It's an 'Escalation' not a 'Surge' no matter how Bush and his MSM try to spin this

Don't fall in line and become a puppet of the Bush administration, allowing them to manipulate the truth and the way you resolve their talking points in your head. Using the term surge is disingenuous to the facts. A surge is meant to describe additional reinforcements for a short period of time with a pre-planned exit.

The Bush team needed a new way to sell their occupation of Iraq due to low polls for Republicans, Bush and the failing war.

Karl Rove’s MO, job #1, was figuring out the poll-tested term that had the best chance of selling Bush’s policies to the public and then job #2, making sure that term was the one everyone in the media used and honed in on over and over.

The manipulation is intentional. Previous deployments being referred to as an escalation, and now simply changing the talking points, using the term surge, when in fact they were doing nothing differently than they had done in prior deployments, escalating more troops into Iraq, for undefined long term deployment.

With any other combat deployment (in history), this same shift on the ground has always been referred to by the military as an escalation. Never has the term surge been used. The Bush administration had (and has) no set date for a pullout, only the status quo of 'no end in site', therefore this can't be technically referred to as a surge.

Other details:

In January 2007 Bush ordered 21,500 more troops into Iraq to join the 130,000 already on the ground. In March of 2007, a week after Bush ordered (another) 4700 troops deployed, an additional 2,500 to 3,000 more soldiers along with dozens of helicopters and gunships (requested by Gen Petraeus) were planned for deployment. This would bring the total escalation to approx 30,000 troops. The full deployment was spread out (actually beginning before the surge was even announced), with all additional troops to be on the ground in Iraq by May. Semantics here but sources who didn't want to be named at the Pentagon said that in actuality, this many troops would require large support teams added, which means we are looking at approx 50,000 - 78,000 that were being sent in. One surprising calculation the public isn't aware of is that the military plans for 20,000 additional personnel, for every 28,000 troops on the ground. This has to be an astonishing figure to the average Joe when looking at the numbers being thrown around.

In November 2006 the term escalation was used by the Pentagon to announce their plan of sending 4 more battalions to Iraq in early 2007. At that time, the AP reported a total of 3500 troops were the estimate the Pentagon wanted.

There was a surge of sorts... in the cost of this escalation. Originally $6 billion (approx) was the appraised (and appropriated) cost of the added troops but one week later there was a request for $2 billion more to be added to this budget. All of this, keep in mind, when they had no set date for pull out. As the budget for war was being fought over, it came down that in actuality, a 4 month deployment would cost $13 billion, well over what Bush's budget had stated the need for. A 12 month stint was estimated to be $27 billion (over normal operating costs).