President Bush Aspires to Kill 35,000 Troops in Iraq

Yes, it's a ludicrous headline. But is it any more ludicrous than the media's current hysteria over six terrorist wannabes in Jersey who only had access to purchase the weapons they wanted because an FBI sting operative said he'd sell them to them?

While the media dutifully does its job of attempting to whip the public into a frenzy about the latest misfits in search of self-styled jihadist glory and the loathsome Chris Christie tries to play on public fears to launch whatever seat in Washington for which he's planning to run next year, let's look again at what the troops' own Commander-in-Chief is doing to them:

The Pentagon announced yesterday that 35,000 soldiers in 10 Army combat brigades will begin deploying to Iraq in August as replacements, making it possible to sustain the increase of U.S. troops there until at least the end of this year.

U.S. commanders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that heightened troop levels, announced by President Bush in January, will need to last into the spring of 2008. The military has said it would assess in September how well its counterinsurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, is working.

"The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the day-to-day commander for U.S. military operations in Iraq. The new requirement of up to 15-month tours for active-duty soldiers will allow the troop increase to last until spring, said Odierno, who favors keeping experienced forces in place for now.

"What I am trying to do is to get until April so we can decide whether to keep it going or not," he said in an interview in Baghdad last week. "Are we making progress? If we're not making any progress, we need to change our strategy. If we're making progress, then we need to make a decision on whether we continue to surge."

35,000 troops is not going to pacify Iraq. And as for progress, well, is Odierno saying it's going to take A FULL YEAR to determine if we're making progress? This country took less time to defeat Hitlerm Mussolini, and the Emperor of Japan. Of course during WWII, Americans were asked to sacrifice to finance the war effort, whereas this president is financing it with crushing debt that the children of the very people who voted for him will never be able to pay back, because HIS constituency -- the beneficiaries of much of his tax cuts -- refuses to sacrifice a nickel, and he knows that the rest of the American people are not inclined to give him another year of a blank check to feed tens of thousands more soldiers into a meatgrinder in an increasingly futile attempt to save his pathetic little ego.

This must stop. Rather than being willing to sacrifice even more of our civil liberties to this lunatic in the name of "safety", it's time for us to demand that he stop the gratuitous killing of a generation of young Americans in the name of his ego. And it's also time to not allow this Administration to play on the reptilian part of the human brain by flogging this arrest in south Jersey the way they have been. If we want to be outraged about plots to kill American soldiers, let's look at the man who is directly responsible for the deaths of over 3300 of them.