Bush/Cheney fiddle while Iraq burns - and our soldiers keep dying

1. Take This War and Shove It -- by Ron Jacobs

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." --President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Talk about stepping into the abyss. George Bush and his Pentagon allies are considering increasing the number of troops in Iraq by 40,000. The idea is supported by some members of Congress, although John McCain is the only one so far to express his support publicly. This is despite the fact that over 60% of US residents want the troops out of there sooner rather than later. Not only does the Bush position represent another blow to the idea that the people of the US run the country, it is a blatant kick in the voters' face. Yet, as long as Congress continues to give the White House and Pentagon whatever monies they want to fight the war, any other legislative actions mean less than zero. In a reversal of Bush's domestic initiatives like the No Child Left Behind act – an act which demanded individual states to follow certain mandates from the federal government without providing any funding, Congress provides unlimited funding of the war effort without asking for any guidelines, much less requiring any show of success.

It's not like this is unusual. Certain funding requests rarely get a careful examination in Congress. Two of the most obvious ones both concern the Middle East. One is the constant funding that Tel Aviv gets no matter what they do or how they do it. The other is the budgeting that concerns those countries that contain big oil's profit source. Sometimes the money for the latter is to prop up a regime friendly to Washington's interests and sometimes it's used to destroy a regime with different ideas. In Iraq, the former is taken to its historical extreme. In other words, a regime that appears to be barely holding on to its power is being supported with unabashed US military power – to the tune of approximately 180 million dollars per day. This is only the financial cost, of course. Human costs are immeasurable, but here are some raw numbers regarding them: over the course of the war, US troops have died on the average of more than two per day; somewhere around a half million Iraqis have died (probably more rather than less), over 20,000 US troops have been wounded, along with unknown numbers of Iraqis.

Despite these statistics, the war continues. In fact, as noted above, it may very well escalate. The Democrats squeak a lot about their frustration with the war and say they will do things differently, yet very few have made any genuine indication that they will refuse to fund the war. Instead, a good number have signed on to the suggestions of the essentially irrelevant Iraq Study Group, whose report suggested a continuation of the war by renaming the mission of the troops on the ground and eventually withdrawing the combat troops – a move that a Washington Post report said would leave 75% of the troops in country. In addition, not a single Democratic Senator voted against the appointment of CIA man and war apologist Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds like more business as usual. The Democratic Congress' first test will come soon after they are seated. It will come in the shape of a $100 billion request for continuing the Iraq war. Other than a few noises from the left wing of the party – mostly from Congressman Kucinich of Ohio – there has been no indication that this request will not be granted. Indeed, a cursory reading of newspaper reports on regarding the request leads me to believe that the only problem the Democrats have with the administration's war funding request is the manner in which he requests them. Instead of the emergency requests Messrs. Bush and Cheney tend to prefer, the Democrats want the war funding requests to be included in the annual budget.

Recently, antiwar vet Mike Ferner, speaking for the groups Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Veterans For Peace, announced their call to antiwar protesters around the country to occupy the hometown offices of Representatives and Senators who have voted money for the war. These actions will take place in February, since Congress convenes in late January and the aforementioned funding request will be one of the first pieces of legislation on its agenda. This is a good idea. Indeed, I say let's go even further. Let's take up the call for the mass march on the Pentagon scheduled for March 17th and stage a sitdown protest there. Take over the lawn and refuse to leave. Sure, the upcoming antiwar marches on January 27th and March 17th are important, but, if all indications are correct, manifestations such as these have so far only succeeded in getting our elected officials to say they oppose the war, but not to do anything concrete about it. It's up to us to make them stick to their words. Sitting in their offices until they answer our questions or call the police is a logical next step. So is the idea of a massive sit-in on the Pentagon lawn. It's called heightening the contradictions. The United States could use some of that. Think about it.

If these ideas don't work for you and your people, perhaps another one will, or a combination of other ones. If we are to believe the polls, there are enough US residents opposed to the war that we can sit in on the Pentagon lawn AND take local actions. It's in our interest to stop this war now. We have to make it in Congress' interest , too.


2. What Civil War Has Done to an Iraqi Family -- by Aparisim Ghosh, Baghdad/Time

Amina Sabah Shaab is only 6, but she has already been orphaned three times this year. When her father Husam was killed in January—he had been kidnapped, tortured for five days, shot, then strangled—one of his brothers took charge of her upbringing. But the unrelenting violence of Iraq's civil war eventually forced him to flee the country, passing Amina on to another brother. In a matter of months, he too had emigrated. Her mother, who had divorced Husam and rarely sees Amina, is planning to leave Iraq with her second husband and their children. Stuck in Baghdad with her last paternal uncle and a sick grandmother, little Amina is running out of options.

The trauma of repeated abandonment has left the child with sad, grownup eyes and only the haziest memories of her father. "He was a nice man," Amina says, deadpan and listless. "He used to bring me sweets."

Her uncle Heitham, 29, does what he can to cheer her up, but he is burdened with his own anguish. Sectarian violence has claimed four of his six brothers, two of them this year alone, all Shi'ite victims of Sunni insurgents. He is acutely aware that his own life is on the line every time he leaves home—and he's a taxi driver. To protect Amina and her grandmother from the worsening civil war, he has moved to a relatively safe Baghdad neighborhood where the rent for a one-bedroom apartment takes most of the $200 he earns every month. Even there, the sounds of gunfire and occasional mortar explosions are reminders of everpresent danger. But Heitham, left, encourages his niece and mother not to dwell on their tragedies. "This is Iraq," he says with an air of quiet resignation. "There are many families worse off than ourselves."

