Sunday, January 07, 2007

Saigon to Baghdad


In "The Timely Death of Gerald Ford" Frank Rich (full column link below) does his best to prepare us for this week's War Speech from the little decider from hell.

Our long national nightmare in Iraq, far from being over, is about to get a second wind.

It’s against the backdrop of both the Hussein video and the Ford presidency that we must examine the prospect of that much-previewed “surge” in Iraq — a surge, by the way, that the press should start calling by its rightful name, escalation.

The "surge," then, is a sham. It is not meant to achieve that undefined "victory" Bush keeps talking about but to serve his own political spin. His real mission is to float the 'we're not winning, we're not losing' status quo until Jan. 20, 2009. After that, as Joseph Biden put it last week, a new president will 'be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.'"

Read the whole thing. . .