Have you heard the good news?
Okay…I admit it. It’s in my blood. I’m infected. It’s there, and I’m never going to be rid of it, so I might as well let it loose the best way I know how. As much as I try not to be…as much as I wonder that this makes me seem even more of a bitter old shit than I really am, I still can’t change the fact that I am, always have been, and always
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And, actually, the number of troops (around 20,000) is actually the minimum number suggested by the military experts responsible for composing this proposal. (They proposed a surge (their words, actually, not the president's) between 20,000-30,000 troops.) I still don't hate you, but sometimes you get so heated up over something that you don't take the time to actually learn about it, and that makes me sad/desire to asphyxiate you. The true comedy is listening to news people and the 'experts' they find try to claim they know better and also make the mistake of thinking this was just some cockamamie scheme Bush just up and dreamed the night before the speech.
But yeah, I knew people would get disappointed about the 'Rats' - just remember they don't have all the answers and are not miracle workers. They're politicians.
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I never said a thing about his scheme being something he concocted the night before. Myself, I’d been hearing about proposed troop surges through half of December. The biggest announcement about this surge came from the American Enterprise Institute, about a week and some before Bush’s speech, when they proposed exactly that…mind you, this is supposed to be a non-partisan not-for-profit organization, but it has become essentially a conservative think-tank producing almost the entirety of Bush’s policy throughout his presidency…very non-partisan of them…(not that the leftward fundies have much to say-the Brookings Institute is guilty of the same sin)… And when AEI suggested, 20,000 was below their low number. A few generals proposed a surge…usually 30-40,000. Quite a few OTHER generals, however, proposed a pull-back. Neither side was unilateral or anything. It was divisive, even amongst the “experts”. And can we really call these guys experts at this kind of warfare? Some of these high-muckety-muck generals are the same guys who lost Vietnam by trying to fight a conventional war on an unconventional battlefield against a guerilla force…which is exactly what’s going on right now.
Of course, the way I worded that, it sounds like we’re losing. We’re not. Because there IS no winning or losing this farce. There is no victory…no emerald city at the end of the yellow brick road. That’s a misconception about this. Our military is no longer fighting a proper war, they are performing a police function and suppressing a civilian population. How can you ever win OR lose that? In our own way, we’re losing every time our public opinion dips another point in the global polls. Every time we shoot another Iraqi child, whether or not he has a bomb strapped to his underdeveloped nipples. Every time one more soul snuffs it, we have lost.
I don’t honestly care about most politics of war. The policies of victory or which side has public opinion, who’s cutting which purse strings of which megalomaniac. What interests me…the SOLE thing is how many boys, girls, men, women, mothers, sisters, daughters, sons, brothers and fathers every little action is going to kill. I don’t like war, because people die in war. Sometimes people I love.
So, yeah…princess…I still love you, too, just as much as I did yesterday. And I think it’s cute the way you condescend and tell me I don’t bother to learn about a situation while you refute things I didn’t even say in the first place. I study all the numbers and I watch from the sidelines. Just like every American Male on every Monday night during football season, playing armchair General. And I think it’s time we stopped trying to run the ball into a solid wall and call in the kicker…how can you honestly tell me that a little diplomacy in this situation would be a BAD thing?
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