He is only too right. As simmering sectarian tensions finally exploded this year into a civil war, Iraq's families have been brutalized and traumatized as never before. Not even their long suffering during almost three decades of dictatorship, more than 12 years of economic sanctions and three wars could have prepared them for the year that 2006 turned out to be. Since the Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shi'ite shrine—the first blast of the civil war—sectarian violence has routinely killed more than 100 people a day. It has also displaced more than 420,000 from their homes; toward the end of the year, more than 100,000 were leaving the country every month. One of Amina's uncles fled to Syria (Mohammad, right), the other to Jordan. Both those countries are struggling to cope with the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from Iraq.

Can Iraqi families endure another year like 2006? Heitham is not hopeful about his own shrinking clan. Like many in Baghdad, he expects the security situation to get worse, not better. He would love to follow his surviving brothers into exile in Jordan or Syria. But they are university graduates; as a high school dropout, he is unlikely to qualify for a residency visa in either country. Many of his friends have sneaked into Jordan illegally, but it's hard to be inconspicuous when you have an ailing mother and a young niece to care for. So Heitham must remain, and this places on him yet another burden: figuring out who would take care of Amina and her grandmother if he should be killed. "I have to talk to some of my cousins about taking them in," he says grimly. "I'd better do that soon." In Iraq these days, that's not pessimism—just prudent planning.


3. The List: Options for Iraq – from Foreign Policy

If Iraq isn’t lacking for problems, it also isn’t lacking for would-be solutions. Now that the much-hyped Iraq Study Group has gone public with its recommendations, FP takes a look at several of the other plans for stabilizing Iraq and the likelihood of their success.

1. Go Big
Supporters: Sen. John McCain, The Weekly Standard , Gen. Anthony Zinni
The argument: Dramatically increase the number of U.S. ground troops in Iraq without a specific timeline for withdrawal. It’s a belated attempt to make amends for not having enough boots on the ground in the first place.
Drawbacks: There just aren’t enough U.S. soldiers available. The plan would mean extending tours of duty (again) and calling up more overstretched National Guard brigades. It would also impair America’s ability to respond to a growing insurgency in Afghanistan.
Chance of being adopted: Zero. Without the necessary troops, the plan looks dead on arrival.

2. Go Long
Supporters: The Joint Chiefs, the Iraq Study Group
The argument: Iraq is too important and fragile to leave precipitously. By surging the number of U.S. troops for a brief period while shifting combat brigades to training and advisory roles, the United States can stabilize the situation enough to prevent a complete disaster. A commitment to stay on longer, even in a diminished role, would bolster the shaky Iraqi government.
Drawbacks: If U.S. troops shift roles before the Iraqis are ready to step up, al Qaeda and Shiite militias will fill the vacuum. With the American public’s patience wearing thin, time may be the one thing the U.S. military doesn’t have.
Chance of being adopted: High. It’s the most palatable plan both to generals who have few troops left and to congressional leaders, who neither want to stay the current course nor call for immediate withdrawal.

3. Go Sunni
Supporters: Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Iraq’s Sunni neighbors
The argument: Baathists and tribal sheikhs in the Sunni insurgency are pragmatists, not ideologues. By giving them amnesty, a rollback of de-Baathification, and a fair share of oil revenues, the United States could theoretically split the insurgency by creating a cleavage between Sunnis and al Qaeda. And because the United States has inadvertently played midwife to Iranian ambitions by destroying the Iraqi Army and empowering the Shia through elections, a Sunni tilt might reassure the 85 percent of the Arab world that is Sunni.
Drawbacks: Negotiating with Sunni insurgents could create a Shiite backlash against the United States, strengthening the hand of anti-American Shiite leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr and weakening Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government. Plus, it won’t be easy to separate the insurgency into neat boxes, or determine who speaks for the Sunnis.
Chance of being adopted: Low. Americans have negotiated with the insurgents in the past without much success, and recent reports suggest this strategy is being abandoned altogether.

4. Go Shiite
Supporters: Vice President Dick Cheney, Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim
The argument: Civil wars can last decades and usually end only when one side wins a decisive military victory. Instead of policing a civil war, the United States should either follow a policy of noninterference, or fight only the Sunni insurgency.
Drawbacks: Choosing whom to back on the Shiite side could worsen intra-Shia rivalries. It would also alienate Iraq’s Sunni neighbors while strengthening Iranian influence in Iraq. And it could mean the slaughter of Iraq’s Sunni population, whose flight to neighboring countries might further destabilize the region.
Chance of being adopted: Medium to High. It wouldn’t be a dramatic change of course—siding with the Shia is the path of least resistance.

5. Go Home
Supporters: Democratic Rep. John Murtha, Iran, Syria, most Iraqis
The argument: The longer the United States stays, the worse Iraq gets. Not only do most Iraqis want the Americans out, but the U.S. presence may be exacerbating the sectarian violence and preventing Iraqis from reconciling with each other. After leaving, the United States would retain “over the horizon” capability via its bases in the Persian Gulf if vital interests are threatened.
Drawbacks: Although al Qaeda would declare victory, a U.S. pullout would actually leave most of Iraq in Iranian hands. Nervous Sunni states in the region might then intervene to protect their coreligionists. The result: a bloodbath and sky-high oil prices.
Chance of being adopted: Moderate. President George W. Bush has invested too much political capital in the war to perform such a dramatic public U-turn. But U.S. troops must leave eventually, and the Iranians will still be there when they do.

6. Go Regional
Supporters: The Iraq Study Group, congressional Democrats, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment
The argument: Iran and Syria were happy to see the United States get a bloody nose in the early years of the insurgency, but they now have an interest in a stable Iraq. Stability will elude the region as long as Iraq is in chaos.
Drawbacks: With a humiliating U.S. withdrawal in sight, the Iranians and Syrians have no incentive to negotiate—unless the price paid is very high.
Chance of being adopted: Low. The Bush administration may make token gestures in this direction, but it won’t grant the painful concessions that Iran and Syria will demand. There may be a regional conference, but don’t expect too many kind words being exchanged.

