A perfect example:

A White House official who attended the meeting, and spoke on condition of anonymity in order to describe details, said Mr. Bush’s first question to the Democratic leaders was, “When can you get me a bill?” And, this official said, Mr. Bush told the Democrats that he hoped to ultimately follow several of the guidelines set forth last year in a report by the Iraq Study Group, which called for an eventual draw-down of American troops. According to the official, Mr. Bush noted that the Study Group, whose co-chairman was his father’s former political aide, James A. Baker III, had suggested that a temporary troop increase could be a necessary step on the way to an eventual withdrawal.

Let’s tease apart the insulting stupidity of this reasoning. Say that I break your leg in three places. How could you get angry with me? Medical doctors break bones all the time. I could pull out a manual where it says – in plain English – that you sometimes need to break a bone when an old break doesn’t set right.

The president obviously does not plan to pull troops out of Iraq. Maybe he honestly thinks that people are morons, maybe he fails to see the stupidity of his own statement, whatever. The remarkable thing here is not the president’s quotidian stupidity but the almost totally counterfactual nature of his claim. Surging troops now will not only do nothing for a withdrawal that won’t happen, but our current troop surge will make a safe withdrawal nearly impossible.

Our army was tired before the “surge.” Even then our commitments were hardly tenable, sustained by rapidly deteriorating equipment and a massive callup of the National Guard and reserves. Readiness is a real crisis and increasing our troops now will only make it that much worse. When our “surge” winds down the army will need a significant time before America is able to commit new troops abroad for any reason.

The “surge” does more than just put off the date that we leave Iraq. It also ensures that pullout orders will go out to tired troops with worn-out equipment and virtually no hope of reinforcements. If Iraq remains hot when the inevitable pullout comes, Americans will die because Frederick Kagan convinced the president to spend our last resources on a quixotic troop buildup.

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To broaden the point, compare this with the mantra that we should invade Iraq because of 9/11. Think about what group could possibly have wanted America to invade Iraq as badly as the neocons. If al Qaeda doesn’t ring a bell, it should. Iraq relieved al Qaeda’s siege in Afghanistan, threw our resources down an insurgency hole, brought on exactly the public-inflaming occupation of Islamic holy lands that AQ tried and failed to accomplish in Afghanistan, and (bonus!) it saved AQ the chore of knocking over Saddam themselves.

Again the unique Bush gift goes beyond making a plainly stupid argument to some ethereal plane of counterproductive mendaciousness. A sworn enemy of the United States could not manufacture a Manchurian president-bot that would serve their interests better than our current leadership.