’s, AEI military analyst Frederick Kagan and retired General Jack Keane’s comments to the AEI:

A strategy advocated by McCain and Keane, who has advised Bush on Iraq policy, calls for about 30,000 additional troops who would remain in Iraq from 18 months to two years. About 140,000 U.S. troops are now in Iraq.

The proposal has heavily influenced administration thinking, and it has strong advocates within the Pentagon and White House, setting up tension between those advocating a broad troop buildup and those supporting a more limited increase.

"The worst of all worlds would be a short, small surge of U.S. forces," McCain said at a forum on the final version of the plan, developed by Keane and Frederick Kagan, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. "This troop surge [must be] significant and sustained; otherwise, don't do it."

---snip---

"The enemy always expects us to surge and leave," said Kagan, a former faculty member at the U.S. Military Academy. "If we surge for three or six months and then pull our forces back, the enemy will be right there waiting."

For the record, I hardly think that there is a way that they will revert into the "don’t do it" camp. And McCain’s comments were made before "a packed room" at the AEI. Of course, Kagan’s remarks are strikingly similar to the ones that I made both here and at RedState, but alas, he gets paid the big bucks and I am stuck putting numbers in boxes.

But there is so much more than these comments. There is "bipartisan" Lieberman’s comments:

"The battlefield is in Baghdad and Al-Anbar, not in Washington," Lieberman said. "We need to support the President as he goes forward."

Um, Joe - WE don’t need to support the president. WE (in fact nearly 90% of "us") are against this terrible idea with little thought to anything other than "yeah, send more troops".

There is the recent NY Times article where the new US Commander in Iraq Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno indicates the following about how long we may be in Iraq for:

The new American operational commander in Iraq said Sunday that even with the additional American troops likely to be deployed in Baghdad under President Bush’s new war strategy it might take another "two or three years" for American and Iraqi forces to gain the upper hand in the war.

There is the LA Times article (linked above) indicating that an alternative to the immediate escalation would be a longer term escalation:

Although the most likely scenario includes an increase of 20,000 troops, another option is a gradual increase of forces, with perhaps a portion of new forces sent into Iraq while other brigades stayed in the U.S. or Kuwait as backup.

There is the additional $100 billion that is going to be requested by Bush:

The White House is working on its largest-ever appeal for more war funds - a record $100 billion, at least. It will be submitted along with Bush's Feb. 5 budget.

While it is unclear now if this will be PART of the budget or IN ADDITION to the budget – this hits on a theme that I mentioned last week. No funding for Iraq outside of the normal budget process. This is a more palatable way to draw a line with respect to "blank checks" and "emergency" requests than it is to just stop funding the occupation altogether. Although, that being said, I will say that I am getting more and more to the point where the funding not only should be limited to the budget process, but there should be specific monies for certain items and all other "general appropriations" should not be passed in the budget.

The funding should be done with an eye to funding only those items that will go towards equipment and proper gear for the troops, international humanitarian efforts to stop the genocide, and a definitive redeployment plan – with or without timeframes. I will say that we need more of the rhetoric that we are hearing from Speaker Pelosi regarding the continued funding of this debacle.

But it is clear what is going on now. There is a major battle going on – and by fighting the "escalation/no escalation" or the "surge/no surge" battle – we are missing the larger picture. It is time to talk seriously about getting out now, or it will be too late. The escalation itself, whether it is "short term" or for two years isn’t the issue. It is the repercussions of the escalation and the impact that it will have on Iraqis, our troops, the surrounding countries and the future direction of this country.

Stopping the escalation is part of the bigger picture – this is the time to say, "enough, we need to talk about getting out". Those in favor of escalation are in favor of perpetual war. We need to not only stop this but also put withdrawal and international humanitarian efforts back in the forefront.

We are running out of time, and we can’t let the "escalate/do not escalate" distract us from the real issue.

We need to get our troops out of there.

The Cost of a Surge

by Gordon Adams

01.04.2007

The president is widely expected to soon announce a plan for Iraq that hinges on sending more U.S. military forces to Iraq, above and beyond the 140,000 currently in that country. And while there has been some bipartisan cheerleading for such a prospect, there has been less discussion of where the troops for this famous surge would come from, what it would cost, or how it would further unravel a national-security, budget-planning process that has served the nation well since the Second World War.

Budgeting for Iraq and the so-called Global War on Terror (or GWOT), is already out of control. In large part because of its “emergency” status, the nation, and even Congress, does not know what the funding for this war covers or how it has been spent. It is virtually impossible for Congress or the American people to track Iraq spending.

The Bush Administration has demonstrated that it vastly prefers to fund Iraq as an “emergency”, allowing it to sidestep the kind of detailed justification and reporting that Congress seeks in the regular budget process and has started to request on Iraq. A decision to “surge” forces this winter would only exacerbate the problem, since it will be coming long after the Pentagon has already put the next “emergency” budget request together.

Demands and Recommendations Rebuffed

The December 2006 Iraq Study Group report urged the administration to return to normal budget procedures: “costs for the war in Iraq should be included in the president’s annual budget request starting in 2008.” The White House has made no response.

Later in December Congress again urged this change. In a letter, Senate Budget Committee Chair Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) and his House counterpart Representative John Spratt (D-SC), along with Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), asked the president to “include in [his] budget the best possible projection of war costs beyond 2008, and to specify war costs with the same level of detail as items in the regular budget.”