7. Divide Iraq
Supporters: Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, Leslie Gelb, radical Kurds and Shia
The argument: Divide Iraq into three autonomous regions—one each for the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds—with a limited central government that distributes oil revenue by population. The Kurds already have an autonomous region in the north, and some Shia factions are busy carving out their own “Shiastan” in the south. With their own region and guaranteed oil revenue, wary Sunnis can be convinced they have a stake in the new Iraq.
Drawbacks: Such a plan might exacerbate ethnic cleansing in mixed areas. The oil-less Sunnis fear being left with nothing by vengeful Shia and Kurds, and the United States is hardly a trusted guarantor. Along with the nationalistic Sadr movement, Sunnis reject federalism as a foreign plot.
Chance of being adopted: Moderate. Federalism is permissible under the current Iraqi constitution, but opposition is fierce among Iraqi nationalists. Advocates counter that it simply formalizes a process that is already under way.


4. U.S. Troops Should Leave Country, But How Will America Then Keep Control of Oil Fields? -- by Linda McQuaig/ Toronto Star

Advising the Bush administration on how to deal with the Iraq fiasco, the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group urges the president to clarify that Washington does not seek to control Iraq's oil.

It then gets down to business and sets out exactly how Washington should take control of Iraq's oil.

The report calls for Iraq to pass a Petroleum Law — to be drafted with U.S. help — that would allow foreign oil companies to develop Iraq's vast and largely undeveloped oil reserves (which, the report notes, are the second-largest in the world).

It's hard not to feel exasperated reading the report. Released in the wake of the Republican trouncing in the U.S. mid-term elections, it generated excitement that George Bush's imperial adventure was finally coming under sharp attack, and that senior figures from both parties would force the president into line.

Instead, the report reveals the extent of the imperial mindset — shared by both Democrats and Republicans — that is the very heart of the problem of American foreign policy in Iraq, and elsewhere.

Yes, the report acknowledges the extent of the Iraq debacle, and outlines a strategy for getting U.S. troops out.

But it's essentially the strategy of the Bush administration: Create an Iraqi army strong enough to handle security — within the context of a U.S.-controlled Iraq.

One senses the impatience inside the White House and the Iraq Study Group. For heaven's sake, it's almost four years since the invasion! How long does it take to get a competent puppet government and army up and running?

The report sets out a vision for extending U.S. control over Iraq. U.S. officials will be embedded everywhere: U.S. soldiers inside the Iraqi army, American trainers inside the Iraqi police, FBI agents inside the interior ministry, CIA agents inside intelligence operations.

The report even specifies that Iraqi consumers must pay more for oil, and that the Iraqi Central Bank must raise interest rates to 20 per cent — before the end of this month.

All this is in line with Bush's contempt for meaningful Iraqi self-government, as illustrated by the massive, new $1 billion U.S. embassy he's built in Baghdad, which has 1,000 employees, only six of whom speak fluent Arabic. Six! Presumably the other 994 employees are busy bringing democracy to Iraq — by talking to each other or to Washington.

The reluctance to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq has nothing to do with fears of a bloodbath, which is already underway.

Washington contributes to the bloodbath, through its own violence and by allowing death squads, operating within the Iraqi army, to murder enemies of the U.S.-sponsored regime.

U.S. troops are only worsening the situation. They should leave. But that would involve giving up control over a country Washington has already spent $400 billion trying to subdue. And then how would America get control of all that oil?

(Linda McQuaig is a commentator and author of It's the Crude, Dude . Email to: lmcquaig@sympatico.ca)


5. Six brutal truths about Iraq – by General William Odom

Mythologies about the war in Iraq are endangering our republic, our rights, and our responsibilities before the world. The longer we fail to dispel them, the higher price we will pay. The following six truths, while perhaps not self-evident to the American public, are nevertheless conspicuously obvious to much the rest of the world.

Truth No. 1: No "deal" of any kind can be made among the warring parties in Iraq that will bring stability and order, even temporarily.

Ever since the war began to go badly in the summer of 2003, a mythology has arisen that a deal among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds could bring peace and stability to Iraq. First, the parliamentary elections were expected to be such a breakthrough. When peace and stability did not follow, the referendum on a constitution was proclaimed the panacea. When that failed, it was asserted that we just had not yet found the proper prime minister. Even today, the Iraq Study Group is searching for this holy grail. It doesn’t exist.

Truth No. 2: There was no way to have "done it right" in Iraq so that U.S. war aims could have been achieved.

Virtually every new book published on the war, especially Cobra II, Fiasco , and State of Denial ,reinforce the myth -- the illusion -- that we could have won the war; we just did not plan properly and fight the war the right way. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and most other major newspapers have consistently filled their opinion pages with arguments and testimonials to support that myth. (Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University offers the most recent conspicuous reinforcement of this myth in the Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2006.)

The fragmentation of the country, civil war, and the rise of outside influence from Iran, Syria, and other countries -- all of these things might have been postponed for a time by different war plans and occupation polices. But failure would have eventually raised its ugly head. Possibly, some of the variables would be a bit different. For example, if the Iraqi military had not been dissolved and if most of the Baathist Party cadres not been disenfranchised, the Sunni factions, instead of the Shiites, probably would have owned the ministry of interior, the police, and several unofficial militias. The Shiites, in that event, would have been the insurgents, abundantly supplied by Iran, indiscriminately killing Sunni civilians, fighting the U.S. military forces, blowing up the power grid, and so on.

A different U.S. occupation plan might have changed the course Iraq has taken to civil war and fragmentation, but it could have not prevented that outcome.

