Before the November elections Dick Cheney told ABC News that no matter what the outcome of the vote it would be full speed ahead in Iraq.
Turns out he wasn't kidding.
Everything about the President's so-called "new direction" is the same old bullshit. In fact, the administration's only response when plans go awry is to do the same thing, just do it more. The surge in troops will do nothing more than bring troop levels back to where they were a year ago. The latest plan to secure Baghdad in cooperation with Iraqi troops marks the third such program in 12 months. (The previous two, Operations Together Forward I & II were dismal failures in large part because Iraqi troops didn't show up.)
The spin being peddled on Karl Rove's behalf by Roger Ailes' crew of stooges at FoxNews is that this is different because it's an Iraqi plan, devised by the Maliki government and to be led by it. If that is true (and no one believes that) the administration's rhetoric about a multi-ethnic central government masks an actual agenda, advanced in recent weeks by Dick Cheney, to back the Shiites who will control the oil after the war anyway. After all the Maliki government is wholly owned by Moktada al-Sadr, runs anti-Sunni death squad operation, and has consistently refused to move against the Mahdi army or to allow the Americans to move against the Mahdi army.The Maliki government's plan is for US forces to do the Shia dirty work, clearing out armed Sunni insurgence but not armed Shia militias. Maliki aids have told the press in recent weeks that the Iraqi government opposes the presence of American troops presumably because those troops would be given the task of going after Sadr.
To use a cliche, but an apt one, changing tactics in Iraq is like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There can be no actual change in US strategy, no truly new direction forward, until the nation's leadership accepts two realities: the notion that US security requires democratizing the Arab world is just plain wrong and the majority of Iraqis don't want a central, multi-ethnic government.
With respect to Arab democracy, those of us in the reality-based community can look around the world and see that Arab democracies, legitimate Arab democracies like those in Lebanon and Palestine, don't elect governments friendly to the US. In fact the administration continues to talk out of both sides of its mouth on the matter, proclaiming to be democratizing Iraq while actively working to destabilize the democratically elected government in Palestine. US security in the Middle East requires stable governments with which US diplomats and commercial interests can work, regardless of their form of government.
With respect to the Iraqi central government, the most stunning part of the ISG report was its revelation that the country is a uncontrolled riot of ethnic armed forces--some militias, some government controlled but functioning strictly as sectarian forces. The only people on the ground fighting for a central government in Iraq are Americans. This, more than anything else, makes sending in more troops futile.
I know that the administration will never accept these two incontrovertible facts. The president is a horrible leader for a fundamental reason--he only wants people around him who will tell him what he wants to hear. So, instead of taking the advice of the military commanders on the ground, as he has often pledged to do, Bush spent last week clearing out the top military officers who told him that escalation is a bad idea, moving in an officer inexperienced in the Middle East but who favored what the president had already decided to do. It's the same process that led the president to believe there were WMD in Iraq: a single source, a guy code named Snowball who US and German intelligence officials thought to be not credible, was the lone source for the false claims that Saddam had mobile chem weapons labs. And a single guy in the Atomic Energy Commission thought the infamous aluminum tubes were centrifuge parts. It was that guy that the president listened to despite the universal opinion of others in the AEC and CIA who believed, correctly, that the tubes were not suitable for and atomic centrifuge.
Luckily the November elections seem to have stiffened the backbones not only of Democrats but also of Republicans. Far from being damaged politically by refusing to fund this escalation, legislators who do the right thing and shut down this disaster before Bush makes it worse will not only be doing the principled thing but also will be rewarded by voters worn out by six years of incompetence, ideological rigidity, and death.
Comments