http://select.nytimes.com/2007…..an.html?hp

Quagmire of the Vanities
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The only real question about the planned “surge” in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional.

Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks they’re cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be “the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.”

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they’re delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one’s losses — the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

Of course, such gambling is easier when the lives at stake are those of other people’s children.

Well, we don’t have to settle the question. Either way, what’s clear is the enormous price our nation is paying for President Bush’s character flaws.

They should be called “The Escalation Eunuchs.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..01810.html

subway @ #17

Gore & Dean

i’ll back that ticket.

I wouldn’t mind Gore-Clark myself. And then President Gore can ask Howard to continue servings as head of the DNC for another 4 years. Then in 2012 after 4 years of President Gore with a filibuster proof Democratic majority in both the House and Senate… Maybe, just maybe, we can undo a lot of the terror Dubya’s brought down on this planet.

is that before or after the monkeys come flying out of my ass?

what has been “leaked” about fuckwad’s “surge plan” is preposterous on it’s face. a billion dollars for “jobs” and supplies to give the jobs purpose? talk about money down a rat hole. kurdish troops in bagdad? both the sunnis and the shia will welcome them with open arms. if they show up. iraqi brigades will fall apart as soon as they’re deployed, if they muster enough bodies to be deployed.

gilliard is so right about this.

punaise @
33

the Surge Sisters are being coy at the Suck (H)up tonight

Yes! Now you can SURGE and SUCK!

good one.

The reported strategery will have Maliki and the Iraqi military laying waste to the Sunnis and the US taking on the Shiite death squads.

What could go wrong with such a plan?

-GSD

Only this: It would fail to maximize the fucked-upness of the, um, enterprise. What’s needed to get all the way to the failure possibility boundary, is to add this (by way of Steve’s News Blog):

They said two-thirds of the promised Iraqi force would consist of Kurdish pesh merga units to be sent from northern Iraq, and they said some doubts remained about whether they would show up in Baghdad and were truly committed to quelling sectarian fighting.