Truth No. 3: The theory that "we broke it and therefore we own it," with all the moral baggage it implies, is simply untrue because it is not within U.S. power to "fix it."

The president’s cheerleaders in the run-up to the war now use this theory to rationalize our continued presence in Iraq, and in that way avoid admitting that they share the guilt for the crime of breaking Iraq in the first place.

Truth No. 4: The demand that the administration engage Iran and Syria directly, asking them to help stabilize Iraq, is patently naïve or cynically irresponsible until American forces begin withdrawing -- and rapidly -- so that there is no ambiguity about their complete and total departure.

Effective negotiations will be possible, even with Iran, but only after the U.S. withdraws. And such negotiations must be based on a candid recognition that Iran will come out of this war with a much enhanced position in the Middle East. Until these realities are acknowledged, the planning staffs in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department will not begin addressing the most important tasks awaiting them in confronting the post-Iraq War world.

First among them is how to help the Arab Gulf states cope with a stronger Iran, one that has territorial claims on the Arab side of the Gulf. Second is dealing with the increased threat to Israel that comes from the U.S. defeat in Iraq, its own recent misguided war against Hezbollah, looming instability in Lebanon, and the large number of experienced al Qaeda cadres produced by the war in Iraq. Moreover, as the Sunni-Shiite split in the Arab world spreads from Iraq into neighboring Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, not to mention Lebanon, the United States will be facing a dynamic it has little power to limit.

These new challenges will not be manageable by the United States alone. Europe will have to join with the United States in meeting them. American neocons who have sought to split the United States from Europe, as well as Europeans who tilt excessively in favor the Palestinians, will have to change their tunes if Israel is to survive the upheaval that the U.S. and the Israeli governments so eagerly perpetrated.

The media have not begun to recognize and explain the dramatic changes catalyzed in the Middle East by the war in Iraq. Most editors are not even willing to contemplate them, preferring to pretend they do not exist, probably because they bear some responsibility for creating them.

Truth No. 5: The United States cannot prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The only sure way to stop Iran's program is to invade with ground troops and occupy the country indefinitely. Both Iran and North Korea learned from Israel's bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facilities and have hardened their own to make bombing only marginally effective at best. Having squandered ground force capabilities in Iraq, the U.S. does not have sufficient forces to invade Iran, even if that made sense. And bombing would produce all the undesirable consequences of that action but not the most desirable one. Yet the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers editorialize as if this is not so.

Truth No. 6: It is simply not possible to prevent more tragic Iraqi deaths in Iraq.

Many pundits and politicians -- particularly those who howled for the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003 -- posture about human rights abuses that will occur if U.S. troops are withdrawn rapidly. The way to have avoided moral responsibility for these abuses was not to invade in the first place. At present, U. S. military forces in Iraq merely facilitate arrests and executions by Shiite officials in the police and some army units. These, of course, are mainly in reaction to the Baathist-led insurgency. This struggle will continue, with or without U.S. forces present, although the forms and tactics of the struggle will change after U.S. forces withdraw. An earlier withdrawal, one or two years ago, would probably have allowed this struggle to be fought to a conclusion by now. Our well-meaning efforts to prevent blood baths are more likely causing them to be bigger, not smaller.

The Iraq Study Group’s recommendations could be used to dispel these myths and prompt a rapid withdrawal, but it remains to be seen if either the president and his aides or the Congress can or will use them for that purpose. The “one last big try” aspect of the recommendations, if pursued vigorously, will just make the final price the catastrophe higher. The media, by dispelling the foregoing list of myths, could make that less likely.

(Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. He was Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988. From 1981 to 1985, he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer. From 1977 to 1981, he was Military Assistant to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
E-mail: diane@hudson.org)


6. As Bush Loiters: A Christmas Toll -- by Pierre Tristam/ Candide's Notebooks

It’s turning into an interesting Christmas season for those mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters who’ll get to lose a husband, a father, a son in the next few weeks (and of course years) as the American death tally in Iraq ho ho hoses it to 3,000 while our Lord and Savior president and decider decides not to decide what to decide next for Iraq until — maybe to please Jenna and the other one — “after the holidays,” as the phraseology of the corporate cruiser goes. As long as the Dow keeps breaking records , why worry? This is the man about whom Peggy Noonan, the Bush family publicist, once said that “eloquence is in his plainspokenness, in the fact that each word is a simple coin with a definite worth.” What, at this point, is moral bankruptcy worth? But this is the same man who once explained his style to Bob Woodward this way: “I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel I owe anybody an explanation.” This is a man who values the worthlessness of his silence. Who makes the soldiers he never was die for it. And who still struts, with pride, “in his chesty way, with what seems a jarring peppiness” ( Peggy Noonan’s words again , four years too late, like all the other rats bailing from the USS W.) So for the last few days he’s created his own little parade of generals and “experts” to give the appearance of receiving advice without needing to consent to more than what Laura Bush will suggest he should get Barbara and George Sr. for Christmas, no doubt to pacify them.

Meanwhile, what has happened on this presidential clock, as we near Christmas, if we were to take just a few of the latest 1,350-odd days—a span longer than America ’s involvement in World War II, and soon World War I, combined? Here’s what: On Tuesday, Army Sgt. Brent Dunkleberger was killed by a grenade fired at his Humvee as he patrolled in Mosul . He was 29. He was the father of four children, none of them older than 11. He was a firefighter back in his hometown of New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, where, as Baby New Year 2000, he’d “played the role for the borough’s New Year’s Eve huckleberry drop at the Perry County Courthouse—complete with sash, cloth diaper and bottle of champagne” (as the Patriot-News described it on Thursday). It was shortly after that role that he announced he’d be joining the military.

