Mr. Moderate

President Bush and his military leaders (presumably acting under Bush’s orders as Commander-in-Chief) are streaming out hopeful words about the prospects for the US troop surge making things better inside Iraq. However, the BBC reporters on the scene in Baghdad offer this gloomy assessment:

One measure of how bad things have become is that Western diplomats will no longer visit the Iraqi Defence ministry, even though it is inside the Green Zone.

In fact, militia infiltration is believed to be such that no-one walks anywhere in the Green Zone for fear of being snatched off the street.

So, if the coalition cannot even guarantee its own safety in the heart of its power base, what hope for the rest of Baghdad?

The so-called “Green Zone” is the heart of the US occupation, and is heavily walled, fortified, and guarded by American troops. So, if things are getting to be that bad in the “Green Zone,” then it really is legitimate to ask not only what hope there is for Baghdad as a whole, but what hope is there for the whole of Iraq?
Continue reading ‘Where The Surge Is’ »

The intense political debate in our nation over whether we are “winning” or “losing” the war in Iraq actually misses the point. The real fact is that we never intended to win in any real sense. President Bush went into Iraq with one goal in mind: to capture Saddam and see him executed by his enemies. Even that extremely limited goal proved very difficult to achieve, as Saddam avoided capture for many months, and the total destruction of the Iraqi governmental structure took years to rebuild to the point where Saddam’s political show trial could take place with at least some semblance of decorum. But the replacement of the chief judge in the middle of the show trial simply proved to the world at large it was no real trial, but a kangaroo court of the worst kind. The appeal process proved that when the appeal court insisted that one more defendant be sentenced to death when he had been spared after his original trial. It isn’t recorded in the public news media what punishment the judges received for failing to follow the script set down by the Bush administration.

But to get back to the war, it was never stated as an objective that the United States would somehow annex Iraq as a political dependency, such as it had done in the past with Cuba and the Philippine Islands. It is true that, in the earliest days, there was talk of using Iraq’s oil money to pay back the United States for giving Iraq its freedom from Saddam. But that idea foundered when it was pointed out that the Iraqi government was not likely to keep up payments to the United States after the US military leaves Iraq, and the US military was spending $100 billion per year in Iraq to protect an oil output worth only $30 billion per year. Besides, the main idea of repayment was to pay back construction loans, but again, the US is still destroying more each year than it builds overall. So, even in that limited case no legitimate argument exists for expecting the Iraqi government to make any payments to the United States.

The real issue, which nobody points out, is that even if Bush’s war plan is the greatest success any general could conceive of from here on out, the United States still loses the war by any rational measurement. No matter what happens, the US military will eventually leave Iraq. And no matter what happens, Iraq will still be next door to Iran. And no matter what happens, Shiites with a natural friendship towards Iran will be in the majority within the body politic inside of Iraq. So, no matter what happens, eventually Iran will have far more influence within Iraq than the United States will. With a victory like that, who needs a loss?
Continue reading ‘Iraq: Winning Is Losing’ »

There seems little doubt that the American public is being subjected to a great deal propaganda coming out of Iraq. But how do we sort fact from fiction? Take, for instance, these paragraphs out of THIS STORY:

After the arrest, the military said, nine vehicles moved into the area and positioned themselves to “block and ambush Iraqi and coalition forces.”

Iraqi and coalition forces called in an airstrike. All nine vehicles fought, and five terrorist suspects were killed, the military said.

According to an official in Iraq’s Ministry of Information, the attack planes hit a line of cars queuing next to a gas station near Sadr City. Six cars were destroyed, three civilians were killed and eight others were wounded, the official said.

Continue reading ‘Paranoia Strikes Deep’ »

With the passage of the Iraq War funding bill yesterday, giving President Bush another blank check through at least the end of September, there has been much time wasted on talk radio and in print media with analysis of minute shifts of opinion among the political elites. All of this misses the main point: we are fighting the wrong war.

The right wing focuses on the terrorist acts in Iraq and claims “we have to fight them there or else we will end up fighting them here,” in the United States. This ignores the one undisputed fact of the 9/11 terrorist attack: it was an operation run by Osama bin Laden, and Osama bin Laden continues to hide out in safe houses, most likely in a region of Pakistan where neither the US nor Pakistani armies dare to go after him. My rejoinder to the right wing is this: we need to find and fight Osama where he is hiding or else he will continue to lead and inspire terrorists to come after Americans.
Continue reading ‘Fighting The Wrong War’ »

I get so mad listening to President Bush continue to argue for his “stay the course” strategy when it is obvious to the majority of Americans that the ship is drifting ever closer to rocky shoals. In my mind, the 2008 election can’t come quickly enough to get the USA a new hand on the rudder of the ship-of-state.

