OK, here are 12 articles from all over the world to read on Iraq, but if you read them, you'll be better informed than our Asshole-in-Chief

1. How Republicans Win if We Lose in Iraq
Bush and the GOP are shifting tactics just like Nixon did with Vietnam -- to win the next election, not the war.
By Rosa Brooks/ LA Times

If you think the growing similarity betwen Iraq and Vietnam is tragic but inadvertent, you're not being cynical enough.

During the first years of the Iraq war, any resemblance to Vietnam was the result of the Bush administration's disastrous miscalculations. But today, the Iraq war is looking more and more like the Vietnam War because that's exactly what suits the White House.

Writing on this page Thursday, Jonah Goldberg praised President Bush for telling Americans that "he will settle for nothing less than winning" in Iraq. Sure, Goldberg acknowledged, Bush "may be deluding himself," but at least he's "trying to win." No, he's not.

It's clear that Bush knows perfectly well there's no possibility of "winning" anymore, so apparently he's seeking in Iraq exactly what Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sought in Vietnam before the 1972 election: a face-saving "decent interval" before the virtually inevitable collapse of the U.S.-backed government.

By 1971, Nixon and Kissinger understood that "winning" in Vietnam was no longer in the cards — so they shifted from trying to win the war to trying to win the next election. As Nixon put it in March 1971: "We can't have [the South Vietnamese] knocked over brutally … " Kissinger finished the thought " … before the election." So Nixon and Kissinger pushed the South Vietnamese to "stand on their own," promising we'd support them if necessary. But at the same time, Kissinger assured the North Vietnamese — through China — that the U.S. wouldn't intervene to prevent a North Vietnamese victory — as long as that victory didn't come with embarrassing speed.

As historian Jeffrey Kimball has documented, Kissinger's talking points for his first meeting with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai on the topic of Vietnam included a promise that the U.S. would withdraw all troops and "leave the political evolution of Vietnam to the Vietnamese." The U.S. would "let objective realities" — North Vietnamese military superiority — "shape the political future." In the margins of his briefing book, Kissinger scrawled a handwritten elaboration for Chou: "We want a decent interval. You have our assurance."

The "decent interval" strategy worked. By declaring that "peace was at hand," Kissinger took the wind out of antiwar Democrat George McGovern's sails, and Nixon won reelection. And though Nixon himself later fell to the Watergate scandal, the Republican Party successfully used the "decent interval" to cast the Democratic Party in the role of spoiler.

In December 1974, tired of hemorrhaging funds to prop up the failing South Vietnamese government, the Democrat-controlled Congress finally pulled the plug on further U.S. financial support. The following April, Saigon fell, just as Kissinger and Nixon had privately predicted. But enough time had elapsed for Republicans to pin the blame on South Vietnamese missteps and, most important, on the perfidy of the Democratic Party.

In the end, the Vietnam War was a terrible tragedy for the both the U.S. and the Vietnamese — but it was a great success for the Republican Party. Nixon and Kissinger's "decent interval" created the myth of the Democratic Party as weak and anti-military and helped keep the White House in Republican hands for all but 12 of the last 30 years.

Bush's "surge" is the "decent interval" redux. It's too little, too late, and it relies on the Iraqis to do what we know full well they can't do. There is no realistic likelihood that it will lead to an enduring solution in Iraq. But it may well provide the decent interval the GOP needs if it is to survive beyond the 2008 elections.

The surge makes Bush look, as Goldberg suggests, like he really wants to win, even as he refuses to take the necessary and honest steps to mitigate the terrible damage we've already done. The surge buys time — and meanwhile, the Democratic Party is placed in the same untenable position it was in during the last stages of the Vietnam War.

If it backs Bush's feckless plan, it loses credibility with the voters, who hate the war. But if it opposes the escalation, it will be attacked for undermining the military. Ann Coulter offered a preview last week: "Democrats want to cut and run as fast as possible from Iraq, betraying the Iraqis who supported us and rewarding our enemies — exactly as they did to the South Vietnamese."

The Democrats need to break out of the script the White House has written for them and remind Americans that the war in Iraq is a dangerous distraction from other pressing threats to U.S. security, such as nuclear proliferation and the rise of militant Islam worldwide. They need to emphasize that withdrawal from Iraq isn't about "defeat" — it's about shifting our troops, our money and our energy to the real challenges that the Bush administration is ignoring or exacerbating.