On Monday, Marine Lance Cpl. Budd M. Cote was killed when his Humvee hit a roadside bomb. He was 21. He’d just married his 19-year-old high school sweetheart back in Marana , Arizona . He’d been a Home Depot stocker before enlisting, but figured four years in the Marines would follow in the footsteps of his father, who’d served in Vietnam , and help him get a leg up on joining the sheriff’s department at the end of his tour. Two other Marines died in the same bombing, one of them 23, the other 25. Then there’s Marine Master Sgt. Brian P. McAnulty. When he was growing up in Vicksburg , Mississippi , he survived a car wreck that killed his best friend and soccer teammate. He was a passenger. It happened just before Christmas, when he was 18. That was twenty-one years ago. He died in a helicopter crash just after takeoff on Monday. He was a passenger in that one, too.

McAnulty exhibits an enormous smile in his picture, the kind of smile that announces lives and loves, although so far he seems to have had no life back in Vicksburg : no telephone number bearing his or his family’s name. Something will turn up, and his brief history will be recorded in a matter of inches in one newspaper or another, his memorial held, the waste of his life dulled by talk of service and heroism, or talk like this, by the president, after another helicopter crash with many lost lives in January 2005: “We mourn when our soldiers lose their lives. But our long-term objective is to spread freedom.” In case the rest of us didn’t know.

Those back-stories of young men’s lives are all distinct and all the same. They’re all individuals and yet all, without exception, human beings with lives rooted in the lives of others—families, friends, enemies, companies, communities. Provincial newspaper stories capture shreds of those lives but couldn’t possibly capture them in their totality, in the true effect of a lost life’s shock to a human ecosystem that quivers down to the uncomprehending eyebrow of a four-year-old inflicted on his father’s funeral, or that intrudes an emptiness sudden and total and astonishing on an eight or nine year old, whose pain isn’t yet mature enough to feel what will come with age: sorrow that doesn’t—unlike the fortune cookies’ predictions—heal with time, but only deepens. It’s those burdens that the newspaper stories cannot convey, that all the fraternal love and camaraderie of military units cannot possibly take on, that presidents, and this president in particular with his chesty way and jarring peppiness, this president who has yet to attend a single serviceman’s funeral, think grave words in speeches alone can carry. It is those burdens, magnified a thousand fold with every life lost as the president delays and prevaricates and poses for his subservient storytellers, that, gathered together in an indictment of their own, amount to a different kind of war crime that will never be prosecuted because they’re here, dispersed and diffuse all around us in small hearts and souls only solitude can grasp.

And the irony of all these lines here, these lines you’re reading now, is that they’re focused on an infinitesimally small, almost self-indulgent part of the tragedy. We write about the lives lost, the names, the high school sweethearts, the children left behind, because these are American lives. But what differentiates them from the lives being lost on the other side, the Iraqi side, if not the most puerile and ridiculous difference—a difference of geography, of culture, of nationality, differences that have nothing to do with the human loss, to say nothing of the humanity being lost. Here we are, mourning an American loss or two or three or four every day as if it were the limit of the unbearable. And yet two days ago, in a single bombing in Baghdad — one bomb, one explosion —seventy Iraqis lost their lives. The equivalent of a heavy month’s total losses for the American military. And that bombing was just one of several that day. And those bombings were just a few of the many means by which hundreds of Iraqis found their end that day. What newspapers are telling those stories? What encyclopedias of the dead will tabulate those losses, the effects on those human ecosystems? Who ever speaks of a shared humanity when an Arab dies anymore, the deaths—in Iraq, in Gaza or the West Bank, in Lebanon—being so routine, so disposably forgettable. (And none of this is nearly as bad as the disposability of African lives, which run in the millions.)

But President Bush wants to wait. He wants to delay. He wants to spend his holidays in peace . He wants us not to know what we’ve known all along. It isn’t indecision that’s keeping him from announcing his new strategy. It isn’t infighting among his staff, or figuring out how to navigate an opposition Congress. It is certainly not the possibility that he is incubating a Lincolnesque declaration. (He had his Lincolnesque moment, on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and look where that led us.) No. What we’ve known all along is what he’s been all along, in Iraq as elsewhere. Clueless. Pointless. And now we can safely add, heartless. His best strategy is to run out the clock on his term, to hand Iraq to the next president in the hope of making himself not be the president who lost Iraq, even as he’s been the only president, Saddam included, who managed to wreck Iraq. And the worst of it is to know that as reprehensive as the crimes committed in the name of “freedom” or “democracy” or “security” have been, they’re not nearly as horrific as the crimes being committed at the expense of Iraqis’ and Americans’ humanity, they’re not nearly as unpardonable as the crimes that will go unspoken except in grief’s inexplicable blooms, for years to come, from their little seed in that four-year-old’s eyebrow and that nine-year-old’s newborn emptiness. Here and in Iraq.

(Tristam is a Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial writer who was born and raised in Lebanon. Email to: ptristam@att.net .)


7. Act III in a Tragedy of Many Parts
The US Occupation of Iraq
By ANTHONY ARNOVE/Counterpunch

The tragedy unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq defies description. According to the most recent findings of the Lancet medical journal, the number of "excess deaths" in Iraq since the U.S. invasion is more than 650,000. "Iraq is the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world," according to Refugee International: nearly two million Iraqis have fled the country entirely, while at least another 500,000 are internally displaced. Basic foods and necessities are beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis because of massive inflation. "A gallon of gasoline cost as little as 4 cents in November. Now, after the International Monetary Fund pushed the Oil Ministry to cut its subsidies, the official price is about 67 cents," the New York Times notes. "The spike has come as a shock to Iraqis, who make only about $150 a month on average-if they have jobs," an important proviso, since unemployment is roughly 60_70 percent nationally.

