Blogged

Operation CYA, or Shock and Awe reprised

By Phil Barron ⋅ March 16, 2006 ⋅  ⋅   ⋅  Post a comment ⋅ 

With the president’s poll numbers tanking and Americans increasingly tuning him out on Iraq, the administration’s apparent response is to go back to the last tactic that the folks at home actually liked: blowing things up from the air. The so-called “Operation Swarmer” - an attack on “a suspected insurgent stronghold” somewhere northeast of Samarra - looks like nothing so much as a “do it louder” response to war critics, and an opportunity to convince the skeptical that Iraqi troops really are up to the job of security. Of course, it’s a lot easier to meet that challenge with the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team and Black Hawk and Apache choppers at your back.

The war handlers in Washington are busy on the home front as well. President Bush finally managed to dig up the belated “national security strategy”. This document - the ‘C’ in Operation CYA - rationalizes the strike-first approach that has so far produced nothing but dead people: twenty-three hundred American soldiers and literally countless thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children.

Of course, the rationale of striking Iraq first to protect America has already been exposed as thoroughly bankrupt, but the president doubtless hopes no one will mind the confusion here. With yet another country - Iran - now being flogged as a challenge to the nation, the timing of this strategy’s official release shows that George Bush now has other fish to fry.