Bush's undemocratic escalation.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Column

There's a proverb that says, "Bad beginnings lead to bad endings." U.S. troops are discovering the truth of that every day in Baghdad, Anbar province, and elsewhere throughout that country.

The American people have absorbed the truth of that proverb, as well. A majority wants U.S. troops out of there within the year. On November 7, voters drove that point home, booting Republicans from power. In a December 15 CNN poll, only 11 percent said they wanted to send more troops in.

The soldiers themselves have come to the same conclusion. A February 2006 Zogby poll revealed that 72 percent of them believed that all U.S. troops should leave Iraq within a year's time.

And no wonder.

Bush's war has cost the lives of more than 3,000 U.S. troops and anywhere from 52,000 Iraqi civilians to more than ten times that number. A figure for wounded Iraqis is hard to come by. For U.S. soldiers, that number exceeds 22,000.

The financial toll is also exorbitant. We are spending $2 billion a week on this horror, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that it will end up costing the United States $3 trillion.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blithely says it's all "worth the investment."

Her boss is too insulated or too stubborn or too macho or too deluded to face reality and accept the fig leaf that James Baker offered him so he--and our troops--could get out of there.

"This business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever," Bush said.

He's absolutely right about that.

There is no exit marked "graceful." The only exits from Iraq are marked "clumsy," "embarrassing," "humiliating," "bloody," "bloodier," and "bloodiest."

But somehow Bush thinks he can still be victorious in Iraq. Even Henry Kissinger doesn't believe that anymore. And the commanders, including the Joint Chiefs, advised Bush against sending more troops.

Bush responded by scolding them and then changing commanders. After a classified Pentagon briefing in December, General James Conway described Bush's message the following way: "What I want to hear from you is how we're going to win, not how we're going to leave."

The new U.S. military strategy seems to be "surge and train."

But neither has any hope of success.

As University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole notes, "The U.S. put an extra 15,000 men into Baghdad this past summer, aiming to crush the guerrillas and stop the violence in the capital, and the number of attacks actually increased." The reason...