What's a Surge, Anyway? Oh Yeah, It's a Battle You Lose Eventually.

...and after you spend a gazillion dollars you supposedly couldn't possibly give to the poor because, you know, they're so irresponsible.

Troops on the move during Iraq "surge." Sources say we won the "surge." What's
winning? I don't know, ask ISIS. Their answer would be I got your "surge" right here.

Daily Kos flagged a Politico story on a potential new "surge" in Iraq against ISIS.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a 2016 candidate for president, recently called for sending 10,000 troops to Iraq. Fellow GOP presidential hopefuls Rick Perry, Scott Walker and George Pataki say they’re open to the idea. Last week, two key architects of George W. Bush’s 2007 troop surge told the Senate that up to 20,000 additional U.S. troops are needed to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. They’ve found an ally in Sen. John McCain, a longtime Republican hawk.

And even though President Barack Obama has ruled out the idea of a ground combat force — which is also a nonstarter for congressional Democrats — polls show growing public support for the idea.

Aside from the fact that the usual suspects are calling for war, war, war as the only way to deal with the ISIS threat, the real question, other than WTF?, is what in hell do you expect to accomplish by sending 10,000 or even 20,000 troops to fight ISIS on the ground?

I suggest one possible accomplishment: the biggest ISIS recruitment video in the history of ISIS recruitment videos. Sending 10,000 Americans to Iraq is one way of getting 50,000 new volunteers for ISIS.

Mind you, we'd blew people and stuff up really well for a while. And maybe, as we did in the last surge, we'd pay off some Sunnis to act all un-ISIS-like. Then we'd leave and the Middle East would go back to being the Middle East, with the Sunnis and Shia hating each other and both of them hating the Jews while chanting Death to America.

Or -- and that's a big OR -- we could let them sort it out and tell them that, when the smoke clears, we're going to be buying even less oil from them because we've decided the best way to win this war was through diplomacy, when feasible, and innovation in new energy sources and methods, where possible.

I've driven across Germany in the past year or so, and this is what it looks like.

We can look like Germany, too, a country that began producing 74% of its energy needs from renewable resources over a year ago.

Or -- and that's a really predictable OR -- we could go back to preferring SUVs to Priuses and war to peace. Which do you think it will be?

We are so fucked.

What's in this pic? 43 Toyota trucks we gave to Syrian rebels. Now they're
in the hands of ISIS. Didn't work out like we planned. Rarely does.

What's in this pic? Some of the $15 billion in cash sent to Iraq -- on pallets! --
but now generally listed as unaccounted for or "improperly" accounted for.

We're really good at nation building. We should do more of it! Maybe Lindsey Graham and John McCain can pass the hat. (The real way our wars were paid for is called "off the books.")

Thank God fiscal conservatives are against this sort of thing.