Did someone spike Senator Boxer's Wheaties this morning?

Barbara Boxer confiscated the testicles of Lindsay Graham on national teevee, and I don't think she intends to give them back.

Appearing on CNN this morning, Graham said that those of us who have the audacity to oppose the escalation/troop build-up/splurge and criticise the Useless Tool™ are calling the troops 'losers' Senator Boxer set the fuckin' record straight, with not a moment of hesitation.

“I don’t know anyone who opposes this war that ever said our troops are losers. Our troops are winners.” But she wasn't done - she was just gettin started, in fact - “Lindsey, just be careful what you say. The bottom line here is that the losers are the ones who have engineered this war, made a huge mistake — Dick Cheney we’re in the last throes, the war will last six months — and all of you who have supported this escalation and have turned us away from fighting al Qaeda into putting us in the middle of a civil war. The loser is the Commander-in-Chief who has not led our country well.” (emphasis added)

Watch it, but pop some corn first:

(Transcript here, h/t Think Progress.)

So much for 12-months “Dwell Time”

Stars & Stripes reported Thursday that the Army is rotating a combat company back to Iraq a mere nine months after they left. Members of the 1^st Armored Division, 1^st Battalion, 6^th Infantry, Company A were informed on Tuesday that they will return to Iraq in November, for a 15 month deployment. They just finished a 13-month deployment to Iraq in February.

On April 11, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that tours would be extended to 15 months for all active duty Army personnel currently deployed or with orders to the theatre of operations. At the time the extended tours were announced, the SecDef also stressed that soldiers would be guaranteed a full year at home.

When asked about the situation late Wednesday, Mr. Gates said he could not explain why the Army was sending the company back to battle a mere nine months after it’s last deployment finished. “I’ll be very interested to find out more about that. We just need to find out about that, because I made it clear that people would have 12 months at home.” (emphasis added)

Apparently the SecDef needs to have a chat with Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman about just what, exactly the Secretary meant when he said those words, because he got something entirely different out of the SecDef’s proclamation..

“[T]here are some people, just by the nature of transferring units and things like that may not end up with the full 12 months.”

“The United States military is not a static organization,” Whitman said.

The Army, Whitman said, is “managing intensely” “individuals in units, and assignment policies, and rotations and things like that.”

“But it’s not going to be 100 percent, or you would have to basically, you know, lock down the Army, and nobody would transfer from one combat unit to another combat unit,” Whitman said.

Rather than a guarantee, Whitman said, the 12-month dwell time between deployments “is a goal, to have units and individuals to have an appropriate amount of time for recovery and for stability purposes at home station and to be able to be with their families.”

So…a promise made to the services by the Secretary of Defense is a goal, eh?

The fact remains, we have asked too much of our services, especially of the Army. It is simply unsustainable. We have a reckoning in store, and it will not be pleasant to deal with. It would behoove us to start that process now.

Now Even Surgier!!!

These guys just don’t get it…

Americans. Want. This. War. Over.

Our military is over extended and facing a decades-long restoration and rebuilding phase. Our Army is being both abused and neglected. And the top-brass is doing the opposite of what needs to be done.

The so-called “surge” of troops is a sustained escalation, pure and simple, a Hail Mary pass made into triple coverage. We have been told that we can just deal, because it will last another year. Five years of fighting an urban guerrilla war.

The Pentagon announced yesterday that 35,000 soldiers in 10 Army combat brigades will begin deploying to Iraq in August as replacements, making it possible to sustain the increase of U.S. troops there until at least the end of this year.

U.S. commanders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that heightened troop levels, announced by President Bush in January, will need to last into the spring of 2008. The military has said it would assess in September how well its counterinsurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, is working.

"The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the day-to-day commander for U.S. military operations in Iraq. The new requirement of up to 15-month tours for active-duty soldiers will allow the troop increase to last until spring, said Odierno, who favors keeping experienced forces in place for now.

"What I am trying to do is to get until April so we can decide whether to keep it going or not," he said in an interview in Baghdad last week. "Are we making progress? If we're not making any progress, we need to change our strategy. If we're making progress, then we need to make a decision on whether we continue to surge."

While informing us that the troop buildup will proceed apace, and just get used to the daily deaths in double digits, damnit…

While telling us to suck it up, they also tell us it most likely ain’t gonna work…

Commanders said that even with the ongoing increase in Iraq of tens of thousands of American troops, violence could increase in coming months, and some indicators in Baghdad suggest that is already happening.

Partial data on attacks gathered from five U.S. brigades operating in Baghdad showed that total attacks since the new strategy began in February were either steady or increasing. In some cases, certain kinds of attacks dipped as the U.S. troop increase began, only to begin rising again in recent weeks. Overall, "the number of attacks has stayed relatively constant" in Baghdad, said one U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be quoted by name.

The U.S. military commands that oversee Baghdad and Iraq as a whole have so far failed to meet requests to release current statistics on attack trends, with some U.S. officers voicing concern that the information would be skewed by critics to argue that the strategy is not working.

People – Petraeus said it himself – the solution is going to be political – not military.

I realize that admitting to being the wrongest group of mother fuckers in history makes the moronic militaristic mental midgets at the AEI reluctant to suck it up and admit that they have been 180º from correct on every single thing. Yes, admitting to a degree of wrongness that is tantamount to treason is an unpalatable idea – but it is not going to taste better in six months or six years. how about instead of we suck it up and give them "two more Friedmans" - they suck it up and we call this whole thing off?

Does anyone else feel like they are in the War Room with General Ripper?

Congress needs to stand firm and take the steps available to them to end this fiasco now.

The steps I refer to include impeachment of both executives and at least one cabinet member.

About that S(pl)urge...

.

It certainly seems to be having an effect in Diyala province, I’ll give it that. Only one minor detail: It is creating a more lethal adversarial force for the American military to reckon with.

From the Washington Post:

In Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, the American military is engaged in an intractable guerrilla fight against an elusive and sophisticated enemy more deadly than many battle-hardened soldiers have ever encountered in Iraq. The attacks on U.S. and Iraqi soldiers here have risen sharply in recent months, a problem compounded by an influx of fighters in search of safer havens outside Baghdad. Many of the insurgents are well-trained, highly mobile fighters who refuse to get dragged into open confrontations in which American forces can deploy their overpowering weaponry.

The insurgents "fight in small numbers, they try and hit you through subterfuge, they like using snipers," said Sgt. 1st Class Benjamin Hanner, 35, of Redding, Calif., part of an armored unit of Stryker combat vehicles that took part in the Buhriz al-Barra assault. "These guys know what they're doing. They're controlled, their planning is good, their human intel network and early-warning networks are effective."

These techniques have become increasingly devastating to the Americans in this province. Since November, when the 5,000-member 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division deployed to Diyala, at least 46 American soldiers have died in the fighting, officers said. Eleven U.S. soldiers were killed in the province from October 2005 to October 2006, according to a Washington Post database. Diyala was the eighth-deadliest province for Americans in 2006 but has risen to third this year, after Baghdad and Anbar provinces.

So – take a relatively restive province, add insurgent fighters displaced by increased American troop presence, and what do you get? Violence, destruction and death on an epic scale, heretofore unseen.

Heckuva Job.

Now, who gets this Medal of Freedom?