Monk

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I'll let Frank Rich gives us the latest dose of bad news from Iraq, as he is sort of a Dr. Kevorkian on the sordid affair:

What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began. The latest National Intelligence Estimate said as much when it posited that “even if violence is diminished,” Iraq’s “absence of unifying leaders” makes political reconciliation doubtful. Not enough capable Iraqi troops are showing up and, as Gen. Peter Pace told the Senate last week, not enough armored vehicles are available to protect the new American deployments. The State Department can’t recruit enough civilian officials to manage the latest push to turn on Baghdad’s electricity and is engaged in its own sectarian hostilities with the Pentagon. Revealingly enough, the surge’s cheerleaders are already searching for post-Rumsfeld scapegoats. William Kristol attacked the new defense secretary, Robert Gates, for “letting the Joint Chiefs slow-walk the brigades in.”

Ah, Dubya, Dubya, your father gave you the keys to the country and you wrecked it, son. I know that it was supposed to be an easy ride after the balmy Clinton years and after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a stained dress was our biggest problem, but life fucks with us like that sometimes.

(Source: Frank Rich for The New York Times)

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In the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, civil war was a worst-case scenario. In the 2007 one, Iraq has zoomed past civil war to hell: “The Intelligence Community judges that the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence.”

As John McLaughlin, the former acting director of central intelligence, told The Times’s Mark Mazzetti: “Civil war is checkers. This is chess.”

-- Maureen Dowd for The New York Times

It just feels like we are drawing closer to the point where we are going to start to really feel the pain of this nightmare, and not just the military families in our country.

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Hundreds of news articles and opinion pieces have described President Bush’s decision to escalate the Iraq war as a “Hail Mary pass.”

But that’s the wrong metaphor.

Mr. Bush isn’t Roger Staubach, trying to pull out a win for the Dallas Cowboys. He’s Charles Keating, using other people’s money to keep Lincoln Savings going long after it should have been shut down — and squandering the life savings of thousands of investors, not to mention billions in taxpayer dollars, along the way.

-- Paul Krugman for The New York Times

Now, here is an example of criticizing the President and his Iraq policy that does not come off as exuberantly shrill. This is the voice of cold, uncompromising reason, talking truth to power with some genuine sense of despair.

The only thing that can controvert this argument is victory in Iraq. I only wonder whether Bush doesn't even believe anything resembling victory is possible. If not, his war policy can seem somewhat criminal.

( Krugman column )

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Meanwhile, history comes around in other ways. The Rev. Bob Edgar, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, recalls that as a young congressman in April 1975, he encountered a similar presidential request for a surge of troops. It was a demand by President Gerald Ford for more U.S. forces to stabilize Saigon.

A White House photo captures Ford conferring with two of the architects of that request: senior administration officials named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

-- Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times

A cute little historical footnote.

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I was on Keith Olbermann last night discussing Joe Lieberman and his shared delusions with John McCain. They've become brothers in bloodshed. They can validate their misguided beliefs by pointing at the other and saying: "See, I'm not crazy." They're the D.C. version of Thelma and Louise, only it's not their car they're driving over a cliff -- it's our country.

-- Arianna Huffington

Monk has a hard time resisting snappy, provocative rhetoric like this. The sentiment expressed is also common these days, regarding Dubya's surge. Although I am now inclined to think that they are right about our prospects in Iraq, I do not really care for this sort of expression. The tone is so shrill that it can begin to sound as though they are cheering for failure and tragedy.

Dubya is our elected president. It is his call. So long as we are committed, we have to hope that the military and the Administration can pull it off. If they somehow turn Iraq around in the next two years, then Dubya miraculously saves his legacy, and our Middle East situation is on a much needed healthy footing. If they indeed fail, and we only continue to pile on casualties without any improvement in Iraq and the region, then the critics were right. They are still going to fight it out for a while, and we are left to be supportive of those ends.

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President Dubya gives his big landmark speech tonight, laying out his case for a so-called surge of 20,0000 troops, which is practically nominal. The bottom line is that, in spite of the anti-Iraq War election last November and the fact that our fortunes there have been only sinking, we will be engaged in that war for the remainder of Dubya's term.

The next two years promises to be a terrible slog. If the jihadists score another big blow in America, it should be that much more devastating, to be struck hard while fully engaged and over-extended in active fighting in a losing war. Indeed, we might be left with using nuclear weapons for retaliation, thinking of J. R. Dunn's Rome argument.

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I can imagine how tough it must be to be called into Iraq when you have to leave such an angel of a wife. Click the pic for the romantic story, which includes how they tried for a pregnancy before he left, but Providence would not have it.

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Where you at, Uncle Mike?

I'm with the Army guys.

Why?

We have to go fight the bad guys.

Why?

So the bad guys don't come here and hurt you.

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