UPDATE: Hello to the many visitors from cursor.org. Thanks for stopping by. Please feel free to look around at some of our other thoughts on life in Mr Bu$h's America.

The BBC is reporting this morning that Mr Bu$h will reveal a new Iraq strategy within the next few days.

Bush 'to reveal Iraq troop boost'

US President George W Bush intends to reveal a new Iraq strategy within days, the BBC has learnt.

The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces.

The move comes with figures from Iraqi ministries suggesting that deaths among civilians are at record highs. *
…

The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week.

Its central theme will be sacrifice.

The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers.

The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.

It is hardly news that there is going to be a massive troop buildup in Iraq. Fred Kagan, the shadow Defense Minister of the US branch of the Likud Party, informed us of that last month, as we have discussed here and here and here.

It isn’t going to be a real “surge” as such – more a slow escalation as the DoD desperately grabs at Army units that are almost, kinda sorta ready to go back, and fleshes them out with individuals and portions of other units that have been back long enough to administratively justify sending them out into the maw once again. It will be a long, tedious process, and could well take several months to provide the estimated 30,000 more troops demanded by the Likud. Of course, some of them will be provided by just stop-lossing units due to rotate back after their 12 months in the meatgrinder. But most likely by April we’ll be in the right position to attack Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Baghdad. The anticipated two to three Marine regiments will probably be tasked to win back Anbar province, which a classified Marine Corps report revealed last year was a lost cause.

Of course, there is a second possibility, given that, now that Saddam Hussein, a “very bad man” who “killed his own people” has finally been dealt with in a shaky early morning execution that violated quite a few Iraqi and US laws. We do have those two US Carrier Battle Groups loitering with intent in the Persian Gulf region, with a third group, based on the USS John Stennis, sailing in that direction now.

Did I mention that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also a “very bad man”?

All that’s needed now is a snappy three-word phrase, which is the “new Iraq strategy” the BBC article referred to. The National Security Team has been hard at work doing the past two weeks, testing various phrases, rolling them around on their tongues, savoring them like the latest batch of nouveau beaujolais wine, and most likely carefully focus-grouping different combinations of words to see which groupings seem the most wise, forward-thinking and most of all, manly and aggressive.

Think of that 3rd grade sentence game, with the words on magnetic stickers, where children learn to create sentences. The only difference will be the larger number of US troops, because saving Mr Bu$h’s reputation, and Israel’s dreams of military dominance over all of her regional threats will be unfortunate. Ah, well, eggs and omelettes, eh?

As people are asking WTF? next year we can be treated to dueling voice bites from Bu$hCo about how Mr Bu$h grieves over every death even as he takes great pride in the “sacrifice” and lets slip that he still sleeps very well at night, thank you very much.

* As I was preparing this article there was a radio report that the Iraqi National Government announced 16,000 Iraqis died in 2006 due to sectarian violence. This is a faulty figure, of course, since the ING means little outside the Green Zone and many Iraq families just bury their daily dead and go on with trying desperately to stay alive, and out of the way of the various militias. The only way the ING could get an accurate figure would be at the morning roll call of the Iraqi Army and National Police. Officers would have to ask each squad just how many citizens they capped off during the night. There are a lot of militias and units, and all that reporting would take time. Maybe they‘ve been keeping a covert daily running total.