Oh sweet effing jesus...

...I mean, we knew stuff like this was true, but that doesn't mean we wanted it confirmed, you know (via Atrios and Carpetbagger)?

In going for more troops, Bush is picking an option that seems to have little favor beyond the White House and a handful of hawks on Capitol Hill and in think tanks who have been promoting the idea almost since the time of the invasion.

...

Although the president was publicly polite, few of the key Baker-Hamilton recommendations appealed to the administration, which intensified its own deliberations over a new "way forward" in Iraq. How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme.

As described by participants in the administration review, some staff members on the National Security Council became enamored of the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton.

There are a couple of quotes I want to point out, but first, here is the response from the Carpetbagger Report...

The Bush gang decided to change course in Iraq, but went out of their way to “look distinctive” from the Iraq Study Group? Troop escalation wasn’t in the ISG report, so the Bush gang latched onto the idea because the ISG didn’t endorse it? As if this all some kind of exercise in Oedipal spite?

Exactly what kind of men-children are we dealing with here?

Legal Fiction’s publius, who also seemed disturbed by this, had a good piece on the subject.

[I]f the NSC official is correct, Bush is picking this option out of vanity and spite simply because the Baker Group didn’t offer it.

All in all, it sounds like a promising strategy. After all, if history has taught us nothing else, it’s that military strategies with no empirical basis adopted out of pride and vanity are usually phenomenally successful.

Again...vanity, arrogance, takes-advice-worse-than-a-spoiled-child...we knew our president had all these characteristics. But still.

This whole story, though, comes down to two main quotes. First...

The president wasn't satisfied with the recommendations he was getting, and he thought we need a strategy that was more purposeful and likely to succeed if the Iraqis could make that possible," said Philip D. Zelikow, who recently stepped down as State Department counselor after being involved with Iraqi policy the past two years.

"I mean...the plan woulda worked if not for them damn freedom-hating Iraqis..."

And second...

He has fashioned a plan to add up to 20,000 troops to the 132,000 U.S. service members already on the ground. As Bush plans it, the military will soon be "surging" in Iraq two months after an election that many Democrats interpreted as a mandate to begin withdrawing troops.

Just in case he hadn't already, he is sealing his fate with this one. The American public has said they don't want to a) be in Iraq, or b) send more troops to Iraq. And beyond that, Bush is wanting to send (last I heard) 21,500 troops when he's been told that 9,000 are available. So we'll be sending about 12,000 or so unprepared troops over to fight. As publius goes on to say in the above-linked post, "Bush is choosing an option that has zero support from anyone except those who have consistently been wrong about pretty much everything relating to Iraq. Military officials, Middle East experts, and foreign officials are all opposed because they don't think it will work. And that makes sense given that the underlying problem today in 2007 is not so much a lack of security, but a sectarian civil war that is ultimately a political problem."

He thinks he's playing a war game on Xbox...there are no real consequences to his actions and he's too lazy to get up and hit the Reset button, so he's just going to play this out and make sure it doesn't work. Never mind that he's playing with real lives.