There is no indication the president, or the Pentagon, will agree to this request, which will in all likelihood lead to a continuation of the dance we have grown familiar with: forces go into Iraq; they are not budgeted in advance; an “emergency” budget is put together to cover them and shipped to the Congress on a “fast track”, leading to little scrutiny and yet more funding.

The opacity of Iraq and GWOT spending has increasingly been the focus of concern. Last year, Congress, led by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Gregg, asked the Pentagon to change its budget practices and submit Iraq budget requests as part of the regular defense budget, providing equally detailed justification for the funding. The White House chose to interpret this legislation as inconsistent with the president’s constitutional authority.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has committed more than $507 billion to these struggles, three quarters of it for operations in Iraq, 91 percent of it for the Pentagon and over 90 percent as “emergency” funding. In all likelihood, the White House in February will request another $100 billion in emergency funding, as well as a roughly $50 billion down payment for the same “emergency” in the next fiscal year.

If Congress approves all of these requests, the GWOT will be at least as costly as any other war in American history, save World War II, when more than 12 million at a time served in the U.S. military. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, very conservatively, that the United States could spend another $320 billion over the next nine years in Iraq alone, putting the total war costs over $1 trillion.

If U.S. deployments do not decline, these costs could rise significantly. The annual trajectory for GWOT spending is ever upwards, from $31.4 billion in 2001-02 to a possible $170 billion for 2007 alone. To tether these astronomical figures closer to the ground, this fiscal year we are likely to spend $14 billion a month on the GWOT, or $3.3 billion a week. Put another way, emergency money for the GWOT will consist of roughly a quarter of all the funds the Pentagon will receive for the current fiscal year.

Transparency, Interrupted

There are serious issues of good government, accountable budgeting and spending control buried in this pile of dollars. When the budgets for Iraq and GWOT are put together in the Pentagon, they consist of “lump sums” for categories of spending, not detailed budgets for specific programs or requirements. For example, the Army discloses what it is requesting for “operations and maintenance”, but does not detail the funding for specific provisions, supplies, spares, or logistics. Nor does the Pentagon distinguish between the uses of these emergency funds and the regular budget funds for non-Iraq activities. Congress has been asked to take on faith that all of these funds are needed, that they are all dedicated to Iraq and the GWOT, and that other regular budget funds are not being siphoned into the war.

When the Iraq and GWOT budgets come to the Congress, the accompanying justification is thin and the emergency designation means that only one set of committees—the appropriators—get to look at it. The Budget and Armed Services Committees don’t get to scrutinize the funding, unlike the normal defense budget.

These requests have also frequently included funding for items that are questionably linked to Iraq and GWOT needs and, in any case, are certainly not urgent, such as the long-term transformation of the Army, or helicopters that will take two or three years to deliver. The forthcoming GWOT emergency request is rumored to include funding for the military’s new F-35 fighter.

And once funds for Iraq and the GWOT are appropriated, there is little reporting back to the Congress on how the funds have been actually been spent. Repeated legislation requiring detailed reporting has not been followed by the Defense Department. It argues that because so much of the funding is mixed with regular budget funds for operations, maintenance, etc., that it simply cannot sort it out by emergency funds or by particular operations.

Meanwhile, the State Department reports to Congress the type of program that funds its diplomatic and foreign assistance budget, but provides no reporting on the actual execution of programs and projects.

And because it is budgeting for the war six months at a time (by now there are usually two emergency requests a year), the Defense Department has done no forecasting of what the Iraq War and the GWOT are likely to cost in the future. It says the war is unpredictable, so they cannot make a forecast, leaving it up to Congress’ Budget Office to make its own estimates without any DOD input.

This rolling approach to funding the war every six months makes a clear break with past wartime practices. Historically, even wartime budgets have been put through the normal budget process in the Pentagon within a year or two of the start of combat. Today we are entering the seventh year of this unusual budget process.

Over the past six years, this practice has undermined both the administration’s budget-planning system and the normal scrutiny and control Congress has given to the defense and foreign policy budgets. The budgetary consequence is real: projections of future deficits are meaningless, because Iraq costs are not forecast into the future as part of the regular budget and actual spending is counted only after the fact. The national security consequence is equally serious: neither the Congress nor the American people have a clear view of how much the war actually costs, how we are spending the funds or how much it is likely to cost in the future. The nation’s fiscal—and therefore security—health is at stake.

Gordon Adams is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. From 1993-97, he was associate director for National Security and International Affairs at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

Lieberman, Bush and the Generals: The PR campaign around the troop "surge" in Iraq

Submitted by Conor Kenny on Wed, 01/03/2007 - 13:19.

President Bush is expected to make an announcement soon about his plan for Iraq, but a PR war has been raging for several weeks to prepare the ground for a "surge" in troop levels for Baghdad and Iraq. Bush and surrogates Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) have been busy pushing back hard against senior generals who oppose the surge and are concerned about an escalation in the war without a clear short-term objective.

It all started when General John P. Abizaid testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on November 15 that he opposed the "surge" strategy: "I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem. I believe that the troop levels need to stay where they are." The Washington Post reported on December 21 that "other generals have been equally resistant in public and private comments... The uniformed leadership has opposed sending additional forces without a clear mission, seeing the idea as ill-formed and driven by a desire in the White House to do something different even without a defined purpose."

