The "surge" seems like the military analog of the CEO who manages his business to show good results to Wall Street on a quarterly basis: you move sales from future quarters into the current one, defer spending to the future, and arrange for a few "one-time" charges to muddy the situation. You can't sustain this indefinitely--in the long run, the piper must be paid, and some future CEO will be reporting enormous losses as a result of your machinations. But by then you will have taken your golden parachute and moved on.

Yeah that just about sums it up.

This is a great analogy, does sum it up. Bush has been buying time, but time for what? (As for the soldier, I understand your feelings, but fact is that you are not the only soldier, and for those of us who want an end to the killing, we want you and all of them out of there...its not that I want you to die, but I don't want the next wave under Mad McCain to die either, not for a stupid, useless and hopeless "cause").

Speaking of Enron, didn't Bush use Enron to blast California when he was first elected?

Enron collapsed. The real time space universe does not give a damn who can hype a la la land on the television or win a popularity contest amongst Republicon groupies.

But is the "Enron" in this case merely the Iraq invasion and occupation, or is it the USA?

The Soviet Union collapsed after their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. That is what I have been afraid of.

It seems to me that Bush isn't buying time, he's killing time.

In a year, this will be someone else's problem. Perhaps I am overly cynical, but it seems like this administration would be perfectly happy to obtain some minor success in the short run, and then duck out of the picture.

ecoli:

The "surge" seems like the military analog of the CEO who manages his business to show good results to Wall Street on a quarterly basis: you move sales from future quarters into the current one, defer spending to the future, and arrange for a few "one-time" charges to muddy the situation. You can't sustain this indefinitely--in the long run, the piper must be paid, and some future CEO will be reporting enormous losses as a result of your machinations. But by then you will have taken your golden parachute and moved on.

You talk and know nothing as most dems do .Go shake there hand i'll pay air fare

Most all of you are flat wrong. You havent even left the cozy safe confines of your cubicles and most reporters do not spend a month in Iraq or Afghanistan and you all are clueless. I have been to both places and served my country and am curently in Baghdad and have been here almost 4 years now. We are not losing the surge or the war and dont try to corporatize it by comparing it to Enron you pathetic defeatists. We are routing them big time and will continue to do so until we are done. To the blogger who suggested we dismount our tanks and trucks and seek and fight them; get real, we can rain carnage upon them from 2 miles away using our tanks, why in the heck should we go on foot? MSN is nothing but a Dem left-wing propoganda machine. I am sure as soon as they find my dissenting views i will be blocked from this site. That is how the liberal lefties try to hide the truth. History will show we won big time and we should have took Baghdad during the first Gulf War and we would not have this mess now. You gotta stop being such cry babies, you are part of the problem and it is high time you became part of the solution and began supporting your country!

I am sorry i did not mean to say MSN is a leftist propoganda machine, MSN provides a great service to our nation...please dont ban me!

Anyway why is it so hard to find any positive and balanced stories about the Iraq war and all seem to be negative reports when there are many success stories to report on? Why no stories on the many successes?