Another Year At War

This is an old Calvin and Hobbes (naturally); I found it very appropriate today.

With the Hussein Deathfest in the news, time for an obligatory 'where do we stand' post. Obviously, nothing has changed; I'm not sure what more I can say on the subject than I did earlier this month. We all know the score.... President Bush is likely preparing to 'surge' more troops into Iraq, a move that is politically and publicly unpopular, in what few will yet call out as another transparent attempt to buy time for his pet project until the end of his presidency in two years.

On the surface, no more needs to be said than that.

Digging deeper, though, Matthew Yglesias explores the psychological reasons causing President Bush to lean toward escalation: "Roughly speaking, the fixed point of the president's thinking is an unwillingness to admit that the venture has failed... It's not that the president has some policy initiative in mind whose operational requirements dictate a surge in force levels. Rather, locked in the prison of his own denial he came to the conclusion that he should back an escalation, prompting the current search for a mission." Yup.

And, by the way, there's nothing more equally funny and depressing than this from the AP-

President Bush worked nearly three hours at his Texas ranch on Thursday to design a new U.S. policy in Iraq, then emerged to say that he and his advisers need more time to craft the plan he'll announce in the new year...

More time? You mean three hours of brainstorming wasn't enough??

Really puts everything in perspective, doesn't it? The article notes that it is being framed as a 'temporary' surge meant to work in unison with Iraqi political settlements. But while, in the past (it's been a while, though), I have been willing to give some benefit of the doubt to these things, I am no longer that naive. The 'temporary' surge will be anything but; it's a lie. Hopefully our new congressional leaders know this.

The seeming inevitability of this war's continuation until 2009 is really an unbearable thought. A major casuality of that, as Arianna Huffington lamented on yesterday's Left, Right, and Center on KCRW, is that the major domestic issues we need to tackle (economic issues like health care and education, or the 'drug war', etc) have been put on hold while we figure out how to end a war that never should've begun. Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke makes the same point on major international issues.

[UPDATE: Not an uplifting way to end the year... the U.S. death toll has reached 3,000.]