October 2006 proved to be the bloodiest month of the entire occupation, with more than six thousand civilians killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad, where thousands of additional U.S. troops have been sent since August with the claim they would restore order and stability in the city, but instead only sparked more violence. United Nations special investigator Manfred Nowak notes that torture "is totally out of hand" in Iraq. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein." The number of U.S soldiers dead is now more than 2,900, with more than 21,000 wounded, many severely.

The underlying trend is clear: each day the occupation continues, life gets worse for most Iraqis. Rather than stemming civil war or sectarian conflict, the occupation is spurring it. Rather than being a source of stability, the occupation is the major source of instability and chaos.

All of the reasons being offered for why the United States cannot withdraw troops from Iraq are false. The reality is, the troops are staying in Iraq for much different reasons than the ones being touted by political elites and a still subservient establishment press. They are staying to save face for a U.S. political elite that cares nothing for the lives of Iraqis or U.S. soldiers; to pursue the futile goal of turning Iraq into a reliable client state strategically located near the major energy resources and shipping routes of the Middle East, home to two-thirds of world oil reserves, and Western and Central Asia; to serve as a base for the projection of U.S. military power in the region, particularly in the growing conflict between the United States and Iran; and to maintain the legitimacy of U.S. imperialism, which needs the pretext of a global war on terror to justify further military intervention, expanded military budgets, concentration of executive power, and restrictions on civil liberties. The U.S. military did not invade and occupy Iraq to spread democracy, check the spread of weapons of mass destruction, rebuild the country, or stop civil war. In fact, the troops remain in Iraq today to deny self-determination and genuine democracy to the Iraqi people, who have made it abundantly clear, whether they are Shiite or Sunni, that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq immediately; feel less safe as a result of the occupation; think the occupation is spurring not suppressing sectarian strife; and support armed attacks on occupying troops and Iraqi security forces, who are seen not as independent but as collaborating with the occupation.

It is not only the Iraqi people who oppose the occupation of their country and want to see the troops leave. A clear majority of people in the United States have expressed the same sentiment in major opinion polls and in the mid-term Congressional elections, which swing both houses of Congress and the majority of state governorships to the Democrats, in a clear vote against the imperial arrogance of Bush's "stay the course" approach to the disaster in Iraq. The public did not vote for more money for the Pentagon (as incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada immediately promised, announcing a plan to give $75 billion more to the Pentagon), for more "oversight" of the war (the main Democratic Party buzzword these days), or for more troops (as Texas Democrat Representative Silvestre Reyes, the incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has demanded), but to begin bringing the troops home. A clear majority of active-duty U.S. troops want the same thing, as a much-ignored Zogby International poll found in early 2005, with 72 percent saying they wanted to be out of Iraq by the end of 2006.

But Bush's response to the groundswell of opposition to the war, which has led not only to his setbacks in the midterm elections but to even further erosion in his already abysmal approval ratings (with approval of his handling of the war reaching a new low of 27 percent), is to insist that the sun still revolves around the earth. "Absolutely, we're winning," Bush told reporters. "I know there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit from Iraq," Bush said. "This business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever," he added. "We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done." In a similar vein, Vice President Cheney said, "I know what the President thinks. I know what I think. And we're not looking for an exist strategy.We're looking for victory."

After the midterm elections Bush was forced to jettison his deeply unpopular defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, but nominated in his place someone who is unlikely to oversee any fundamental shift in U.S. strategy. Robert Gates, an old CIA hand, is a dedicated Cold Warrior who advocated, among other enlightened policies, the bombing of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua for daring to challenge the corrupt order of death squad dictatorships in Latin America. Bush also dropped UN ambassador John Bolton, a man who embodies everything that the world hates about U.S. foreign policy today.

Perhaps most significantly, though, in the face of the failures in Iraq, Congress resorted to the old strategy of bringing in the "wise men" to repackage a failing war, convening the Iraq Study Group (ISG), with Bush family fixer James Baker III, former Indiana representative Lee Hamilton, and other foreign policy establishment figures with little or no knowledge of Iraq. The commission was never going to advocate any radical reversal of U.S. policy in Iraq, but even so, Bush has hedged his bets from the outset, setting up two different internal military review committees to make suggestions to the White House about the next steps in Iraq (much as he had overseen a separate intelligence operation to create the evidence that would be used to sell the invasion in the first place). Indeed, when the report's findings were made public on December 6, Bush immediately distanced himself from its highly limited recommendations. As the New York Sun noted, "Barely 24 hours old, the bipartisan report has been placed on a high shelf to gather dust, its principle function having been to take the heat off the president for a time while allowing him to gather his resolve to press on" with the same course as before. Bush immediately rejected the report's call to negotiate with Iran and Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported: "A senior administration official said the White House doesn't feel bound by the report and is unlikely to implement many of its recommendations, especially regarding calls for diplomatic outreach to U.S. foes Syria and Iran." In addition, "The White House has rejected mounting calls for a course correction in Iraq, insisting it would maintain the current number of U.S. military personnel in Iraq indefinitely."

