Hoon's troop movement sparks outrage

[struggle4progress]

The government pulled what the Americans call the old "bait and switch" stunt yesterday. Basically this means hooking the public with one offer in the hopes that, having suckered them in, you can palm them off with the thing you wanted to flog them in the first place.

So having told us that 3,000 extra troops might be sent to Iraq, and with Tony Blair telling us on Wednesday that no decision had been made, and the implication, seized on by paranoid MPs - which these days is most of them - that the order to send the lads east would be made in next week's parliamentary recess, they they hit us with: Geoff Hoon!
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So it turned out that instead of 3,000 troops, we were sending only 370, a mere 4.3% rise instead of 35%!
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Alec Salmond asked when ministers would admit that "they have led this country into a morass of monumental proportions ... we need an exit strategy, not a bigger hole strategy".
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http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1226489,00.html