Be all that you can be, whether you like it or not, tour after tour after tour

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So how will the ongoing surge in Iraq be sustained? By sending in fresh troops? Hardly:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced yesterday that all active-duty soldiers currently deployed or going to Iraq and Afghanistan will see their one-year tours extended to 15 months, acknowledging that such a strain on the war-weary Army is necessary should the ongoing troop increase be prolonged well into next year.

The decision -- coming three months after President Bush put forth his new security plan for Iraq, including the deployment of at least 28,000 additional troops there -- reflects the reality that the new strategy is unfeasible without introducing longer Army tours.

The across-the-board extension will affect more than 100,000 active-duty soldiers and will result in the longest combat tours for the Army since World War II. It will also mandate for the first time that active-duty soldiers spend more time at war than at home.

So what's wrong with this? What isn't wrong with this?

First, troops who thought they were going home aren't. Second, the Iraq War isn't WWII. These tours are being extended for a war that no longer makes any sense (if it ever made any sense at all) and that is unwinnable. The troops are being sent not into a necessary and noble war but into an occupation of a country that has had more than enough of the occupation, an insurgency against that occupation, and a sectarian civil war that is going from bad to worse. Third, the surge won't succeed, whatever the illusion of short-term improvements. Fourth, the American people turned against the war a long time ago. Fifth, the U.S. military is already "stretched" (Gates's word) to the point where it can't respond effectively to other crises in the world.

And sixth, it was all a big lie. I'll let Kevin Drum explain: "It's not plausible that the Pentagon didn't know this when the surge was announced. They just decided not to announce it at the time."

But let's take that one step further. It's not plausible that the White House didn't know this. From the start, and even before, Bush has never levelled with the American people about the Iraq War, and this was no exception. He talked up the surge -- confidently stressing that the war was still winnable, just give it more time, give him more time, one last push -- but what he failed to mention was that the increase in troop levels was just an Enron-style deception.

The American people -- and particularly those with loved ones fighting Bush's disastrous war, risking their lives for a lost cause -- should be pissed off at this.