But even if the Bush administration sought to immediately implement every recommendation of the Iraq Study Group report, it would only be a recipe for more death, displacement, and despair. The ISG report explicitly rejects setting any deadline or timetable for withdrawal, asserts the need for a "considerable military presence in the region, with our still significant force in Iraq and with our powerful air, ground, and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, as well as an increased presence in Afghanistan" for years to come, and basically repackages the Bush Doctrine of "as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," that is "Iraqization" of the conflict, much as "Vietnamization" was presented as the solution in Vietnam.
It is worth briefly reviewing the various options now being considered by the Bush administration, none of which offers any real alternative:

Sending in more troops in the short term

The idea that sending in more troops would provide stability and improve the situation in Iraq ignores the fact that the U.S. is the main source of violence and instability. More troops breed both more opposition and more sectarian violence. Observes Michael Schwartz, "Instead of entering a violent city and restoring order, [U.S. forces] enter a relatively peaceful city and create violence. The accurate portrait of this situationis that the most hostile anti-American cities like Tal Afar and Ramadi have generally been reasonably peaceful when U.S. troops are not there." Even the ISG notes that Operation Together Forward II, which redeployed thousands of U.S. troops to Baghdad in August 2006, achieved the opposite of its stated goal: "Violence in Baghdad-already at high levels-jumped more than 43 percent between the summer and October 2006." Schwartz also explains the way in which the higher presence of U.S. combat troops exacerbates sectarian violence:

American patrols in Shia neighborhoods immobilize the local defenses and make the community vulnerable to jihadist attack; while American invasions of Sunni communities are even more damaging. They not only immobilize the local defense forces, but almost always involve the introduction of Iraqi Army units, made up mainly of Shia soldiers (since the army being stood up by the Americans is largely a Shia one). What results is violence in the form of battles between a Shia military (as well as militia-infiltrated Shia police forces) and Sunni resistance fighters defending their communities. These attacks generate immense bitterness among Sunni, who see them as part of a Shia attempt to use the American military to conquer and pacify Sunni cities. The result is a wealth of new jihadists anxious to retaliate by sacrificing their lives in terrorist or death-squad-style attacks on Shia communities-which, in their turn, energize the Shia death squads in an escalating cycle of brutalizing violence.

The U.S, in addition, cannot add more troops without straining an already badly overtaxed military and relying on greater use of backdoor draft measures that are provoking more opposition at home and within the military to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, another failing occupation.

We'll stand down as they stand up

The idea that training Iraqi troops can be improved, a major recommendation of the ISG report, suggests that there's a technical solution that the U.S. faces in Iraq. But the root of resistance to U.S occupation is political. As long as the U.S. remains an occupying power, the police and military will continue to be seen as collaborators and illegitimate. Resistance groups in Iraq, meanwhile, face no such training problems, and are carrying out increasingly sophisticated operations, including direct military battles with U.S. troops, because their fighters are politically motivated and have a defined goal that has widespread support.

Engage Iran and Syria

The idea behind this strategy, another major thrust of the ISG report, is that the root of resistance to U.S. occupation in Iraq is foreign, rather than indigenous-much as we were told that the popular resistance of the Vietnamese to U.S. state terrorism was directed by Moscow and Beijing. In this delusional worldview, Iran and Syria, and groups such as al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, are the sources of violence in Iraq. This baseless theory then leads to the equally baseless idea that the U.S. will somehow stabilize Iraq through talks with two governments it is committed to overthrowing. As the Financial Times observes, there is little reason to think Bush "would be willing to follow advice that contradicts his deeply held belief that the U.S. should not talk toIran and Syria" because doing so would "reward bad behavior." Bush has repeatedly said that a precondition for talking to Iran is a suspension of the country's legal nuclear enrichment program, something that Iran has no reason to agree to in advance of negotiations. At any rate, even if talks do take place, Iran and Syria are not the masters of events in Iraq, which are driven by the internal politics and the dynamics of the U.S. occupation.

Gradual withdrawal

Proposals for gradual withdrawal with no timetable are a recipe for pursuing an infinitely receding horizon. The idea behind gradual withdrawal was put accurately, if cynically, by Donald Rumsfeld in a secret leaked memo, written November 6, just a few days before his resignation: "Recast the U.S. military mission and U.S. goals (how we talk about them)-go minimalist." In other words, change the rhetoric while lowering expectations, but pursue the same goals. "Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.'"

Redeployment

A frequent buzzword in discussions of the occupation of Iraq today, especially among Democrats, is redeployment. On November 14, 2006, Senator Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat considered to be at the extreme left end of the party's elected officials, introduced a bill "requiring U.S. forces to redeploy from Iraq by July 1, 2007." But the plan itself calls for keeping troops in Iraq. "My legislation would allow for a minimal level of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq for targeted counterterrorism activities, training of Iraqi security forces, and the protection of U.S. infrastructure and personnel." In other words, redeployment envisions U.S. bases, U.S. troops, and U.S. occupation, while merely shifting some personnel to other military bases in the region-where they can be quickly mobilized to strike when necessary-and most likely shifting to greater reliance on air power in Iraq and in the region to pursue U.S. imperial objectives.

Partition

One plan that the ISG did not recommend, and which Bush has also criticized, but which remains a real possibility as the crisis in Iraq unfolds, is partition. The deteriorating situation on the ground has encouraged some analysts and politicians-including incoming Democrat Joseph Biden, the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair-to call for the breakup of Iraq into three independent countries or three relatively autonomous territories within a loosely federated state. Such a division of Iraq, however, could only be accomplished by massive ethnic cleansing. The largest urban concentration of Kurds in Iraq is not in the northern zone that would likely make up a future Kurdish enclave or state, but in Baghdad. Most cities described by reporters as "Sunni strongholds" or "Shiite townships" have mixed populations with significant minorities of Sunni, Shiite, Turkmen, Kurds, or Assyrians. In addition, any predominantly Sunni state in central and western Iraq that emerged from a tripartite division of the country would be significantly impoverished compared to its oil-rich southern and northern neighbors.

The iron fist

Another option-one with a long history in Iraq and the Middle East-remains support for a new "iron fist." Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, suggests that "A junta of military modernizers might be the only hope of a country whose democratic culture is weak, whose politicians are either corrupt or incapable," a narrative that is gaining much more popularity in the establishment press and among pundits and politicians seeking an explanation for the disaster in Iraq that avoids looking at its real roots. This is a refurbishing of an old idea-a Saddam-style regime without Saddam-that became impossible as soon as the Bremer administration in Iraq dismantled the army and the Baath party, the only political and administrative basis on which such a dictatorship could have been established.

