I now understand what is victory in Iraq. I understand why the far right never cared about the chaos, and continues to deny the reality on the ground.
We are fighting the wrong war with them. I have been thinking about the wrong kind of victory. The long war is with fascism at home, not democracy in Iraq.
He will get the victory of not being the president in charge when the last helicorpter leaves, like this:
http://www.mishalov.com/...
He will get the facist victory in 20 years when the economy is collapsing from oil shocks. The next Bush generation can claim "we were stabbed in the back by the liberals". (Jews will come in for special blame, as if this were not some ultra-christian regime.)
The person who brought this forward is from TPM:
It hit me the other day that what the surge is going to accomplish for Bush and Cheney is to take them through these next two years. By the time they can claim to have the extra troops in Baghdad it's gonna be May or June. They'll be there a few months till everyone has to admit that it isn't working (though in the interim I would predict the first really horrendous event in which our troops suffer a big loss, like 200 men in one blast), then it will be the end of 2007 and the argument will be about whether we should remove some of the surge troops. That will take a few months, at least, and we'll be in the throes of a presidential election. Bush won't want to do anything too "political" at that point, of course, so he'll happily leave it to the new prez to make shitcakes out of shit. And Bush and Cheney will spin it for all it's worth for the rest of their lives...
So preventing the escalation is a matter (obviously) of life and death for the Americans and Iraqis who would be killed in the upswing of violence. An increase in troops is not about victory in the war with Iraq. It is about victory in the Long War for America. This is a long fight, and going with escalation now is about losing for 20 years.
And it is not a surge, it is an escalation.
And an escalation in troops is an escalation in death, as noted by Juan Cole
Iraq violence is at an all-time high since the US "turned over sovereignty" to an Iraqi government June 28, 2004. USA Today writes, "The Pentagon says injuries and deaths among U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq rose 32% during the period from mid-August to mid-October over the previous three months. Both the average number of attacks each week and the average number of people killed or wounded in those attacks were at their highest levels since the United States handed over power to the Iraqi government in June 2004."
What the report does not say is that this period coincides with a major US military operation, "Together Forward" intended to restore security in the capital, involving sweeps of Sunni Arab and some Shiite neighborhoods. That is to say, the operation not only did not make things better, things got worse during it. The military beefed up the US troop contingent in Baghdad significantly for the operation, including moving 3,700 troops down from Mosul. It is this sort of thing that convinces me that an extra 20,000 troops for Iraq is not going to make a difference.
The escalation is to increase chaos for the next President, for a one-term D, setting the war for more R domination of the White House.
Just think, without the war in Iraq we would be talking so much more about the drug war, health care, homelessness and abuse of power. The Long War is not with Iraq, it is with fascism.