Last night on MSNBC’s “Countdown,” Keith Olbermann reported that Pres. Bush will announce next week that he is sending 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. According to NBC and the BBC, the president will try to sell the escalation as a “sacrifice” by the American people in order to achieve stability in the Middle East.
The real reason for the escalation, of course, is to try to create sufficient stability in the region so that Bush can declare “victory” in Iraq before he leaves office.
In an editorial later in the show, Olbermann expressed outrage at the president’s intent to require the sacrifice of additional American troops in order to salvage what is left of his own legacy:
If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene?
Would you at least protest?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them — and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?
And:
[From] our impeccable reporter at the Pentagon, Jim Miklaszewski, tonight comes confirmation of something called “surge and accelerate†— as many as 20,000 additional troops —for “political purposes†…
This, in line with what we had previously heard, that this will be proclaimed a short-term measure, for the stated purpose of increasing security in and around Baghdad, and giving an Iraqi government a chance to establish some kind of order.
This is palpable nonsense, Mr. Bush.
And:
The additional men and women you have sentenced to go there, sir, will serve only as targets.
They will not be there “short-term,†Mr. Bush; for many it will mean a year or more in death’s shadow.
This is not temporary, Mr. Bush.
For the Americans who will die because of you, it will be as permanent as it gets.
Finally:
This senseless, endless war.
But — it has not been senseless in two ways.
It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
It has gotten many of us used to the idea — the virtual “white noise†— of conflict far away, of the deaths of young Americans, of vague “sacrifice†for some fluid cause, too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrase “the war on terror.â€
And the war’s second accomplishment — your second accomplishment, sir — is to have taken money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield, and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers.
Because if you sell the Army a thousand Humvees, you can’t sell them any more until the first thousand have been destroyed.
The service men and women are ancillary to the equation.
What a waste: The lives of our troops; the lives of innocent Iraqi grandmothers, babies, children, mothers and fathers killed as “collateral damage” by our bombs; the millions spent on the 9/11 commission; the millions spent on the Iraq Study Group; and the billions we have spent, and will continue to spend, on a war based on nothing more than the whim of a foolish, self-aggrandizing aristocrat.