Expansion

Despite the ISG's recommendations of direct talks with Iran and Syria, and the caution of Robert Gates and others about the pitfalls of pursuing Iran militarily, the threat of the U.S. expanding the war in Iraq remains very real. In summer 2006, Washington sponsored the disastrous and bloody Israeli invasion of Lebanon, hoping to gain some tactical advantage in the region and hence in Iraq. The gamble failed miserably, but some feel another such gamble is necessary. As Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker, "many in the White House and the Pentagon insist that getting tough with Iran is the only way to salvage Iraq. 'It's a case of "failure forward,"' a Pentagon consultant said. 'They believe that by tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq-like doubling your bet.'"

Whatever Bush's new plan for Iraq may be, a major clash of expectations is likely to come about as the Democrats fail to pose any real challenge to the war. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stressed "bipartisanship" the moment the results were announced, adding that impeachment of Bush was "off the table." Pelosi and the new Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also said they would take off the table the greatest power the Democrats have in Congress, the ability to cut off funds for prolonging the occupation. As Alexander Cockburn wrote in the Nation: "It'sthe role of elections in properly run western democracies to remind people that things won't really change at all. Certainly not for the better. You can set your watch by the speed with which the new crowd lowers expectations and announces What is Not To Be Done."

Out now

Indeed, the one option that remains truly off the table in Iraq is the only sensible one: complete and unconditional immediate withdrawal, followed by reparations to the Iraqi people for the massive harm the occupation-and before that the sanctions, the Gulf and Iran-Iran Wars, and years of supporting the dictatorship-have caused. According to the New York Times, "In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats' victoryin an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option."

The debate today in Washington remains one largely over tactics, not strategy or principles. In fact, the one debate over principles that is taking place is a racist one: more and more "experts" now question whether Bush's folly was in thinking he could bring democracy to Arab or Muslim people, who, we are told, "have no tradition of democracy," are from a "sick society," a "broken society." In a much-lauded speech, Barack Obama, the great hope of the Democrats, couched his criticism of the Bush administration's policy by saying there should be "No more coddling" of the Iraqi government: the United States "is not going to hold together this country indefinitely," he explained, adding that "we should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy." Richard Perle, former chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, one of the main neoconservative enthusiasts of the invasion of Iraq, in explaining why things had gone so contrary to his glorious predictions, now says he "underestimated the depravity" of the Iraqis. And the ISG report chides that "the Iraqi people and their leaders have been slow to demonstrate their capacity or will to act," and therefore the U.S. "must not make an open-ended commitment" to them. In other words, blame the victim. As Sharon Smith wrote on CounterPunch, "Within a few short weeks, the Washington 'consensus' has rewritten the history of the U.S. invasion of Iraq-as if Iraqis invited the U.S. to invade their sovereign nation in 2003 and now have failed to live up to their end of the bargain."

As the crisis in Iraq unfolds, we can expect these arguments to gain even wider traction, providing more cover for the real U.S. objectives in the Middle East.

The tragedy unfolding in Iraq is still far from over. In Act I of the tragedy, we were told that Washington would invade Iraq, quickly topple the dictatorship, install a stable client government, and then-having radically changed the balance of power in the Middle East-march on from Baghdad to confront the regimes of Iran and Syria. With that dream in tatters, the United States commenced Act II: the manipulation of sectarian divisions in Iraq to form a Shiite and Kurdish coalition government that would isolate the Sunnis (though it would seek to co-opt as much of their political leadership as possible) and serve the intended client role, if less effectively than Washington had hoped, allowing the U.S. to gain at least some foothold in Iraq and claim victory. By mid-2006, the failures of this strategy could no longer be ignored, however. Having invaded Iraq intending to weaken Iran and Syria, to strengthen its position and that of Israel and its Arab allies in the region, the United States instead achieved the opposite. (Of course, all of this ignores the many stages of the tragedy authored by the United States before the March 2003 invasion, through its support of the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein, its nefarious role in the Iran-Iraq War and then the 1991 Gulf War, and the more than twelve years of sanctions and bombing that followed.)

Acts I and II in the tragedy of the Iraq occupation have now come to a close. But Act III has only just begun. All the signs suggest that the endgame in Iraq is likely to be long and very bloody. Iraq and the Middle East are so strategically important to the United States that neither party is willing to withdraw and admit defeat; such an outcome would be more disastrous for the United States than its defeat in Vietnam.
But there is one factor in the Iraq tragedy that we should not discount. The question of how long this war lasts, whether it will expand to Iran and Syria, whether more troops will be sent to needlessly kill and be killed for profit and power, does not only depend on the decisions and internal conflicts of the ruling class. It also depends on the level of public opposition in Iraq, at home, and within the military itself. Groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War are already playing a leading role in the struggle to end the occupation. But we are still only at the beginning of organizing the kind of opposition we need to affect the course of the war decisively.

The U.S. war against Vietnam was lost by 1968, if not sooner, but continued for years after, with millions of lives lost as a consequence. We cannot allow a repeat of that tragic history. The Vietnam War, though, also has another lesson to teach us: that when people speak out and organize, they can deter even the most powerful and reckless government. The war against the people of Indochina would certainly have lasted even longer-and might have spread even farther-had concerted opposition at home and internationally not forced the United States to retreat. That is a lesson we badly need to relearn-and put into practice-today.

(Anthony Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, just published in an updated paperback edition, with a foreword by Howard Zinn, in the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt). He is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and International Socialist Review. This article appears in the January-February issue of the ISR)