Stay The Course --> Surge --> Stay The Course

Coming up on the President's address tonight, people are seeing headlines like this-

AP: 'Officials: Bush to announce troop cut'

The article states that the President "understands Americans' deep concerns about U.S. involvement in Iraq and their desire to bring the troops home," and "that, after hearing from Petraeus and Crocker, he has decided on a way forward that will reduce the U.S. military presence." But this is, to cut the political correctness, a 100% lie.

The article makes it out to be a completely random decision by the President (and Petraeus and Crocker), ignoring previous reports for months that the surge would logistically have to end by around April '08, because that's when the Army would be at the breaking point and no longer able to sustain the numbers. So, if this is what happens, the White House will expect applause for doing what they were going to have to do anyway, unless they wanted to snap the giant rubberband that is our military.

The article does note, however, that the White House won't even fully guarantee this.

Still, the White House and its defenders will milk all the 'withdrawal/drawdown' headlines out of this that they can (and the 'liberal' media will provide kindly), but the reality is that, short of extending tours to 18 months, they have little choice here.

And so, in summer 2008, we will go back to the 2006 status quo (the 'stay the course' policy Republicans now insist they never really supported)... in terms of troop levels, Iraqi's political situation, levels of violence, etc. So two years of Iraq policy, basically from the 2006 election to the 2008 election, will have been a parentheses in a long sentence, a time-buying exercise.

It is an exercise, of course, that has cost thousands of people their lives (if you include not only U.S. soldiers, but also Iraqis caught in the crossfires) in these two years, and countless billions of dollars. But all that matters to Bush is that he will succeeded in his long-stated goal of passing off the war to his successor.

Predictable? Yes, we expected this. But disgusting all the same.