A month later, Abizaid announced his retirement. As the longest-serving commander of the U.S. Central Command (who extended his service at the request of then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld), his retirement had been expected, so it is unclear if he was forced out as a result of his statement of opposition to the surge. Since his testimony, however, Abizaid has refused to answer questions about his position on troop levels and said his retirement "has nothing to do with dissatisfaction."

The Decider Decides

President Bush, for his part, has recanted his longstanding position of relying on the opinions of his generals to determine troop levels. As recently as July 2006, he said, "General Casey will make the decisions as to how many troops we have there... He'll decide how best to achieve victory and the troop levels necessary to do so. I've spent a lot of time talking to him about troop levels. And I've told him this: I said, 'You decide, General.'"

Since Abizaid and Casey let their opposition to the surge be known, however, Bush reversed his position. He refused to answer a reporter's question about whether he will rely on his generals in late December and a "senior aide" later told the Washington Post: "He's never left the decision to commanders... He is the commander in chief. But he has said he will listen to those commanders when making these decisions. That hasn't changed."

On December 21, newly installed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates held a photo-op breakfast with U.S. soldiers in Iraq in which every one told him they supported increased troop levels in Iraq. This was in stark contrast to a December poll of active duty military soldiers (2/3 of which had served in Iraq or Afghanistan) by Military Times that found 39 percent think there should be the same, fewer or no troops at all in Iraq, while 38 percent think there should be more. (Hat tip: Steve Benen.)

Finally, on December 24, a "defense official" told the Los Angeles Times that the top U.S. military commanders in Iraq, including Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., had now decided to recommend a troop surge.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who recently hired former Republican and Christian Coalition spokesman Marshall Wittmann as his communications director, attempted to seal the deal in a December 29 Washington Post op-ed that aimed to make the opinions of the generals irrelevant:

"In Baghdad and Ramadi, I found that it was the American colonels, even more than the generals, who were asking for more troops. In both places these soldiers showed a strong commitment to the cause of stopping the extremists. One colonel followed me out of the meeting with our military leaders in Ramadi and said with great emotion, 'Sir, I regret that I did not have the chance to speak in the meeting, but I want you to know on behalf of the soldiers in my unit and myself that we believe in why we are fighting here and we want to finish this fight. We know we can win it.' "

Whether Lieberman's recent hire has finally cemented his place within the Bush administration's Iraq PR shop is up to debate, but the message from this series of events is clear: If you're a general, it's best not to disagree with the decider.

For more information and continued updates on the politics of the troop surge, see the SourceWatch page on the "McCain doctrine" and related coverage on Congresspedia.

Conor Kenny's blog

Topics: Iraq | U.S. Congress | rhetoric | public relations

Bush 'to reveal Iraq troop boost'

Last Updated: Tuesday, 2 January 2007, 05:34 GMT

By Justin Webb BBC News, Washington Mr Bush has come under pressure to change his strategy on Iraq US President George W Bush intends to reveal a new Iirraq strategy within days, the BBC has learnt. The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces. The move comes with figures from Iraqi ministries suggesting that deaths among civilians are at record highs. The US president arrived back in Washington on Monday after a week-long holiday at his ranch in Texas. The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week. Its central theme will be sacrifice. The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers. The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces. The proposal, if it comes, will be highly controversial. Already one senior Republican senator has called it Alice in Wonderland. The need to find some way of pacifying Iraq has been underlined by statistics revealed by various ministries in the Iraqi government, suggesting that well over 1,000 civilians a month are dying.

Cannon fodder at Christmas time

Thursday, December 21, 2006

By Gabriele Zamparini

Santa Claus Bush is preparing to deliver his special Christmas’ gift: “We do need to increase our troops”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon unanimously disagreed but hey, do you want to question the Clown in Chief who hid into the Texas National Guard (and even there he was an AWOL) to avoid to fight in the Vietnam war? [That’s probably the only good thing this scam has done in all his life, at least he didn’t kill anybody, THEN!]

Even war criminal Powell – the clown of the UN show just before the invasion – “said the U.S. Army is ‘about broken’ from the Iraq conflict and cast doubt on whether the military could or should boost the number of troops in the country. ‘There really are no additional troops'’ to send, Powell said on CBS's ‘Face the Nation’ program. ‘The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they are being asked to perform’."

But the propaganda machine is working full time.

On Thursday he [Defense Secretary Robert Gates] had breakfast with ordinary soldiers to sound out their views on troop levels, a timeline for training Iraqis, sectarian leanings in the Iraqi security forces and the "caliber and discipline" of Iraqi soldiers and their military leaders.

"Sir, I think we need to just keep doing what we're doing," Specialist Jason Glenn told Gates. "I really think we need more troops here. With more presence on the ground, more troops might hold them (the insurgents) off long enough to where we can get the Iraqi army trained up."

No soldier present said U.S. forces should be brought home, and none said current troop levels were adequate, as some commanders have argued.

A young US soldier’s mother recently wrote: “Two weeks ago he called by satellite phone, awakening Amy and me in the dead of the night. Machine gun fire was all around him, the sound of war filling our ears and hearts with grief and fear of loss. (…) He says that this war cannot be won! He has no faith in the politicians who sent him there.”

