TPM Saturday morning post -- the best rundown I've seen about the "surge" scam.

[scarletwoman]

Don't be fooled by the subdued tone and subtle nuance of David Sanger's front page article in this morning's New York Times on the "New Way Forward" in Iraq. It is a milestone in the Bush Administration's public spin of the war, marking the first official acknowledgment that the surge and all the attendant fuss were nothing more than an elaborate stop-gap intended to buy time so that the colossal failure of the President's foreign policy can be pawned off on the next president:

The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush’s top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited, according to senior administration officials.

In interviews over the past week, the officials made clear that the White House is gradually scaling back its expectations for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The timelines they are now discussing suggest that the White House may maintain the increased numbers of American troops in Iraq well into next year.

<snip>

But the Administration has employed several sleights of hand (no surprise there) which are designed to allow it to buy more time. The biggest charade has been the deployment schedule, which has phased in the "surge" over a period of five months. The full contingent of troops won't be on the streets of Baghdad until May. So the surge is really more of a ripple.

The deployment schedule is largely a product of an overextended military. The only way, short of a draft, to increase the number of troops on the ground is to juggle the schedule through a combination of extended and accelerated deployments so that units' time in Iraq overlap. But the Administration will argue, come May, that the new strategy is only then fully implementational. We will be told that we have to give the new strategy a chance to work once all of its components are in place. The period from January to May when we thought we were watching the surge for signs of success was merely prelude, we will be told.

Really a must-read -- go to the link to read the whole piece.

sw

[rodeodance]

1. the "New Way Forward". like so many things with this WH--it is backwards.

[scarletwoman]

2. Heck, I was hoping *someone* would be interested in this piece...

[Lilith Velkor]

3. kicky-wicky