“Operation Swarm” the News Cycle…

The largest military assault in Iraq since… well, the last time a large military assauult was announced… this time, called Operation Swarmer, involving over 1,500 U.S. troops and over 50 aircraft of various sizes were deployed in an anti-insurgent operation near the Samarra area of Iraq, toward purported insurgent strongholds and weapons caches. Coming just a few days shy of the third anniversary of the commencement of the Iraq war, I guess we can call this “shock and awe light”. Perhaps very light. It comes as the extremely fragile “democracy” we installed met in the form of a brief meeting of Iraq’s parliament, still unable to form a government, which promptly adjourned.
While one hopes that the primary goal of this operation is, in fact, a military one, and that there is reasonably good intelligence about the location of insurgent positions… one has grave doubts about such things with the Bush Administration. That anything and everything it does might well be timed for maximum political value as opposed to military logistical, strategic or tactical value… is always a concern. Certainly the President’s record low (for him) poll numbers and approval ratings (exacerbated by the bizarre confluence of Fudd-gate showing us that Administration “grown-up” Dick Cheney is not merely a putz but a klutz and the insanely cognitive dissonance generating ports deal) might well call for… something…
Or, perhaps, Congress needs a quick diversion lest anyone notice its voting to increase the national debt ceiling to a staggering $8.96 trillion… as promise after promise about fiscal restraint by the so-called “conservative” majority went by the way-side amidst the political imperative to solve problems by throwing money at them… and heaven help us, paying for this spending with actual taxation cost Poppy Bush his job in ’92, and not paying for it has kept the GOP in clover from ’94 to date… so they’ll be damned if they get all “responsible” on us now…
Or perhaps, both Congress and the White House need a big diversion lest anyone pay attention to the whitewash bill to retroactively make the Bush Administration’s blatantly unconstitutional and illegal warrantless surveillance suddenly legal… with the approval of just a handful of friendly senators… Republican Senators DeWine, Hagel, Snowe and Graham think that they can get away with that… All they’ve shown us is that if Dick Nixon had been blessed with a GOP majority in Congress, he’d have simply asked them to pass a law retroactively making breaking into the other party’s offices and then attempting to cover it up legal…
As always, the consistent, harmonized theme of both the Bush White House and its lapdogs in the Republican controlled Congress remains the same: quick… look over there…