The Bush administration has a new fallback strategy: blame and run.
The administration must now realize that this might be be an unwinnable conflict. (In my view, it is, in fact, unwinnable because of all the eggregious strategic and tactical military and political mistakes we made in not winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, immediately after we became an occupational force in Iraq, which resulted in formenting the insurgency and sectarian/civil war and now utter lawlessness.) And if you are not winning the war against the insurgency, you are losing the war. Isn't that the lesson of Vietnam we did not learn from the French? Draws go to the insurgents, not the occupational forces. And these kill ratios of the enemy have no relevance when battling an enemy that recognizes it has the capacity to incur exponentially more causalities than the occupational forces -- Westmorland got it all wrong and we're still getting it wrong in Iraq too.
There is a very remote possibility that a surge could work, if all the stars are aligned right: we tactically wipe out the lawlessness and restore security and peace in the major hotspots (without in turn formenting more hatred for us) and the Iraqi political leadership meets every benchmark and goal we have established for them; i.e. installing capable Iraqi military and police leadership, interceding to halt the sectarian violence, bringing the Sunnis under the political tent, and backstopping our efforts to prevent foreign fighters from crossing the borders into Iraqi.
This aint gonna happen, as some of these folks must know. Why do we believe we can rely on an Iraqi administration that can't even execute Saddam without making it a major promotional piece for the Sunni insurgency?
So, what's likely to happen is that this new military tactic of surging troops in Bagdad and other trouble spots will further alienate the Iraqi people, after all, a large majority of them want us out of their country and the recent polls said that the Iraqi people think this surge stuff is stupid. There will be some short term gains, more of our troops will get killed, and eventually the insurgency will come roaring back, and the present Iraqi government will continue to be ineffective but we have to continue to prop it up cause there is no other alternative except splitting the country up. 12 months after the surge, when we realized it has failed, the Bush administration will start the blame game.
We'll blame the Iraqis, we'll blame our military leadership (yeah why didn't you stop us from engaging in our delusional approach) and we'll blame Syria, Iran and Al-Queda. And then after we've buried more of our troops, the next Administration will come into office and begin the process of withdrawing troops, blaming the Bush Administration.
That's the plan, right?