Urge to Surge

There is much talk about sending some 35,000 more troops to Iraq (or really, just extending the deployment of those already there) despite the warning from Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker that current deployment levels, surge or not, will "break the Army." Bush has repeatedly stated that he listens to his generals when it comes to crafting Iraq 'strategery', yet the very man behind the surge plan admits that that has not and will not be the case. Fred Kagan, whose American Enterprise Institute has been a leading advocate of shaking up the entire Middle East, offered this particulary disturbing quote to the BBC:

The amazing thing about George Bush is that on every occasion, he has done what he thought was the right thing to do and he has not worried about polls and he has remained committed to courses that were wildly unpopular. I don't see any sign of that changing - it's a core element of his personality and it is the only thing that has kept us in the fight thus far, even with the problems in strategy.

The facts are not is dispute when it comes to just how wildly disasterous those courses of action have been. Even the truest believers will no longer frame this failed effort in terms of national security or even national interest. What is really just plain sad is that in Kagan we have an advocate of throwing more lives on the fire who is insinuating that from the beginning, Bush has instigated and conducted this war not by strategy, but by faith. Lives are being sacrificed in ever increasing numbers solely because a formerly besotted frat boy has some vague, born-again notion that it is "the right thing to do." God help us all.