At this point, the Republicans win by losing in Iraq — as long as they can blame the loss on the Democrats. And unless they find a way to refuse to play the game, the Democrats will just lose.


2. A New Oil Plan for Iraq -- by VIVIENNE WALT/Time

In his speech announcing plans to boost troop levels in Iraq, George Bush noted that Iraq was about to pass "legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis" in order to give the citizens of that country a share in the economy. Indeed, the 33-page draft of that proposed Oil & Gas Law now circulating, if passed as currently written, would end decades of total government control over Iraq's mammoth oil reserves and distribute oil income among all the country's regions — a dramatic change from the past and a potential windfall for Big Oil. But it must first get through Iraq's fractious parliament and the country's divisive ethnic politics. Already, the draft shows signs of wrangling and potentially troublesome compromise.

With the stakes high, negotiations have been fraught, particularly with the Kurds in the country's oil-rich north. A small government committee met in Baghdad over several weeks late last year to thrash out whether the Kurds' regional government could cut its own oil deals with foreign companies without Baghdad interfering. Kurdish officials have argued their case for months. The proposed law offers a tortuous compromise. A new Federal Council of Oil & Gas will have 60 days to object to any oil deal the Kurds make, and only then with the agreement of two-thirds of the council's members — which will include a Kurdish official. Disputes would also be taken to a new group of independent advisers, who "might include foreign oil and gas experts, Iraqi or foreign," says the document.

Equally thorny is the status of the giant oil fields around Kirkuk, whose capacity is about 700,000 barrels a day, and which the Kurds claim as their own. Under the new law those revenues — like those from elsewhere — will flow into a new national Oil Fund and then be carved up among each region in proportion to its population. Since only the Kurds in the north and the Shi'ites in the south produce oil, that ensures Sunni areas around central Iraq — coyly termed "non-producing provinces" in the law — aren't left out of the deal, potentially deepening Iraq's ethnic divide.

As written, the law would end more than three decades of Iraq's nationalized oil industry. It would give 10-year exploration and development rights to foreign oil companies — at least those willing to start drilling in a country where hundreds of contractors have been killed and pipelines are regularly blow up. Once the exploration deals expire, the companies can negotiate to produce the oil for another 20 years in partnership with the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company. Foreign oil companies would then pay the government 12.5% royalties of the oil's value, and be able to export the rest of whatever oil they find — potentially massive amounts.

Indeed, early word of the document last weekend brought howls from some groups that believe Iraq's government is offering big oil companies overly generous production-sharing deals, which it could regret when the war finally ends. The alternative would be heavy state control, along the lines of the two oil giants that border Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran. "What we are looking at is Iraq signing deals for next 20 years at a time when it is extremely weak and not fully sovereign," says Greg Muttitt, co-director of Platform, a watchdog organization in London that monitors the oil and gas industries. "The U.S. has put a lot of effort into this." But it's not certain that U.S. or British majors like ExxonMobil or BP will be the first big benefactors. Both China and India signed exploration deals with Saddam before the war, which remain in effect.

Whichever companies arrive, their finds could be massive. The country sits atop about 115 billion barrels of oil reserves — the fourth largest in the world after Saudi Arabia, Canada and Iran — and about 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. What is more, much of the oil is relatively easy to reach and cheap to pipe out. There is a catch, however: the infrastructure is in dire shape. Even before this war, rigs and wells had lain rotting for years, since the crippling war with Iran in the 1980s sapped the economy and international sanctions in the 1990s left Iraq in bad need of spare parts. "The consequences have been really quite severe. Things are in bad shape," says James Placke, senior associate of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who spent decades in the region as a U.S. diplomat. "It is not a good investment environment." That is an understatement. Iraq's oil minister Hussein al-Shahrastani has said in recent months that it will take about $20 billion to fix Iraq's equipment well enough to more than double its current output of about 2 million barrels a day, to about 4.5 million barrels in five years' time. In Iraq, that is a very long time off.


3. It may be too late to secure Baghdad's mix
Sectarian strife has changed the capital, solidifying divisions.
By Solomon Moore/LA Times

BAGHDAD — Mohammed Rubaie, 28, is the sort of person President Bush's new Baghdad security plan was designed to protect. But for him and his neighbors and many like them across this city, the plan comes months too late.

One of the chief rationales for sending five additional U.S. brigades to Baghdad is to secure the city's mixed neighborhoods, U.S. military planners say. If residents feel they are safe in their homes, they will no longer turn to sectarian militias to protect them, the strategists argue.

