Splurging For Respect!

I hadn't heard this before, but I'm not surprised, 'NBC News reported that an administration official "admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one."'

I'll go a step further and argue that if this is even partly true, then its not so much about politics as it is 'pride'.

Bush doesn't want to be labelled by history as a 'loser', so he's 'sacrificing' our military men and women to save his pride and secure his legacy.

But more than that, he can't keep saying we're winning if its clear to everyone that we're losing ground. By increasing the rate of carnage he might well be fine tuning the war to keep us from neither losing nor winning excessively.

I'm reminded of the scene in Terry Gilliam's Baron Von Munchausen where Horatio Jackson (Jonathon Pryce) meets with Sultan (Peter Geoffrey) to discuss terms to continue the war and keep profits up. We learn later that Horatia is being made a fool of, as though he is profiting from maintaining the war, Sultan is cheating and amassing more forces with which to win the war with and take everything.

This is a longstanding problem competitive endeavors. If you fight to stay still your competition will eventually outflank you.

And in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Rice and friends are all playing the part of Horatio Jackson. they are working to maintain the war in order to extract profits, but the enemy keeps changing tactics on them. When things start going sour, our intrepid leaders must go back to the board room and discuss marketing strategies, and new ways to repackage their product. The product being the war itself.

The difficulty comes into play when two ideologies collide. Our side wishes only to keep the war going as it is, to extract wealth from the American people and move it into private hands in other countries, filling secret numbered caribbean accounts. This side will profit so long as our forces don't win or lose.

Losing is losing and vistory is losing. The only true way that we win, is to never be victorious. That way we can keep winning forever.

The other side wants us out of their country and they don't give a damn about profits. They only want to win. Because they aren't bound by corporate board meetings and accounting practices, they have a lot more tools at their disposal to interrupt war profits and to put our forces on a losing path.

There is another thought process being suggested, and that is that Bush is simply suffering from delusions.

Paul Craig Roberts (Reagan Cabinet Member and Staunch Conservative) reports in the article The Surge, that "Bush is like Hitler. He blames defeats on his military commanders, not on his own insane policy. Like Hitler, he protects himself from reality with delusion. In his last hours, Hitler was ordering non-existent German armies to drive the Russians from Berlin."

But he goes on to argue that the surge is intended to be put forth to battle the Shi'ites. As we know, Saudi Arabia says that we need to stop them from killing Sunnis, whom we are fighting.

So we need to kill Shias, so we can protect Sunnis from being killed by Shia's while we continue to fight the Sunnis and kill them.

This doesn't sound so good to me. This splurge is going to cost us, and cost Bush. Is there a path that they can navigate that will maximize their looting, while making Saudi Arabia happy? Probably not. And keep in mind that the Saudi royalty doesn't care who lives or dies, but they must placate their population who is siding with the Sunnis.

Then there's Israel. They want us to finish already and turn Iran into what Iraq has become.

It must be a tough path to tread. The administration has three priorities to satisfy.

1. Maximize and stablize profits.
2. Do whatever Saudi Arabia says to do.
3. Do whatever Israel says to do.

Bush has it tough. I wonder how much of this he understands?