Jamming the blender

W's strategy for Iraq is to choke the enemy with our dead

2007.01.03 — Government | Politics | War | by BB Rodriguez

Stop him before he kills again. Over the holidays, the American dead in Iraq topped 3,000. That's well short of the 58,000 that died in Vietnam, but it's a hell of a lot closer than any sane human being imagined. And it's a hell of a lot more than any rational human being would persist in the face of. That 3,000 dead not during a shooting war, but during the rebuilding after the war. It's not a war of attrition; it's an occupation of attrition. That's like getting scored on for 30 points after the final whistle. It doesn't make sense.

Nothing about the Iraq War makes sense. Not Junior's reasons for getting into it. Not the insurgents' sabotaging of the rebuilding effort (seriously: why not just kill GIs and let the contractors rebuild the sewage system?). Not Saddam's kangaroo court case. Not the administration-sanctioned Gitmo/Abu Ghraib cluster fuck. None of it.

Now Bush wants to jam more soldiers into the blender to see if that stops the blades. After 3 and a half years of denying that he didn't have enough troops in country, he's finally coming around to the idea... too late. There's no way that the three-way civil war coming to a boil in Iraq is going to be bottled up by 20 thousand more Americans—weary, angry, confused, disheartened third-tour Americans—stumbling around the desert, knocking in doors and throwing "suspects" to the ground. That's never worked anywhere on any scale other than totalitarian states, where the penalty for resisting was a gruesome death. Even W isn't ready to go that far.

Instead, he's ready to sacrifice as many American lives as it takes to make insurgents sick of killing Americans. And how much sense does that make?

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