I agree with the president. It's a surge.

Throughout American history, sudden downturns in the econonmy, accompanied by investment capital flight, have been called "panics" (eg, the Panic of 1857). Then in 1929, when President Hoover saw a dramatic downturn in the economy and sought to dodge political blame for his poor handling of it, his supporters coined a new phrase, trying to make the 25% unemployment rate sound not so bad. "It's not panic," they assured America, "it's just, well, a simple depression in the business cycle."

Up until 1929, when people heard the word depression, they would've thought of a little groove in the sand or the dip in the road between two rolling hills. By the time Hoover had identified his disasterous policies as "mere" depression for a couple of years, the word came to connote something entirely different. The renaming of what was happening to peoples' lives was a poor substitute for managing the people's business in a responsible manner. No one was fooled by the rhetorical lipstick on the political pig.

78 years later, Mr Bush has tried the same shtick. He and his string-yanking Gepettos continue to insist that the escalation of the war isn't really an escalation. Don't panic! It's only a simple increase in the number of troops in Iraq to allow a wave of increased fighting. A "surge," if you will. Okay, I'll play along. It's not an escalation, it's a surge. It's a new pig, but it's the same old lipstick. A few hundred extra American soldiers and Marines won't be killed in a pointless escalation of the war, but only killed in a pointless surge in US troop levels. I'm sure that will make their families feel much better.

And thousands Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire of renewed, I mean surged, American "pacification" efforts may see their homes, businesses, and family members riddled with lead. But they won't think "Damn those Americans for invading us." They'll only damn us for surging. And when brothers and cousins bury their dead, and feel emascualted as men when they see the next humvee drive by, and they start to wonder if maybe Osama has a legitimate point about Westerners after all, they won't think about imperialism; they won't think about oil grabs. They'll think about surges and hate us for those instead.

So please, Mr Bush, have fun with your pig and your lipstick. You're not fooling anyone. I'll let your new definition surge forth and occupy a new word in the English vocabulary. Whatever we call it, you're still killing people in our name for somebody else's oil and making our flag more hated in a world that everyone else will have to clean up after you've gone back to Crawford and your make believe ranch. Whatever we call it, it is wrong. And whatever we do to stop it is right.

According to Jon Stewart, there were 130K US soldiers there now, exactly 20K less than what we started with, so they'll only be breaking even.

:headbang:
rocknation

The point is hairsplitting of course. The increase is a blip. In 1999 the Pentagon wargamed a regime-change invasion/occupation scenario for Iraq and concluded that 400,000 was too small a force if you wanted to avoid sectarian violence and a more general regional destabilization. In that respect, we're actually getting off pretty lucky with how things are going. There's plenty of room for it to get worse.