In Basra, the greatest liar since the times of Pinocchio met the young British troops he has sent to kill and torture people nothing had done to them and their country. Once again the butcher of London brainwashed the youth “Our country and countries like it are having to rediscover what it means to fight for what we believe in. All over the world the same struggle is going on and if we don't stand up and fight for the people of tolerance and moderation who want to live together, whatever their fate, then the people of hatred and sectarianism will triumph."

We must take much more care of our youth and not allow this gang of pedophiles to abuse and send them to foreign countries as cannon fodder. Those who have their sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan should read A letter to an American G.I. written by an Iraqi woman. This letter would be the most important Christmas gift for your children. Send it to them!

Would you send your relative to Iraq? Rep. asks

Would you send your relative to Iraq? Wu asks

War - The Oregon delegation's tenor previews what the president faces with a new Congress

Saturday, December 23, 2006

JEFF KOSSEFF

The Oregonian

WASHINGTON -- As Rep. David Wu visited wounded soldiers in the National Naval Medical Center this week, he thought about President Bush considering a move to send more troops to Iraq.

Wu fears the White House will quietly roll out the "temporary surge" over the holidays, as if it were a company marketing a new product.

"We need to focus on whether we would choose to send our own son or daughter, our own wife or our own husband off for a temporary surge in Iraq," said Wu, D-Ore. "If we wouldn't do that, then should we permit this administration to roll out a potential product like that?"

Most of the Democrat-dominated Oregon congressional delegation is adamantly opposed to a temporary increase in troops in Iraq. Instead, they want to reduce the U.S. presence in the region and improve diplomacy.

Their opposition to Bush's Iraq policy provides a glimpse of what the White House must contend with next month, when Democrats take control of Congress.

And Bush can no longer count on Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith to support escalating the Iraq war. Smith, who voted to send troops to Iraq and was a firm supporter of the war, said Friday that he opposes a troop surge: "I believe it's too little and too late for that."

All five Democratic Oregon members of Congress voted against using force in Iraq four years ago. Yet Democrats have had little impact on war policy.

Next month, their views will matter more. In a news conference Wednesday, Bush said he will wait to hear from new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the military and diplomats before deciding whether to send more troops to Iraq.

"We'll listen to ideas from every quarter. We'll change our strategy and tactics to meet the realities on the ground," Bush said.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said Bush should start reducing troop levels.

"You've got to start bringing some of our people home in order to send a message that the Iraqis must make tough choices," Wyden said.

"They're not going to do it as long as we still convey that this is an indefinite, open-ended commitment."

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said the factions have been fighting for more than 1,400 years and a temporary surge in troops won't solve that problem.

"Bush seems determined to provide the illusion of a major change in strategy while he's following the same delusional course," DeFazio said.

The United States should begin scaling back by bringing home National Guard and reserves, said Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore.

"I don't know how anybody can talk to our personnel over the last three years and not get a sense of the pain and the frustration," Blumenauer said.

The United States, Blumenauer said, must also begin having discussions with countries such as Iran and Syria.

"You have to talk to some of the people who have influence in the region, even if you don't like them," Blumenauer said.

DeFazio said he hopes Democrats will exert more influence over Iraq policy, but he noted that fewer than 110 House members last year co-sponsored a resolution to withdraw troops from Iraq.

Hearings possible

Although Bush is commander-in-chief, Congress may increase pressure by conducting aggressive oversight hearings.

"The Senate just hasn't done the kind of detailed, focused oversight on the issues surrounding this," Wyden said.

The Oregon delegation's two Republicans -- Smith and Rep. Greg Walden -- voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq.

Smith gained national attention this month for his speech criticizing Bush's handling of Iraq, calling the war "absurd."

When asked about Smith's speech, DeFazio said that it was obvious four years ago that Bush was intent on invading Iraq regardless of whether the country harbored weapons of mass destruction. "It's pretty easy to oppose the war now when those of us who spoke out against the war, went to the same classified briefings as every other member of Congress, saw through the charade and the facade," DeFazio said.

Many Oregon Democrats have echoed similar sentiments about Smith's speech, noting he is up for re-election in 2008. Smith dismisses the criticism as "their job."

"To me, this is not about politics," Smith said. "This is about life and death and war and peace and the future security of our country."

Smith said he will continue exerting pressure through private contacts with the White House.

"Obviously they're very mindful of me right now," Smith said. He declined to say whether he has spoken with President Bush about his speech.

Smith wouldn't comment on specific proposals without first seeing the details. He indicated he would not support an immediate and complete withdrawal from Iraq.

"I'm calling for a repositioning of troops in Iraq," Smith said. "I think we still have a very real interest in taking on the jihadists coming across the borders from Iran, Syria and some from Saudi Arabia."

Walden couldn't be reached this week. In a written statement issued Dec. 6 after the Iraq study group report, he supported a change in strategy to pursue diplomacy.

"It is clear that mistakes have been made since the invasion, not least our assessment of the Iraqis' capacity to establish a stable, democratic society after 30 years of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship," Walden said.

Jeff Kosseff: 503-294-7605; jeff.kosseff@newhouse.com

Flurry of Calls About Draft, and a Day of Denials

December 23, 2006

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 — As the de facto media contact for the Selective Service System, Dick Flahavan is the Maytag repairman of government press people. With the military draft out of business since 1973, the Selective Service just doesn’t get a lot of calls these days.

