Frank Rich ties up all the loose threads.
By large margins, the citizens of both countries want us not to escalate but to start disengaging. So do America’s top military commanders, who are now being cast aside just as Gen. Eric Shinseki was when he dared assert before the invasion that securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops.
It would still take that many troops, not the 20,000 we might scrape together now.
This isn't a wild generalization on Rich's part. "None other than Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the next top American military commander in Iraq" has made clear that the minimum troop density should be "20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents.”
The “surge,” then, is a sham. It is not meant to achieve that undefined “victory” Mr. Bush keeps talking about but to serve his own political spin. His real mission is to float the “we’re not winning, we’re not losing” status quo until Jan. 20, 2009.
Same scenario as in Saigon when Nixon wanted to pass off the mess to the next president.
As the White House tries to sell this flimflam, picture fresh American troops being tossed into Baghdad’s caldron to work alongside the Maliki-Sadr Shiite lynch mob that presided over the Saddam hanging. Contemplate as well Gerald Ford’s most famous words, spoken as he assumed the presidency after the Nixon resignation: “Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
Not here. We do not rule. We didn't vote for this mess in November.
Two months after Americans spoke decisively on Election Day, the president is determined to overrule them. Our long national nightmare in Iraq, far from being over, is about to get a second wind.
Is that clear enough for Americans who think democracy -- much less this wounded and desperate president -- is working for us and for the next group of kids to be rotated back into Iraq?