Youve heard White House spokesmen, official and otherwise, refer to the presidents commitment and/or resolve to go for broke alas, literally. This was a tip-off that he made the decision to escalate back to the 150,000 troop level on his own, against all advice. Even the neoCon architects are quick to point out that The Decider chose the worst of all alternatives presented, which is to put US troops in the middle of Sunni and Shiite fighting.
Embattled, Bush held to plan to salvage Iraq: Bush listened to Malikis power point presentation proposing US troops withdraw from Baghdad but quickly rejected the idea, when the two met in Jordan November 30. Bush relied on his own judgment that the best answer was to try once again to snuff out the sectarian violence in Baghdad, even at the risk of putting U.S. soldiers into a crossfire between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. When his generals resisted sending more troops, he seemed irritated. When they finally agreed to go along with the plan, he doubled the number of troops they requested. It was a signature moment for a president who seems uninfluenced by the electorate on Iraq and headed for a showdown with the new Democratic Congress. Presented with an opportunity to pull back, Bush instead chose to extend and, in some ways, deepen his commitment, gambling that more time and a new plan will finally bring success to the troubled U.S. military mission. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/20/AR2007012001 446.html <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/20/AR200701200 1446.html> No wonder Gen. Jones, fresh back from NATO, supervising the worsening war in Afghanistan - from where US troops are being transferred to Iraq, hinted it was time to review the Goldwater-Nichols Act. And numerous lawmakers have reminded everyone within a microphone and camera that the Commander in Chief has the ability to move troops initially, whether he can legally sustain his decisions or not. Bush has tried to explain that Maliki came up with the troop escalation plan, but in an administration under siege and sinking, leaks to the media and Congress have been trickling out furiously. His visit to the naval base the day after his Jan. 10 speech had a friendly but chilly military audience but the intended target for intimidation was the new Democratic Congress. As Sidney Blumenthal described it, Pres. Bush, once an AWOL Texas Air National Guard weekend pilot, has elevated himself above politics into a military virtues warrior, and as long as he exhibits supreme willpower, he will not lose. Whether its a crusade to exceed low expectations or by refusing to admit failure achieve a constantly redefined success, we are captive to an increasingly isolated and unresponsive chief executive, a place we have been before. Concluding paragraphs from Tom Englehardt Bushs Crusading Scorecard, 2001-2007 In truth, the most obvious factor linking all of the above together, however, the real thing they have in common, is not, in the normal sense, religious at all. If there is a religious war going on, waged by men (and a few women) of faith, then that faith is neither Christianity, nor Judaism, nor is the war against Islam per se. It comes instead from the fundamentalist Church of Our Man of Global Domination and at its heart is the monotheistic religion of Force <http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=101850> . If the arc of instability were inhabited by recalcitrant, angry, sometimes armed, and sometimes destructive Buddhists, sitting on vast energy reserves, this war would look like a war against the Buddha himself. The essential doctrine of faith that ties all the disparate foreign-policy acts of this administration together is the belief that to every global problem, to every difficult situation, there is but a single striking and uniform response -- not the application of democracy, but the application of force. In its pursuit of force as a faith, the Bush administration has managed to lower the bar on all applications <http://www.alertnet.org/printable.htm?URL=/thenews/newsdesk/L12896544.htm> of force by any state (just as it has raised the value of a nuclear arsenal and so, despite its threats of war, lowered the bar on the proliferation of those weapons). This is but a small part of the price a regime of force must pay when force is such an inadequate instrument in our world. The single most striking aspect of Bush foreign policy is that, over and over, it is revealed to be a quiver with but a single arrow in it. If things are going well, you reach back, take that arrow of force, or the threat of it, and notch it into your bow. If things are going badly, you do the same. For an administration so focused on the domination of planetary resources, its officials have, in fact, proven themselves remarkably resourceless. The sort of eternal global military domination imagined in the National Security Strategy <http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html> document they issued with great fanfare in 2002 is, of course, long gone. The sort of domination in Iraq and other lands in the arc of instability of which the neocons dreamed so fervently is no longer at issue either. The religion of Force has proven itself a remarkably weak reed in our complex and difficult world, but that doesn't matter to them. Like many cultists, deeply imbued with their own way of looking at life, our President, our Vice President, and their dwindling band of compatriots can still imagine no other solutions than force, whatever the presenting problems. Not only can't they think outside the box, but the box itself is narrowing around this Presidency and Vice Presidency -- and believe me, given their crusading record, that's dangerous indeed. http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=158512 <http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=158512>
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