But by midday Friday, Mr. Flahavan’s office had fielded dozens of inquiries, not just from reporters but from some anxious parents as well, all with some variation of the same urgent question: Are you reinstituting the draft?

So adamant was the denial that Mr. Flahavan, a bit beleaguered, had his staff members post an unplanned update Friday morning at the top of Selective Service’s Web site: “No Draft on Horizon!”

What prompted all this was a Hearst wire service article noting that the Selective Service was making plans for a “mock” draft exercise that would use computerized models to determine how, if necessary, the government would get some 100,000 young adults to report to their local draft boards.

The mock computer exercise, last carried out in 1998, is strictly routine, Selective Service officials said, and it will not actually be run until 2009 — if at all. The exercise has been scheduled several times in the last few years, only to be scuttled each time because of budget and staffing problems, and Mr. Flahavan said he would not be surprised if it was canceled this time around, too.

No matter. With President Bush saying that he wants to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, the military strained near the breaking point and the secretary of veterans affairs suggesting publicly this week that a reconstituted draft could “benefit” the country, even the notion of a mock exercise seemed to strike a nerve.

--MORE--

Napoleon in the White House

December 20, 2006

by Justin Raimondo

The standard right-wing myth when it comes to Vietnam is that "the politicians" sold out the military and lost a war that could have been won. Civilian interference with the strategy and tactics employed by military professionals led to U.S withdrawal from Vietnam, which was not a defeat so much as a victory aborted by subversives on the home front. Or so the story goes.
While this idea is refuted by the facts – it wasn't for nothing that military experts of the time warned against getting involved in a war on the Asian landmass – at least it represents an attempt to make a rational argument, which is that the conduct of a war is best left to the professionals. In our post-9/11 Bizarro World reality, however, that stance has been completely inverted. Instead of abhorring civilian interference in the military, the neocons are emphatically in favor of it. They emphasized from the very beginning of the Iraq debate that the civilians knew best, and that the generals – by casting doubts on the White House's rosy scenario – were interfering with policymaking decisions.

When senior military figures, both active and retired, began to voice reservations about the wisdom of invading and occupying Iraq, the neocons raised a hue and cry about the need to maintain civilian control of the military. How dare these generals meddle in politics! Get them back to their barracks and out of the public square! One of their number even wrote an entire book making the case for presidential direction of wartime military strategy, citing as models the neocon holy trinity: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill.

President Bush read the book over his 2002 summer vacation, and from all indications he has taken it to heart. In spite of what the Washington Post describes as the "unanimous" opinion of the joint chiefs of staff, Bush is determined to inject a "surge" of troops into Iraq to stabilize – and perhaps save – what the Baker-Hamilton report [.pdf] characterized as a "grave and deteriorating" situation:


"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, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intense debate."

When our president looks in the mirror, whom does he see? Lincoln? FDR? Churchill? Napoleon is more like it. Our expedition to Iraq bears a striking resemblance to the Little Corporal's march on Russia – or, perhaps, Hitler's version of the same mistake. Both were calamitous for the invaders, bringing to mind newly sworn-in Defense Secretary Robert Gates' testimony in front of a Senate committee:


"As the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come."

However one defines it, our mission in Iraq is already a clear failure: the question is, will we let this calamity morph into a cataclysm of regional and even global scope, or will we succeed in isolating and containing the disaster?

There are degrees of calamity, and the one about to be inflicted on us by our Napoleon in the White House is worse than it has to be. There is no way to avoid the consequences of having invaded Iraq in the first place: the breakup of the Iraqi state, the rising influence of Iran, the civil war and horrific loss of life. There is, however, an opportunity to minimize our losses and those of the long-suffering Iraqi people, and that is by minimizing our troop presence rather than increasing it.

However, when it comes to our deluded leaders, who see themselves as world-historical figures, no price is too high to pay for their legacy as conquering heroes. They will see their vision of the world confirmed even if it leads to our utter ruination. If the military is breaking, the people are rebelling, and the country is sliding into bankruptcy, then that's a small price to pay for fulfilling our role as the supreme arbiter of world affairs – isn't it? The direr the consequences, the more the neocons see their own struggle as a heroic endeavor undertaken against overwhelming odds. In the end, it isn't about American interests, or the future of the Middle East – it's all about them, and their rotten place in history.

Next to these grandiose pretensions, however, the everyday reality of our policy on the ground in Iraq underscores the sheer corruption at the heart of our mission. A perfect example: the other day an Iranian-American, Ayham Samarrai – a former minister of electricity charged with absconding with $1.5 billion in Iraqi government funds – was broken out of an Iraqi jail:
"According to Judge Radhi Radhi, Iraq's top anticorruption official, two GMC vehicles belonging to an American security company arrived at the Samarrai's jailhouse Sunday afternoon, intimidated the police officers guarding the site and took the suspect away without firing a shot."
Whatever tawdry corruption underlies this incident – and who knows what kind of cover-up is being attempted in this case? – it underscores the harsh reality of Iraq's ongoing slide into Hobbesian anarchy. The lawlessness that has overcome Iraq and its fledgling government has its source not in the insurgency – which is limited to the Sunni Triangle – and not in the Shi'ite militias (which do keep a kind of order, albeit a bloodstained, sectarian one) – but in the Americans, who run the country as if it were a conquered province. Too bad for them it doesn't want to stay conquered…

Make no mistake about it: a "surge" in troop numbers and a correspondingly more aggressive stance will only exacerbate the crisis and increase the force of the "blowback" effect. There is only one rational way forward, and that is to put this disaster behind us. The U.S. must begin an orderly yet rapid retreat from an increasingly untenable position. We are fast approaching a "Saigon moment," when a spectacular display of our vulnerability – like the 1983 destruction of the Beirut barracks, in which 241 Marines were killed by a suicide bomber – signals the utter futility of continuing this wrongheaded war. The so-called Green Zone sits smack dab in the middle of war-torn Baghdad as a symbol of America's ostensible invincibility and undoubted imperial arrogance: can a more inviting target be imagined?

