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Costs of Escalation in Iraq

Comment by Larry Ross, August 17, 2007

The very useful figures that Tom Englehardt has complied are astonishing and infuriating. A tiny minority in the US, elected by fraud, and supported by the Government machinery including the Military, using deceitful techniques and lies, started wars and spent billions killing over one million Iraqis, destroyed their infrastructure, created four million refugees (2 outside Iraq and 2 inside), started a civil war, created permanent military bases More than 75, according to the New York Times.

Top Democratic Party politicians as well as Republicans, support and fund this insanity, and repeat the lies used to sell and justify the war. Many call for a larger war on Iran, justifying it with the same kind of lies used to justify the war on Iraq. They even echo Bush's threat to use nuclear weapons on Iran. Yet Iran is no threat to the US, has no nuclear weapons and has never initiated any wars. Can this Bush-led military juggernaut be stopped?

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All-time Highs in Iraq: Escalation by the Numbers

by Tom Engelhardt, August 16, 2007

Someday, we will undoubtedly discover that, in the term "surge" -- as in the President's "surge" plan (or "new way forward") announced to the nation in January -- was the urge to avoid the language (and experience) of the Vietnam era. As there were to be no "body bags" (or cameras to film them as the dead came home), as there were to be no "body counts" ("We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team" was the way the President put it ), as there were to be no "quagmires," nor the need to search for that "light at the end of the tunnel," so, surely, there were to be no "escalations."

The escalations of the Vietnam era, which left more than 500,000 American soldiers and vast bases and massive air and naval power in and around Vietnam (Laos, and Cambodia), had been thoroughly discredited. Each intensification in the delivery of troops, or simply in ever-widening bombing campaigns, led only to more misery and death for the Vietnamese and disaster for the U.S. And yet, not surprisingly, the American experience in Iraq -- another attempted occupation of a foreign country and culture -- has been like a heat-seeking missile heading for the still-burning American memories of Vietnam.

As historian Marilyn Young noted in early April 2003 with the invasion of Iraq barely underway: "In less then two weeks, a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds." By August 2003, the Bush administration, of course, expected that only perhaps 30,000 American troops would be left in Iraq, garrisoned on vast "enduring" bases in a pacified country. So, in a sense, it's been a surge-a-thon ever since. By now, it's beyond time to call the President's "new way forward" by its Vietnamese equivalent. Admittedly, a "surge" does sound more comforting, less aggressive, less long-lasting, and somehow less harmful than an "escalation," but the fact is that we are six months into the newest escalation of American power in Iraq. It has deposited all-time high numbers of troops there as well, undoubtedly, as more planes and firepower in and around that country than at any moment since the invasion of 2003. Naturally enough, other "all-time highs" of the grimmest sort follow.

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