Surging into the Abyss By Vali Nasr illustrates how Bush would have responded to Pearl Harbor: Since Japan has no oil, he would have attacked Mexico.
via mydd.com
Just when you thought he couldn't make it worse, yeah I know who would think that ?
money quote:
New troops will be in Iraq not to police the streets and hold the line against the creeping violence, but to expand the war by taking on the Shia militias. This is an escalation strategy. Will it work; maybe, maybe not. But it runs the risk that it may very well provoke a Shia insurgency—something Iraq has not so far witnessed. Thus far the U.S. has faced a Sunni insurgency (which by most estimates continues to account for 80% of U.S. casualties), and sectarian violence in which Shias and Sunnis are killing each other. Shia militias are violent, destructive and radical, but Shia militias are a very different problem from the Sunni insurgency. Shia militias, unlike te insurgency, are not targeting American troops. But it looks like the administration is set to change that. Over the past year Washington and its Baghdad embassy have alienated the Shia and undermined the authority of the more moderate Ayatollah Sistani. Anti-Americanism has grown in Shia ranks as they accuse U.S. of favoring Sunnis by focusing on Shia militias rather than Sunni insurgency. By going to war with the increasingly popular Sadr Washington runs the danger of losing the Shia altogether.
So just to refresh, we turned the corner with the purple fingers, but now it turns out that the purple fingers resulted in someone too close to the only national leader to have emerged, Sadr, we are going to attack him, although his enemies are the ones who are killing us.
No, Mr. Bush the slogan is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", not "the enemy of my enemy is my enemy". But given the ISG, to show his father he is tough, Bush has to attack someone and since multi-year results have shown us that attacking Sunni's doesn't work, he's going to attack Mexico.
Cutting the snark for a moment, what Bush is doing with the surge option, aka escalation, is to pick a fight with the Shia in the hopes of god knows what. For those of us who like the Gang Of 500 who seem to have amnesia, this didn't work the last time and it didn't last.
Actually, what he is trying to do is to take down a genuine (although bad-assed) national leader in the hope that he can put a puppet in who will magically unite the country and leave us in charge of the oil.
Juan Cole went into more detail
The bottom line, is that this is a disastrous move against the will of the military, the American people, and probably everyone except Dick Cheney and Osama Bin Laden.