But many of the districts that U.S. planners might have wanted to protect already have been taken over by sectarian gunmen and their allies. Formerly mixed areas, including Rubaie's Hurriya neighborhood, have been transformed by fear and violence. Standing in their place are militantly sectarian communities, their borders hardened by concrete barriers and vigilante-run checkpoints.

Hurriya, where Rubaie was born and grew up, was one of those mixed neighborhoods — a place in Baghdad's northwestern corner where Sunni Arabs and Shiite Muslims lived in relative peace.

But this fall, the militias saw to it that Hurriya would no longer be mixed. One harrowing October night, "there were two gunmen dressed in black, with the police backing them up. They were saying, 'Sunnis, you should leave now. It's the last warning to you all. We're going to burn your houses one by one,' " Rubaie said.

"When our neighbor's house was burned, I felt it was time for us to leave," he added.

Rubaie's family joined a widening flood of Baghdad residents who have abandoned their home districts as the violence between Shiite militiamen and Sunni insurgents has reshaped Baghdad's neighborhoods. In many cases, U.S. officials say, violent sectarian "cleansing" has been abetted by elements of the Iraqi security forces.

The violence has tilted the demographics of some neighborhoods from one sect to the other. In other neighborhoods, it has consolidated sectarian populations and hardened religious boundaries.

Lines are shifting

The United Nations estimates that at least 300,000 Baghdad residents have fled the country since 2003, when the capital's population was approximately 6 million people.

In the last 11 months, since the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra triggered Iraq's plunge into civil war, about 60,000 Baghdad residents have left their homes for other neighborhoods within the city, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement.

In the last year, the lines dividing Sunnis from Shiites in Baghdad have shifted steadily to the west — deep into what was formerly the center of the city's Sunni population.

As recently as last summer, many people here considered the Tigris River, which snakes through the center of the capital, a rough boundary between the predominantly Sunni west bank and the largely Shiite east side. But Shiite militias, who are widely believed to have seized the advantage in Baghdad, have pushed the battle lines across the river into places such as Hurriya. By contrast, Sunni fighters have been unable to sustain advances into east Baghdad.

"They're both taking territory from each other, but the Shiites have the upper hand in Baghdad because of Sadr's movement," said a U.S. advisor, referring to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi army, a powerful militia. "They're very aggressively taking over areas and putting Shiite families into Sunni homes," said the advisor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The militias are often backed up by sectarian elements within Iraq's security forces. U.S. officials said they hoped that the infusion of new troops would halt sectarian sweeps, but acknowledged that in the meantime, the fighting was likely to get worse.

"Both sides are solidifying their ground right now," the advisor said.

The list of neighborhoods that have been subjected to sectarian cleansing is long. In recent months, Sunnis have pushed Shiite families out of some neighborhoods west of the Tigris, including Yarmouk and Mansour.

Shiites have pushed Sunnis out of a longer list of neighborhoods in central Baghdad, including Babil and Riyadh. They also now dominate the Karada district, which was once heavily Christian.

Shiite militiamen have also struck deep into west Baghdad, taking over neighborhoods such as Jihad, which was recently a majority Sunni area.

U.S. advisors say the best they can hope for with Bush's new plan is to stop future sectarian cleansing campaigns and hold Baghdad's skewed demographics as they are, leaving restoration of abandoned, plundered and commandeered homes and neighborhoods for another day.

The balkanization of Baghdad's neighborhoods also raises the specter of future clashes if residents who have been cast out decide to return and retake their domiciles.

A domino effect

The Sunni exodus from Hurriya illustrates the dynamics of sectarian cleansing. When Shiite fighters pushed out the Sunni residents, the residents fled south into the nearby community of Adil, where Sunnis already were in the majority, and drove out that neighborhood's Shiites.

"The displaced from Hurriya tried to create problems and displace Shiites in Adil," said Adnan Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab member of parliament. When Dulaimi played host to peace negotiations with local Shiites at a mosque, five mortar rounds struck the building and derailed the talks.

Sheik Mahmoud abu Abdullah, a spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Assn., a hard-line Sunni clerical group, said the Shiites have been so successful in their assaults because they constitute the majority in Baghdad and have the backing of Iraqi security forces.

"First the militias raid a Sunni area, conduct assassinations, kidnappings," he said. "Then when the people resist, they distribute threatening pamphlets in the area. If pamphlets don't work, the Iraqi security forces come in."

