I’ve neither seen it nor read it since I was at the Wizards game where DC won despite Agent Zero scoring “only” 20 points on horrible 5-16 shooting. Goes to show crazy things can happen. Thus, the surge is a good idea. Just kidding. It’s still crazy. But as I say, haven’t read or seen the speech yet (will get on that). For now, let me note the reaction of Michael Gerson, currently pretending to be a foreign policy expert at CFR but in fact Bush’s speechwriter 2000-2006:

The speech was direct, strong and detailed. But the policy announced tonight matters far more than the words—and that policy represents a major shift. For the first time since the fall of Baghdad, the president has set out a realistic plan to secure the citizens of that city in order to allow political and economic progress to move forward.

Gerson goes on, offering the level of BS one would expect from the man who wrote the presidents BS for so many years, but just consider this: Gerson concedes that the administration proceeded for years without a realistic plan!

“No Surge” Bush Surge Protector t-shirts now available. Also Swag t-shirts if that’s more your thing.

Get your GOP Bush Iraq speech talking points right here. These are from the House Armed Services Committee and these come from the House Republican Conference. Suffice it to say that the general plan seems to be to attack attacks on the idea of escalation without defending escalation as such. Call it the Zengerle/Klein strategy.

Via an indignant Martin Peretz, a New York Times article about voice recordings of Saddam Hussein discussing his brutal repression of the Kurds in the late 1980s. Remarks Peretz, “Saddam thrills to say, ‘Yes, they will kill thousands.’ And, yes, roughly 180,000 Kurds were killed by chemical warfare. So, please, stop this nonsense about how he didn’t deserve to die.” At the time of the killing, of course, Peretz was using his perch as owner and editor in chief of The New Republic to print articles like the classic April 1987 Laurie Mylroie / Daniel Pipes collaboration “Back Iraq: It’s Time for a U.S. Tilt”.

UPDATE: The theory has been raised in comments that Saddam was a swell dude at the time of publication and only became evil later during 1988′s Anfal campaign. I would recommend a read of chapter one and chapter two of the Human Rights Watch Anfal Report which deals with events before the publication of the Mylroie/Pipes article. The worst was yet to come, but things were pretty damn bad already. Certainly nobody genuinely concerned about the well-being of Kurdish people would have been urging a pro-Iraqi tilt.

Mona Charen gives us some of that good, principled, serious conservative national security policy analysis: “The President also plans to ask for a larger army – a little late and so necessary! It will be interesting to see how the Democrats in Congress handle that one. All that talk of supporting the troops. . .”

For better or for worse, expanding the end strength of the Army has been a longstanding Democratic Party policy proposal. It was, for example, part of John Kerry platform. Did Charen or anyone else at NRO ever suggest that George W. Bush’s longstanding opposition to this idea impugned his patriotism or level of support for our troops?

I taped a diavlog with Ann Althouse on Monday during which we wound up mostly agreeing that the Democratic congress was unlikely to change very much about Iraq, largely because they can’t change very much. As I noted yesterday, however, after we recorded the episode, the Center for American Progress released this briefing paper on congressional powers over military deployments and also organized a conference call on the subject. Armed with said facts and information, I’m now much more inclined to think the Democrats have some options.

I continue to worry, however, that if Democrats merely try to halt the surge, the issue would be regarded as non-justiciable. Marty Lederman doubts this, but let me try to sketch out a scenario. The Bush administration requests supplemental funding for Iraq. The congress, as per the Center’s suggestion, attached a provision to the appropriation mandating that troop levels not rise above some target figure. Bush signs the appropriation and issues a signing statement saying that his commander in chief power allows him to blah blah blah. Then Bush simply orders some brigades to Iraq such that force levels would pass over the cap and the orders duly pass down the chain of command — troops begin to move. What happens next? Someone sues? The Supreme Court orders one of the division to return to the USA? Which one? Federal courts normally give wide deference to executive authority on national security measures and I just find it very hard to imagine them getting involved in that kind of a dispute.

Just as I say in my column on the personnel shakeup I think that for better or for worse (which is to say for worse) we’re more-or-less stuck with Bush and his poor decisionmaking no matter what anyone else says or does.

The Washington Post reports that America’s generals don’t think much of Bush’s plan “to add up to 20,000 troops to the 132,000 U.S. service members already on the ground.” Interestingly, even though they don’t put it that way, even th eauthors of the surge plan think this is a bad idea: “Kagan and Keane both emphasized that the surge has to be both substantial (minimum 30,000 troops) and sustained (minimum 18 months).” A Kagan-Keane sized escalation won’t be mounted because the Joint Chiefs say it’s logistically impossible. But according to Kagan and Keane success requires “a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so. Any other option is likely to fail.”

This is the sort of thing that can make a man shrill; I’m not sure what other indication you need that this cruel farce is being undertaken in bad faith. Or does Bush have some actual reason to believe that the number of additional troops required for the Iraq mission to succeed just so happens to be the exact number of troops who it’s logistically possible to send? That’s be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?

Super-loyal readers may have been paying attention the afternoon of December 26 when I noted Major Kelley Thibodeau seemingly going off her game to explain that “Officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia. The Americans don’t go forward with the Ethiopians. They are training Ethiopians in Ethiopia.” According to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross the truth is that:

U.S. ground forces have been active in Somalia from the start, a senior military intelligence officer confirmed. “In fact,” he said, “they were part of the first group in.”

These ground forces include CIA paramilitary officers who are based out of Galkayo, in Somalia’s semiautonomous region of Puntland, Special Operations forces, and Marine units operating out of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti.

It’s also looking more like that AC-130 strike was directed against some random anti-Ethiopian fighters rather than “an al-Qaeda cell” as per the initial claim. I’m not sure I grasp why the administration prefers to mislead about this stuff. I don’t approve of a policy of having the United States directly insert itself into Ethiopia’s issues with the Islamic Courts Union, but this hasn’t seemed to me to be an incredibly popular position. I would think Bush would be bragging about his involvement in Ethiopia’s swift conquest of Somalia. Perhaps the administration just lies on principle?