Before some singular disaster further erodes America's prestige around the world, and our looming defeat becomes an undeniable reality, let's get out while the getting is good.

The Urge to Surge

POLITICS-US:

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 20 (IPS) - As official Washington breaks for the two-week Christmas-New Year's hiatus, it knows that the number one issue it will face on its return in early January is the White House's apparent "urge to surge" as many as 50,000 new troops into Iraq for up to two years in a last-ditch effort to claim what President George W. Bush insists on calling "victory".

The plan, which was presented to Bush last week in a meeting with five national defence specialists, two associates of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is designed to focus U.S. military efforts on providing "security" for average Iraqi citizens against both the Sunni insurgency and Shia militias that have, in the report's words, made Baghdad the "centre of gravity of this conflict".

Drafted hastily -- it currently exists only as a Power Point presentation -- by its two main authors, AEI fellow Frederick Kagan and the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Gen. Jack Keane, as an alternative to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, it is called "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq".

The title apparently chosen deliberately to counter one of the ISG's core messages: that there is "no magic bullet" -- least of all a military one -- that can save what most analysts here believe is the biggest U.S. foreign policy debacle since at least the Vietnam War.

"Alone among proposals for Iraq, the new Keane-Kagan strategy has a chance to succeed," declared this week's Weekly Standard, which, like the AEI fellows involved in the "Victory" project, was a major champion for going to war in Iraq.

Indeed, the provenance of the plan -- aside from Keane and two other senior retired military officers, a majority its 17 contributors are AEI fellows -- has fed suspicions that it represents one final effort by neo-conservatives to persuade the president that, by "doubling down" on his gamble on Iraq, he can still leave the table a winner and "transform" the entire Middle East.

While Bush has not explicitly endorsed the concept, he noted at his year-end White House press conference Wednesday that he was open to the idea. Vice President Dick Cheney's office, which is closely tied to AEI, is known to support it strongly.

"According to all the talk in Washington, the 'plan' whipped up by AEI's Fred Kagan is likely to be mostly implemented by President Bush when he stops stalling about his policy in Iraq," according to Pat Lang, the former chief Middle East analyst at the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency, who has warned that, if implemented, it would likely lead to "Stalingrad on the Tigris".

"A 'surge' of the size possible under current constraints on U.S. forces will not turn the tide in the guerrilla war," warned Lang, who noted, along with many other experts in the past month, that the reinforcement of thousands of U.S. troops in Baghdad since last summer had actually increased the violence there.

"Those who believe still more troops will bring 'victory' are living in a dangerous dream world and need to wake up," he added, conceding, however, that it may appeal to Bush for that very reason. "He wants to redeem his 'freedom agenda,' restore momentum to his plans and in his mind this might 'clear up' Iraq so that he could move on to Iran."

Even if Bush supports the plan, however, his much-weakened political position in the wake of last month's elections in which Democrats won control of both houses of Congress makes it highly unlikely that he could muster the kind of support - both among lawmakers and the uniformed military -- he would need to deploy the number of troops the plans calls for.

While the current front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain, supports the plan -- as does the Democrats' most prominent neo-conservative, Sen. Joseph Lieberman -- some key Republicans, including Senator Gordon Smith and Norm Coleman who until now have strongly backed Bush's Iraq policy, have come out in opposition.

They are certain to be bolstered by doubts expressed Sunday by former Secretary of State Colin Powell who, since his retirement two years ago, has been extremely reluctant to voice any criticism of Bush.

A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell told CBS News that he was "not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work."

The current theatre commanders, including the outgoing head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, and the senior officer in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, have also argued that more troops are likely to increase, rather than reduce, the violence.

Abizaid, an Arab-speaker with an advanced degree in Middle East studies from Harvard University, has all but explicitly endorsed the main recommendations of the ISG, particularly its emphasis on gaining the cooperation of all of Iraq's neighbours in stabilising the country.

The Joint Chiefs are also reportedly sceptical of the plan, with the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, warning Congress earlier this month that, even at the current rate of deployment -- not to mention increased troops levels, let alone those recommended by the "Victory" plan -- "we will break the [Army's] active component."

In addition to conveying their views directly to Bush's new Pentagon chief Robert Gates, those same sceptics among the active-duty and retired military officers will almost certainly be among the first witnesses called to testify before key Congressional panels beginning next month as the newly-empowered Democrats take control of the legislative agenda for the first time in 12 years.
While the incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said last weekend that he could abide a modest increase in U.S. troop strength in Baghdad for a few months to see if they could reduce the violence, other key senators, including the front-runner for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, said this week she would not support even a short-term deployment. Meanwhile, the top Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives issued statements here Wednesday opposing any "surge".