Baghdad City Councilman Siyyid Yacoub Bukhati said commandos in one predominantly Shiite neighborhood in west Baghdad removed checkpoints recently to allow sectarian fighters into the district.

"A few days ago, six to seven cars full of gunmen came in and started shooting and told six houses of Sunnis to leave the area," Bukhati said. "The main reason this happens is because the security forces are weak and unwilling to apply the law."

U.S. military officials have also complained that Iraqi security forces at times appear to be assisting sectarian militias. In a recent news briefing, Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the day-to-day commander for operations in Iraq, said that an earlier Baghdad security plan called Operation Together Forward failed because sectarian elements within Iraq's security forces allowed abuses to occur.

The perceived complicity of Iraqi police and soldiers poses yet another problem for Bush's plan because the U.S. strategy calls for Iraqi security forces to supply 20,000 troops to assist in protecting Baghdad neighborhoods.

Many here say they have little faith in those forces.

"In our neighborhood, the militias try to kidnap Sunnis from their houses," said Abu Abdullah Maslawi, a resident of the Mansour neighborhood. "If the militias fail, the police come and arrest the people who fired at the militias. Now families are even resisting the police, because they believe they are the same as the militias."

(moore1@latimes.com)


4. Mideast shaking its head
Bush sees a regional solution in his plan for Iraq. But Arab states say the problem is the U.S.
By Megan K. Stack and Ken Ellingwood/LA Times

CAIRO — In ordering more American troops into Iraq, President Bush said he was sending a message of hope to millions of Arabs and Afghans trapped in violence. But to many on the ground in the Mideast, the speech spoke volumes of a gaping disconnect between high-flown U.S. promises and a deadly, turbulent reality.

After long years of war and political disillusionment, Bush would have been hard-pressed to come up with any message that would please the Arab world. Analysts say public opinion of the United States has sunk to an unprecedented low, with no end in sight to the bloodletting in Iraq or the Palestinian territories.

Many here, long mired in bloodshed and sinking deeper into sectarian tensions, hold America squarely to blame for both.

Rather than sowing political progress, they say, the U.S. presence in Iraq has poisoned the mood so thoroughly that secular and moderate activists now stay silent for fear of being tarred as American agents.

"What the United States did for the region is destruction for the forces who believe in democracy, rule of law and human rights," said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza City. "We are the real victims."

The Bush administration has repeatedly portrayed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a boost, albeit a painful one, for Arab democracy and human rights. Victory in Baghdad will bring a brighter era to the entire region, U.S. officials have promised.

But after waves of outrage over torture in the Abu Ghraib prison, the spectacle of Saddam Hussein's trial and execution, and sectarian slaughter in the streets of Baghdad, few people here seem able to articulate what, exactly, the United States is even trying to accomplish.

"The U.S. should pull out its troops from Iraq because innocent people are dying every day, including U.S. soldiers," said Karim Salhab, a 25-year-old accountant in Beirut. "I don't think it's fair for the families of these soldiers that their kids die for nothing."

Conventional wisdom here holds that, because the U.S. invasion pitched Iraq into civil war, only an American withdrawal can set the shattered nation back on the road toward stability.

Bush "mismanaged and brutalized Iraq too long to even hope for stability while the troops stay," said Mohammed Sayed Said, an analyst at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "The reservoir of violence and bitterness and agonies is so huge that hoping for stability in the immediate future is self-deception at best."

If the United States really wanted to boost stability, many Arabs say, the Bush administration would aggressively seek a cure for the regional sore spot of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

Bush's announcement comes at a particularly sensitive moment. The region is still reeling with indignation over the inflammatory images that emerged of Hussein's execution, in which the toppled Sunni Arab Iraqi president was forced to endure the sectarian taunts of Shiite Muslim guards while in the hangman's noose.

Besides rubbing raw nerves by degrading a onetime Sunni leader on the dawn of a sacred Muslim holiday, Hussein's hanging also fed popular fears that the war in Iraq left the country in the hands of Shiites — shifting the power balance in a way that threatens many Sunnis.

Sunni governments such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are longtime allies of the United States, while Shiite-ruled Iran has long been America's nemesis. But the rise of Shiite political power in post-Hussein Iraq, along with the growing regional influence of Iran, has left many Sunnis feeling insecure.

