Operation: Save Bush's Legacy

By Robert Parry
January 3, 2007

If press reports are correct – that George W. Bush will approve a troop “surge” in Iraq of 17,000 to 20,000 soldiers – the follow-up question must be whether the escalation will do anything but get more Americans and Iraqis killed while only forestalling the defeat of Bush’s war policy.

Even top advocates for the “surge,” such as retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and neoconservative activist Frederick W. Kagan, have argued that U.S. troop levels must be increased by at least 30,000 for 18 months or more to bring security to Baghdad, what they call a “precondition” for any successful outcome.

“Any other option is likely to fail,” Keane and Kagan wrote in an Op-Ed article in the Washington Post on Dec. 27, 2006.

So, the more modest escalation of up to 20,000 soldiers would appear to represent what might be called “Operation: Save Bush’s Legacy,” with the goal of postponing the inevitable until 2009 when American defeat can be palmed off on a new President.

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