I don't feel like writing a long piece of text right now, and I don't see any reason to write a long piece of text. This graph, and these data points, pretty much speak for themselves.
The Grey Area at the right is The Future. Just a few months over the frontier from Now we will get General David Petraeus' report on how well or how poorly he believes Bush's Troop Surge has done for us in Iraq, how much closer toward or how much farther away from Mission Accomplished we have moved.
This is just one statistic, and a crude one at that. But it's the statistic that makes lots of Americans scream bloody murder the loudest: The flag-draped coffins of our soldiers and marines returning to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
Interestingly enough, among warhawks, if this trend increases -- if more soldiers and marines die in Iraq as the curve moves into the Grey Area -- this is evidence that the Troop Surge and our more aggressive combat stance in Iraq is a success. The more our troops die, the more proof that the Troop Surge is working, the more fuel for Bush's whack insistence that America must Stay The Course in Iraq. If you have any questions about exactly how that works, don't ask me. It's certainly whack and fucked to me.
And reminds me so very unhappily and creepily of Vietnam. General Petraeus was graduated from West Point in 1974, just too late to begin his Army career with a combat command in Vietnam. All he knows about the Vietnam War he learned in West Point classrooms.
So I think I'll call him General Westmoreland, Jr. And I think I can see his future as Bush's commander-on-the-ground in Iraq, and the circumstances of his honorable retirement to Oblivion (where he can play golf with Peter Pace), as clearly as I can see into the Grey Area. Like William Westmoreland, Patraeus has hitched his career wagon to a pathetically plummeting star and an addled president and loopy war cabinet. Like Westmoreland, Petraeus doesn't really understand what kind of war he's fighting, and he doesn't effectively know or understand his enemy or what motivates his enemy.
He's not supposed to understand these things. If he understood them, he'd advise the President and the American people to get the fuck out of Iraq immediately.
So he might even think that if we just keep sending more and more combat troops to Iraq, to support our courageous Iraqi allies, eventually the world's greatest military and industrial superpower will achieve Victory and impose our will on the people of Iraq, and turn it into a democracy closely resembling Indiana.
Please feel free to filch this graphic and pass it around. It's just data points and numbers -- which happen to represent the deaths of our neighbors' children in a senseless, foot-shooting, pre-doomed, scoundrels' and liars' war over the last seventeen months.
And please feel free to Leave A Comment. There seems to be some controversy associated with this war. Like Vietnam there seem to be Americans who are enthused about this war and want it to last longer and grow more violent. Senator Lieberman thinks that while we're at it, we should bomb Iran, and Senator McCain, who wants to be President of the USA, likes to sing the "Bomb Iran" song.
If you haven't had nearly enough of the Iraq War, if you want more, and want more Evidence of Victory to be flown back to Dover Air Force Base, make me wise, Leave A Comment.
There might also be controversy associated with this graph. The blue quadrilateral that encloses all the data points of the last seventeen months sure does seem to be pointing Up, and promising to keep rising. But does that mean anything of value for predicting the future of this particular dynamic system considered entirely as a regular generator of data points?
Could the quadrilateral -- as some warhawks and Fox News psychos fervently predict -- take a dramatic plunge Down any day now? Is the Troop Surge about to produce the moment when all the pretty young Iraqi girls will run out into the street and throw their arms around the American soldiers and marines who have freed them from the tyranny of Sadaam Hussein, and brought Freedom and Democracy and Coca-Cola and rock & roll and theme parks and chewing gum and Hershey bars and iPods to Iraq? Is the Troop Surge finally about to bring us cheap gasoline?
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