Foremost among the causes of bloodshed in Iraq, according to an editorial Thursday in the pan-Arab Al Quds al Arabi newspaper, "is the U.S. occupation's bias in favor of one sect at the expense of the other, and its humiliation of the members of the latter in a manner that reveals a strong desire for revenge."

Some Sunnis in the region have fretted quietly about the possibility of a U.S. withdrawal. They fear that Iraq's minority Sunni population, already under attack by Shiite militias, would face even harsher retribution from Shiites after the departure of U.S. troops.

But on Thursday, those voices were all but silent.

Meanwhile, neighboring Iran warned against boosting the number of American troops in Iraq.

"The increase in the number of American military forces can escalate insecurity and tension in Iraq and work against solving that country's problems," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini told reporters in Tehran. "America is trying to accuse and blame other countries for interference in Iraq to cover its policymaking mistakes in that country."

Bush, in announcing his plans to beef up the number of American troops in Iraq, spoke of "millions of ordinary people … sick of the violence" in Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. They are all looking to Iraq, he said.

"They want to know: Will America withdraw and yield the future of that country to extremists?" he said.

But many Palestinians said Bush had it backward. Only by making peace between Palestinians and Israelis, they said, would stability come to the region as a whole.

"If there is peace here, there will be peace in Iraq," said Badar Salem, a 26-year-old office worker shopping in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "If Bush solves the Palestinian question first, then he will put an end to extremists, mainly the Islamic extremists, because they will not use the Palestinian question as a pretext for their activities everywhere."

Those sentiments echo the report issued in Washington last month by the Iraq Study Group, which linked stability in Iraq to progress in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Preoccupied with the conflict with Israel and internecine fighting, many Palestinians described the war in Iraq as a bleak, remote reality. As to Bush's suggestion that their fate hinged somehow on that of the Iraqi government, many Palestinians scoffed.

"Bush should work on solving the Palestinian question peacefully first," said Muhannad Abdul Hanid, a Palestinian newspaper columnist in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

In Afghanistan, people were too focused on "survival and getting through the winter" to pay much heed to Bush's plans for Iraq, said George Varughese, the acting representative in Afghanistan for the Asia Foundation.

"What happens in Iraq is just not something that's front and center for them," he said.

(megan.stack@latimes.com
ellingwood@latimes.com)


5. US has ignored seven clear pointers to failure – by Bronwen Maddox: World Briefing

President Bush’s “surge” assumes that the Iraqi Government shares his goals, and that given a bit of help with security and a bit more time, they will get there together. That is wrong.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, is not quite the well-meaning but ineffective figure portrayed in Bush’s plan. He has done at least seven things in the past six months which show that he plans to help Shias to secure control of every part of government and has no notion of sharing power with Sunnis.

Just before Christmas, his Government invited several Iranian officials to Baghdad, to the anger of the US, which arrested them.

Al-Maliki pressed ahead with Saddam Hussein’s execution over the new year despite US requests to slow down the process until legal questions had been answered.

In November, al-Maliki ordered US forces to lift roadblocks they had put in place to try to track down a missing US soldier.

On October 24, when Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, and General George Casey, the coalition commander, announced (with Bush’s backing) a new “timetable” for quelling the violence, al-Maliki denied that he had signed up to any such plan, a public rebuff to the US. Iraq was sovereign, he said, and no one was going to dictate timetables (nor does Bush’s plan this week venture to put dates on its targets for the Iraqi Government).

On October 25, US and Iraqi forces raided Sadr City, the stronghold of the militia led by the radical Shia Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, whom the US blames for persecuting Sunnis and destabilising Iraq. Al-Maliki disavowed the operation, saying he had not been consulted and insisting “that it will not be repeated”.

When US forces embedded with Iraqi forces have urged them to crack down on the Shia militias and to prevent the slaughter of Sunnis, al-Maliki has overruled them.

During Israel’s attack on Lebanon in the summer, al-Maliki condemned the Israeli action and arranged a high-profile meeting in Tehran with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian President, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

These are not the actions of a man who shares the US goal of creating a multi-ethnic Iraq, in which Sunnis are represented and their rights protected.

Al-Maliki may not even tolerate the presence of more US troops for long, although he spared Bush the humiliation this week of saying so outright. But leading Shias, close to al-Maliki and his sometime rival Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, have openly opposed the notion of a “surge”, as an encroachment into Iraqi sovereignty. There lies the rub. They have taken the US at its word — that it has transferred sovereignty to Iraq’s elected leaders, and is staying only to advise and help. Let us run our country, then, and tell the US how to help, is their answer. But after years of suppression by the Sunni elite, the leaders of the Shia majority seem in little mood to make concessions to a minority, although they go through the motions of acknowledging the principle in their pledges to the US.

