Surge Before the End

The "surge"in the number of American soldiers is a last ditch attempt to stop Iraq from dissolving. If reports are true that the surge was originally Al-Maliki's idea, it shows that he is even loosing control over Baghdad. There are reports today of heavy fighting in a Sunni neighborhood close to the fortified American green zone (the Haifa Street neighborhood was cleared once before in 2003 by our military). But twenty thousand additional American soldiers simply cannot put Iraq together again. Nor did the Cambodian incursion save South Vietnam. The occupation was bungled from the start and is doomed to failure. Why we would want to save a regime that delegates a definitive and most solemn act of state--the execution of its former head of state--to sectarian bullies is beyond most Americans' understanding.

At home, Democrats with new majorities in Congress, still seem incapable of mounting a unified, effective resistance to the surge fantasy. Senator Biden babbles about his Commander in Chief and the turncoat toady Lieberman is still calling the Charlatan a 'great' president. No responsible observer advocates taking bullets away from our soldiers defending themselves on the front lines, but a new deployment will cost more and Speaker Pelosi should find the spine to just say no to new supplemental appropriations until a plan for withdrawal from Iraq is presented to Congress. Senator Kennedy will find it difficult convincing his reluctant Democratic colleagues to join him in opposing the escalation.