The end of the year, generally shorthand for the period of the Thanksgiving-New Year’s holiday season, is traditionally a time for reflection of the year past, contemplation of the year to come, and along with the requisite moral inventory, the creation of these damned resolutions that are always so hard to keep. It’s also a time devoted to excess, wretched or otherwise, as we celebrate with too much food, alcohol, good times and often too much family.

I hope all of our readers had a happy and joyful period from Thanksgiving to ‘Hannukah or Christmas, whichever you celebrate. And of course best wishes for a safe New Year’s holiday as well.

So, how was our year? Not so good, actually. I don’t want to count grains of sand here, but one of the few bright spots of 2006 was the election upsets. It did cause a number of Republican deadbeats who somehow managed to hang onto their jobs to begin to push the White House to play nice with the Democratic Party. That, of course was reported with breathless excitement by a media that has consistently enabled the man’s drive to destroy American democracy for the last six years. Here’s hoping Democratic leaders like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are smarter than useful fools like David Ignatius, Fred Hiatt, and Debbie Howell of the Washington Post, and especially smarter than the Christmas Nutcrackers at Fox News. Mr Bu$h is far too childish and self-absorbed to ever consider the other side’s view of an issue. True bipartisanship from Mr Bu$h is as likely as a confession of his lies that got us into this mess.

The Likudnik operatives who have hijacked our foreign policy organs watched their Grand Plan for the New American Century to militarily dominate the Middle East fall apart this year and in desperation have demanded what was intended all along: a larger American armed force in Iraq so as to improve the chances of direct armed conflict with Iran. Iran must be reduced to chaos and its infrastructure destroyed as Iraq’s has been in order to ensure peace – well, peace after Syria is also destroyed, that is.

We learned this week that the “surge” the neocons suggested isn’t really a surge after all but more properly a reinforcement of the troops in-country. Some call it an escalation, which is also a valid description. The latest figures being blithely bandied about is a progressive buildup of some four Army brigades (approximately 20,000 bodies, at full TO&E) and two to three Marine regiments, which should work out to be somewhere around 8,000 to 10,000 troops, depending on how successful they are in quickly fleshing out thinned ranks due to previous deployments. To do this, they’ll probably have to dig pretty deep into Reserve units. All of this takes time, of course. Units have to be alerted, tasked, manpower requirements filled with drafts from other units. Missing personal equipment has to be collected up, perhaps from other reserve units, and then all those bodies have to be serviced administratively – records reviews, medical exams, shots, dependent and beneficiary updates, financial allotments – the list goes on and on. Fortunately (or perhaps not) the US military has been doing this for years now and practice always makes it easier more efficient.

It’s anticipated that the bulk of the Army troops will go to Baghdad while the Marines go back to Anbar province in order to take on the Sunni/Ba’athist/dead enders/resistance there.

The official story is that we’re off to a great adventure – dismantling the Mahdi Army and eliminating Muqtada al-Sadr. This will make things more difficult politically for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who derives a great deal of his political power from Mr Sadr’s constituents. It could make things easier for Mr Hakim, the Iranian-backed head of SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and also of the Badr Brigades. It says a lot about the political desperation of the Bu$h malAdministration that they are going to involve us in Iraqi sectarian politics, and make life easier for an Iranian proxy in Iraq.

There is of course the specific possibility that these troops will miraculously find themselves in blocking positions on the Iran/Iraq border in anticipation of a ground pushback after the upcoming bombing attacks on the Iranian nuclear plants.

It’s important to remember that everything - everything - Bu$hCo does is viewed only through one lens: domestic politics. Apparently they perceive the threat here at home to be so great that they are casting about for more intensified ground combat (and a higher butcher’s bill) in order to deflect the anticipated Democratic investigations that are coming up next year. Since only some 18% of Americans actually favor this escalation you can be certain the sweat level is high. After all, just how unpatriotic are these Democrats that they would hold public hearings about Mr Bu$h’s little ego-war while our troops are locked in a life and death struggle with Islamofascistic Shiite militias in order to restore security in Baghdad?

Even though America made its New Year’s resolution in November to cut back on Iraq, it seems Mr Bu$h is determined to continue to indulge.