Still, neo-conservatives remain confident. "Because this plan offers a credible prospect of winning in Iraq," according to this week's "Standard," "moderate Democrats and queasy Republicans, the White House thinks, will be inclined to stand back and let Bush give it a shot."

CNN Poll: Only 11% Back Call to Send More Troops to Iraq

By E&P StaffPublished: December 18, 2006 9:55 PM ET

NEW YORK President Bush, according to reports, is strongly considering sending a "surge" of troops to Iraq in the new year -- 20,000 or more. Sen. John McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman have already backed such a plan. But a new poll for CNN released Monday found that this idea draws the support of only 11 percent of Americans.Fewer than a third of Americans still support the war in Iraq, and more than half say they want U.S. troops out of the country within a year, according to the CNN poll. This 31 percent support marked a new low in the Opinion Research survey."Nearly three-quarters said Bush administration policy needs a complete overhaul or major changes. But only 11 percent of those polled backed calls to send more American troops to Iraq, as President Bush is said to be considering," CNN said.Pollsters interviewed 1,019 adults for the survey, which had a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.Only 32 percent said they would support keeping U.S. troops in Iraq "as long as necessary" to hand over control to a new Iraqi government. By comparison, 21 percent said they wanted to see Americans leave immediately, and 33 percent said they wanted to see a U.S. withdrawal within a year.

A 'Surge' in Wasted Sacrifice

A 'Surge' in Wasted Sacrifice

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, December 19, 2006; A29

Here's an idea: Let's send more U.S. troops to Iraq. The generals say it's way too late to even think about resurrecting Colin Powell's "overwhelming force" doctrine, so let's send over a modest "surge" in troop strength that has almost no chance of making any difference -- except in the casualty count. Oh, and let's not give these soldiers and Marines any sort of well-defined mission. Let's just send them out into the bloody chaos of Baghdad and the deadly badlands of Anbar province with orders not to come back until they "get the job done."

I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a terrible idea, arguably the worst imaginable "way forward" in Iraq. So of course this seems to be where George W. Bush is headed.

Don't assign any real significance to the fact that the president has decided to wait until the new year before announcing his next step in Iraq, because if history is any guide, all of this photo-op "consultation" he's doing is just for show -- to convince us, or maybe to convince himself, that he has an open mind. The Decider doesn't have the capacity for indecision.

Through Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he has ruled out direct talks with Iran and Syria to try to enlist their cooperation in quelling Iraq's sectarian civil war. Through his own remarks, he has ruled out a firm timetable for a U.S. withdrawal. He has declared himself open to any and all advice, but he rules out any course of action that in his estimation will "lead to defeat."

So much for the Iraq Study Group. So much for the will of the voters. As Dick Cheney helpfully spelled out just before the election, "full speed ahead."

At least the Decider is consistent. From the start his administration's approach to this botched war has been to sort through all the tactical alternatives and pick the most counterproductive -- send too few troops, disband the Iraqi army, stand by while looters destroy critical infrastructure and the social order, allow sectarian militias to fill the power vacuum, make reconstruction an afterthought, and put know-nothings in charge of it.

There are more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and it's unclear what they are supposed to be accomplishing. It should be obvious that to establish security in all of Iraq and disarm the sectarian militias -- to conduct a proper occupation, in other words -- would require a massive infusion of boots on the ground. The Pentagon says that finding even an additional 20,000 to 30,000 troops to send would be a stretch, and officials warn (perhaps a little melodramatically) of the danger that the demands of Bush's war "will break" the U.S. Army.

I find it hard to believe that even this addle-brained administration is capable of breaking the Army. The generals could find 30,000 more troops to send, and I'll bet they could even find an extra 50,000 if they had to. But why?

Whom would they fight? Would they ally themselves with those elusive "mainstream" Sunnis, or maybe those publicity-shy "moderate" Shiites? Would they capture and hold territory, or would they continue the practice of staying for a while, turning the job over to Iraqi forces and then watching as the militias move back in? If an extra 20,000 troops were sent to Baghdad tomorrow, could they realistically be expected to establish order in a sprawling megacity where some two dozen armed militias control the streets? Since we would be providing 20,000 new targets for snipers and roadside bombs, how many do we calculate will die?

It is unconscionable to think about dispatching more young men and women to Iraq without the realistic expectation that their presence will make a difference in a war that is no longer in our control. Here in Washington, proponents of a troop "surge" speak of giving the whole Iraq adventure one last try. But they sound as if they're more concerned about projecting an image of American resolve than anything else. Does anyone think a symbolic troop increase is going to have the likes of Moqtada al-Sadr or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tossing and turning through sleepless nights?

Doubling the number of American troops in Iraq would be wrong -- we need to get out, now, before we set the whole Middle East on fire -- but at least a surge of that scale would have a purpose. The modest increase now on the table would be purposeless and wrong. What could be more immoral than sacrificing American blood and treasure to save face in a lost war?

What a "Surge" of Forces Really Means in Iraq

William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

Out of the November election, where the majority clearly expressed their displeasure with the Iraq war and the President, we have witnessed the creation of the "surge."