Osama bin Laden is, to all intents and purposes, stronger than he ever was, in that he has more “combat effectives” at his disposal today than he did on September 11, 2001. This result is due to a totally bungled war effort that sent most of our combat forces off to Iraq, where there were few (if any) actual terrorists, and only a few combat troops off to Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan where there remain many terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Including, of course, one very tall Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden.
Continue reading ‘Iraq & Terror - What Next?’ »

Four days ago I wrote this comparison of the Vietnam War with the current Iraq War:

In the Vietnam War, we were fighting only one insurgency, parented by the North Vietnamese. And in Vietnam, we did not have Catholic and Bhuddist militias battling it out with each other and the US forces. In Iraq, we have at least four distinct insurgencies, plus at least one active terrorist organization and dozens of sectarian militias, all seeking to kill Americans and each other on a daily basis. The parents of the insurgencies are: the former Baathist leadership of Iraq, the Syrian government, the Iranian government, and the government of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government plays its role by supplying Imams trained in its Wahabbi version of Sunni Islam, each of whom comes with readily-available cash to fund militant activities by people who will agree to follow their lead. Both the Syrians and the Iranians are running traditional proxy wars similar to that run by the North Vietnamese government. And the former Iraqi Baathists have billions of dollars left over from the massive looting conducted by Saddam Hussein before he was deposed as President. That massive amount of money allows them to run their own insurgency without a separate “safe haven” nation to operate out of.

Furthermore, the Iraqi people do not want the American and British troops to remain in Iraq. That is the strong result of every public opinion poll ever taken. The only differences of opinion among the Iraqi people are exactly when the troops need to get out of Iraq. Well, from a BBC report, a former British commander is of the opinion that now is the time for an exit:

Insurgents in Iraq are right to try to force US troops out of the country, a former British army commander has said.

Gen Sir Michael Rose also told the BBC’s Newsnight programme that the US and the UK must “admit defeat” and stop fighting “a hopeless war” in Iraq.

Iraqi insurgents would not give in, he said. “I don’t excuse them for some of the terrible things they do, but I do understand why they are resisting.”

Continue reading ‘Redeploy Our Troops In Iraq!’ »

The thing I liked about Colin Powell is that he “got it.” Powell understood the lessons of our tragedy in Vietnam, and the so-called “Powell Doctrine” called for eight essential questions that must be answered affirmatively before the US military is committed to action in a foreign land. Of those eight questions, history has shown that only the 7th, the support of the American people, was true at the time of the invasion. And of course, as time has worn on, the support of the American people has dwindled away. Why? Because it was clear that the answers to the other questions were “no” at the time of the invasion.

We can argue until the cows come home whether or not President Bush and/or his key national security aides knew that one or more of the answers to the eight questions were “no” at the time of the invasion. But today, four years after Bush appeared under that ludicrous banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” Bush refuses to declare victory and get out as quickly as possible.
Continue reading ‘We Never Learn!’ »

I am all for being against terrorism. Particularly religiously-inspired terrorism. But it sure seems to me that our government has seen fit to selectively ignore some terrorists for present or future political gain. For instance, the date picked for triggering the Oklahoma City bombing was the second anniversary of the violent end to the Waco siege. It is clear that the two events were linked. And another disturbing link was the inspiration drawn from The Turner Diaries, a fictional novel that described a similar bombing. There is little doubt in my mind that the Oklahoma City bombing was inspired by anti-Semitic hate groups with a strong religious motivation. Nonetheless, the US government has refused to adequately investigate any links from the immediate perpetrators to the religious hate groups which obviously supported them, and which gave them their inspiration. Why?

And of course, there is the ever-baffling mystery of why President Bush only sent about 15,000 soldiers after Osama bin Laden, the chief perpetrator of the September 11th attacks, while committing ten times that number to sit on the border of Iraq, waiting for orders to invade. The net result is that there were too few US troops to successfully capture Osama bin Laden, and bin Laden remains at large today (April 30, 2007).
Continue reading ‘Bush’s Bogeyman - Osama bin Laden’ »