Stupid Language Games
Yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser. . . you know, that’d be Condoleezza “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” Rice. Yeah, her. At any rate, she had this to say about how the White House has carried out the Iraqi war. “It’s bad policy to speculate on what you’ll do if a plan fails when you’re trying to make a plan work.”
Go ahead. Read that sentence again. Read that sentence and try to apply it to anything you’ve ever planned, ever. Read that sentence and try to imagine a pilot saying that to you about the plane right before takeoff, or a surgeon saying that to you right before you go under the knife. Realize how utterly insane it is. Personally, I prefer to side with Murphy’s Law of Combat: “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”- Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke
Basically, she told America that they didn’t bother with contingency plans because it interferes with the current plan. That there was no backup plan in place is pretty damn obvious to the rest of the world at this point. So you know what? Fine. At least she told the stupid truth, even if she presumed it was divine wisdom as she said it. The real Stupid Language Game is in arguing about the 21,500 additional troops that Bush wants to send to Iraq – troops that everyone outside of Bush’s insular cavalry of sycophants and yes-men knows are going to do nothing to stabilize the country.
It’s an escalation. A pointless escalation, perhaps, but it’s still an escalation. The White House tried to call it a “surge” and then they tried to call it a “bump”. The latest word they want everyone to use is “augmentation”. And you know what? If you want to call it those things, fine. But it’s also an escalation. We currently have roughly 120,000 troops there. We want to add over 20,000 more of them. For every six personel stationed in Iraq, we want to add an additional soldier. That’s a fucking escalation.
And this hopelessly stupid policy (which, for the record, adds a paltry 8% of what Bush’s own Generals thing would been needed to secure the country) is being foisted on the country and on our troops by a group that has been wrong about every single thing having to do with Iraq since the word first passed across George’s quivering lips. After being wrong about the cost of the war, the duration of the war, the original troop levels needed, being greeted as liberators, Iraq refinancing its own reconstruction, the length of the fighting, the intensity of the fighting, the presence of WMDs, the connections with al Queda, the strength of the insurgency, the very existence of a civil war, the need for an exit strategy, the role of the Iraqi security forces, the solvency of those same security forces, the previous escalations of troop levels and, of course, the huge monument to George W. Bush that the Iraqis were going to spontaneously construct in downtown Baghdad, why should we believe that anything any Neoconservative ever says again?
All this escalation is going to do is buy the current crop of dead wrong losers another two years. Two more years to let George Bush pass the buck onto the unlucky son of a bitch that wins the Presidential election in 2008. Two more years of asking for time. Two more years of letting the fighting run its course. Two more years of patience that the American public is supposed to have, after four straight years of brazen government incompetence. He is purchasing his own political absolution with the blood of American soldiers. He is sending them, pointlessly and hopelessly into a no-win end run so he can pin the blame on someone else.
So call it what you want. Call it an escalation. Call it a bump or a surge or an augmentation or an increase. Call it a supersizing for all I care. But admit what it is. Political cover at a terrible price. No more than I expect from such cowardly leadership. But far less than any American should accept from their government.