Dismissed initially as a fanciful quest by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a surge of as many as 30,000 troops to Iraq is now increasingly being viewed as the likely post-New Year's change of course to be offered by President George W. Bush and a potential war winner.

Is the surge now possible because the miserly Donald Rumsfeld is gone?

Or is it a Washington ploy to get to the inevitable withdrawal while also saving face: Sure there are a lot of loyalists and dreamers out there who still think American can "win," but mostly those in the military and their armchair brethren will be able to say 'well, we tried our best, even put in more soldiers for the final push.'

My sense is that we haven't already seen serious proposals for a surge because of fear of a public backlash, because of Rumsfeld, or because no one can actually describe how a surge would either turn the corner or change strategy.

The reason why a surge continues to be so agonizing is that it is also so difficult for the military.

So as we say goodbye to the Secretary of Defense, let's also be honest: Even in those areas where Donald Rumsfeld is supposed to have been a success in "transforming" the American military, he has been a failure.

"Much more agile and more expeditionary" is how outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described where U.S. military forces are today in his final television interview with Brit Hume on the Fox News Channel.

"This institution," the Department of Defense, the Secretary said on Friday, "was designed to fight big armies, big navies and big air forces, and that isn't what we're doing today.... We simply have to be able to deal with irregular warfare and the asymmetrical challenges that are so advantageous to the enemies."

Mr. Teflon was only too happy to pin all decisions regarding the number of troops in Iraq on retired Gen. Tommy Franks and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Though it is unseemly that Rumsfeld is unable to take any responsibility to the Iraq quagmire, in a way he is right. The uniformed military has always been split with regard to how many soldiers and Marines were needed in Iraq. Early in the war, there is no question that Rumsfeld and his big brains in the office of the Secretary of Defense rejected calls for heavier forces to defeat the Iraqi army and topple Saddam Hussein, but since "mission accomplished" as commanders on the ground -- particularly Army commanders -- have called for increases and surges, they have mostly been thwarted by their own.

Proposals for increases have been rejected at the Joint Chiefs level. Gen. John Abizaid, the Central Command theater commander or Gen. George Casey, the Iraq commander, have brought forth proposals for more in the "tank," the closed decision changer where Pentagon horse trading is done.

Here are the dynamics: Do you really need more? Where are you going to get the resources? How are the forces going to be sustained? What are they going to do that is different? What are you willing to cut? The dynamics of the interrogation and the questioning ultimately is more responsible for combat commanders "withdrawing" their request or seeing the light.

Word "comes down" that the political decision-makers aren't going to look favorably on an increase request. The Washington military elite -- the Chairman, the Vice, the director of the Joint Staff, the head of plans and policy -- lets it be known "offline" that the debate is closed, that "people" at higher levels are getting irritated, that there are bigger fish to fry. Field commanders return with their tails between their legs, they redouble their efforts, they change tack. But this is how the system works: No one actually is ever making a firm request for an increase and no one is taking a stand to say "no." In this way, Rumsfeld can claim that he has never turned down a combatant commander's request for more troops.

I'm sure we'll read in the histories of the Iraq War ten years down the road that there were all sorts of proposals and contingencies and nascent requests, but the record will be miraculously thin on how those requests just never seemed to go anywhere.

"There hasn't been a minute in the last six years when we have not had the number of troops that the combatant commanders have requested," Rumsfeld said Friday. Given the dynamics of decision-making, Rumsfeld is both lying and telling the truth.

The real question though should be, was there a time in the last six years when it would have made sense to have more.

The Rumsfeld answer: Oh gosh, it makes no sense to ask what could have been, to second guess those who where to uniform, golly me. In fact that's what he said: "There's no rule book," he told Hume. "There's no guidebook. There's no program that says when you get up in the morning it's this."

When Donald Rumsfeld says he has helped to transform the military into a more agile and expeditionary force, one would think that surges would be the natural byproduct: There is a problem somewhere, we send in forces quickly to stem the tide and then withdrawn them: expeditionary.

Of course this also isn't the way the military works. The only forces that are even vaguely expeditionary in nature are the special operations forces, and even here, the actual number of fighters able to be put on the ground is relatively small. Expeditionary Army and Marine Corps unit require enormous support systems; our military is just not capable of the quick in-and-out. Rumsfeld might walk away with the belief that he has organized the military into some fundamental shift in culture but in this he has failed. Maybe if he had spent less time fighting with the military, he might have worked more effectively over six years to actually build something new.

Of course, as I've said before in these pages, a lot of the blame falls on those in uniform as well. They go along to get along. Precious few are willing to jeopardize their careers or futures on what they believe.

When President Bush finally puts forth his proposal for the big surge, the saddest part will be that most of it will be constructed from even more compromises and horse-trading and deceptions. Some troops will be asked to stay longer, a demoralizing decision for already drained forces. Reservists and guardsmen will be pushed forward, many angry and disgruntled. "Fresh" troops will be sent in, but for what?

A decision to surge will be seen by most on the streets as at least an effort to honor our commitment and pull out a win at the eleventh hour. Few Americans will see that the surge will still leave our forces as hostage to Iraqi action and desire.

Agile? We lumber towards the inevitable absolutely powerless, in a political environment so polarized by ideology and contempt for the truth, we can already see what the outcome will be. Some transformation, Mr. Rumsfeld.

By William M. Arkin | December 18, 2006; 10:00 AM ET