tell me how this ends

I am such a stupid girl. I come back to my (dorm) room early from our little training "casino night" so I can pack it in early and get a good night's sleep, unlike last night. But instead of picking up my easy Bitter is the New Black book to read before bed, I decide to finish reading the Washington Post I bought on Sunday at Panera (bought for $1.50 , mind you, while wearing the same clothes & make-up from the night before. if churchgoers and teenagers who think it's cool to have Sunday lunch dates are going to gawk at me for blatantly having "shacker" written all over me, then I might as well confuse them and buy a newspaper. oh, the slut can read? how novel…). (for the confused, I'm outside of DC for training for the week and spent last weekend with a friend in Fairfax. and, Saturday night is a blur.)

Silly me. Of course I would come across an article about the "surge." Ah, the surge. How I am already sick of hearing about the gd SURGE, and George hasn't even made his speech about it yet.

Before the Bush-aphiles (are there any left? … er, right?) turn off on me, a warning: you can support George all you want, but this (this - encompassing his handling of the Middle East) is stupid, and there's nothing I can do for you when the world finds out that he's fed us a crock of shit once again. If you had a nickel for every time George said we were winning that war when we most certainly were not, then .. THEN I wouldn't fault you for supporting Bush because you'd have a shitload of money that the reds would help you keep. I mean, in May of '03, George even dressed up in his little flight suit outfit and proudly declared, Mission Accomplished. Good show, sport. maybe he'll do the opposite of Schwarzenegger (yes i had to look up how to spell that) and star in crappy movies after his political stint (come now, you know they were crappy).

This is the thing. Bush is probably about to declare his surge as the next move towards winning the war in Iraq, if winning is even possible anymore. But surge is a verb, an action. And action has gotten us nowhere but deeper in debt, more hated by insurgents, and 3,000 more Americans dead. Perspective - let's move away from comparing to Vietnam and compare to WWII and 9/11. For the U.S., the war in Iraq is already longer than WWII and more deadly than 9/11. Already.

We don't need another action. Remember "shock and awe"? Yeah, that was pretty awesome, wasn't it? Shock and awe - I will always remember picking up a newspaper in England and seeing the front-page picture of a huge cloud of smoke rising above a flame-red city; i remember going back to my flat and staring at the picture and crying. I didn't know why I cried back then, but I think I know now.

We need a strategy. Everything I've heard and read that has been said by the actual men in Iraq has been akin to saying, Yes, of course we have plenty of work to do here, but we don't really know what we'd do with more men, because we already don't really know what we're doing with what we have. What kind of strategy? Now that is beyond anything I might know about foreign policy, diplomacy, war, etc. I really don't know anything about that; it's not my job. But it's mine to be upset that America is making a fool of itself, tripping over its own feet.

And I think the part that pisses me off the most is that I'm sitting in bed writing this goshdarn rant because I can't even sleep without saying my piece of mind first.

This is not a Bush bash, a leftist tirade (pointless rhetoric - ok yes probably); it's me saying I see something wrong and thankfully have the right in this country to say so. In the words of Lt. Gen. Petraeus (Bush's choice to become the top U.S. military commander in Iraq), said in 2003 on the initial march to Baghdad,

"Tell me how this ends."