End Run Around the Home Team

In a move that should come as no surprise to anyone, Emperor Bush has staged a successful end run around any attempts to prevent implementation of his latest Iraq battle plan.

ABC News has learned that the "surge" Bush is expected to announce in a prime time speech tonight has already begun. Ninety advance troops from the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in Baghdad Wednesday.

An additional battalion of roughly 800 troops from the same division are expected to arrive in Baghdad Thursday. ABC News

It's a done deal, troops are on the ground and moving in faster than a pack of yuppies at a Pottery Barn clearance sale.

Gets even more interesting when you consider from whence they are coming. Our supposed "commitment" to Afghanistan and our UK and Canadian allies not withstanding, apparently keeping the Taliban out of the mix is no longer a priority.

Already, a U.S. Army infantry battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks in order to deploy to Iraq.

According to Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata and other senior U.S. commanders here, that will happen just as the Taliban is expected to unleash a major campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar. The official said the Taliban intend to seize Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city and the place where the group was organized in the 1990s.
Baltimore Sun

Deanie Mills at Blue Inkblots has more.

My son fought with honor and bravery in that bloody desert country; once during the now-famous Battle of Fallujah in November of '04, and again more recently, in locations scattered throughout the Anbar province. He saw one friend get both legs and an arm blown off, another lose a hand, another get killed by a bullet to the head, and more horrors than he would be comfortable knowing I was writing about in such a public place. He also once drove a Humvee over an improvised explosive device that blew up beneath him. He was medivacced out, checked over, and sent back into combat.

Now, he's finding out that Marines like him who are "short-timers," completing their final year in the service, are being badgered and harassed and downright threatened in an attempt to force them to go back to Iraq, even if their own unit is not scheduled to do so. Marines in Dustin's unit, for instance, are being told that if they don't re-enlist in order to deploy with their own units (which aren't scheduled to go back until they are out of the Marines), then they must actually join other units that are scheduled to return soon.

Younger, more vulnerable Marines succumb to such pressures, and now, due to the new "surge" policy, those Marines will be deploying a full month ahead of time and held over for FIVE MONTHS longer than their usual tours. (If, of course, they survive that long.) And they won't even be with their buddies they served with before and upon whom they have come to rely for their lives, because they were pressed into another unit that was due to deploy soon.This is happening because the Marines are being pressured to come up with thousands of troops THEY DON'T HAVE for this so-called, politely-worded "surge."

I cannot honestly add much of anything to what Ms. Mills had to say in her post, there is much more so head over if you can bear to read another manifesto on this "surge", this was the one that really spoke to me and for me.

And Ms. Mills, I'm with you, I keep hoping that I might be proved WRONG.