Yet the al-Maliki Government has ignored every target the US set it: last year, this summer, and again in October. The US asked it to put into action a plan for sharing oil revenues across the country, and cracking down on militias, both to help Sunnis; it has done neither.

This week Bush asked it for the same things, once more. It is hard to see why it will oblige, when it has felt no need to do so before.


6. Bush's tough tactics are a 'declaration of war' on Iran -- by Anne Penketh/The Independent UK

American forces stormed Iranian government offices in northern Iraq, hours after President George Bush issued a warning to Tehran that was described as a "declaration of war".

The soldiers detained six people, including diplomats, according to the Iranians, and seized documents and computers in the pre-dawn raid which was condemned by Iran. A leading UK-based Iran specialist, Ali Ansari, said the incident was an "extreme provocation". Dr Ansari said that Mr Bush's speech on future Iraq strategy amounted to "a declaration of war" on Iran.

"The risk is a wider war. Because of the underlying tensions, we are transferring from a 'cold war' into a 'hot war'," he said.

In his speech, the President accused Iran and Syria of providing material support for attacks on US troops, and vowed to stop the "flow of support" from across the border. "We will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq," he said.

Dr Ansari argued that the Bush administration had decided to confront Iran at a time when public opinion has been focused on the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. "There's been a shift of emphasis without anyone noticing," he said.

"Moderate" Sunni Arab states who feel threatened by the rise of Shia Iran, thanks to its influence in Iraq and its refusal to curb its nuclear programme, could be expected to back the Bush approach, he said. The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, is due to visit Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia this week.

Until now, the Bush administration had been content to deal with the perceived Iranian threat diplomatically. The United Nations adopted sanctions against Tehran on 23 December. However, the economic measures adopted by the UN have failed to convince Iran to halt its uranium-enrichment programme which could lead to production of a nuclear weapon. The US is calling on allied states to adopt tougher unilateral sanctions.

President Bush appointed Admiral William Fallon to replace General John Abizaid as head of Central Command for Iraq and Afghanistan last week in a sign that change could be afoot. This week, Mr Bush ordered a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, along with its support ships, which could be used to contain Iran.

The US Treasury named Iran's Bank Sepah as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction on Tuesday, banned US companies or citizens from doing business with it and blocked any of its assets that come under American jurisdiction.

But if the US is preparing to confront Iran militarily - which some top military officials in Israel are reportedly recommending - the Bush administration will find itself involved in conflicts on four fronts.

In Somalia, US special forces have been pounding suspected al-Qa'ida suspects since early on Monday, in a continuing operation that risks pulling the Americans back into a conflict in a failed state. US forces are also active in southern Afghanistan in the hunt for the al-Qa'ida leader, Osama bin Laden, and his top associates. Al-Qa'ida has reactivated its Taliban allies who have become bolder in their attacks on coalition forces.

In Iraq, US troops are losing soldiers on an almost daily basis to the bombs of Sunni and Shia insurgents. The Shia-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was warned by Ms Rice yesterday that his days were numbered unless he was able to take on Shia militias who are his allies in government.

Ms Rice followed up President Bush's tough words on Iran by saying: "The President made very clear last night that we know Iran is engaged in activities endangering our troops... and that we're going to pursue those who may be involved in those activities."

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, protested against the raid by US forces in Arbil, saying on Iranian state-run radio that it targeted a "diplomatic mission" since the "presence of Iranian staffers in Irbil was legal".

Ironically, Iran had been contained by Saddam Hussein, until his overthrow by the Americans in 2003. Obsessed by a threat from "Persian hordes", Saddam maintained ambiguity about his weapons of mass destruction so Iran would believe that it had reason to fear its western neighbour. So have the Americans made a strategic mistake by refusing to engage with Iran? "There's no doubt that nothing good will come of this," said Dr Ansari.


7. The Washington War Game
The fight over Iraq is a clash of governmental branches not seen since Vietnam.
By Eleanor Clift/Newsweek

Early rumblings of an anti-war movement sounded in Washington this week as several progressive groups joined forces to press the Democratic Congress to use its power of the purse to stop the latest escalation of the conflict in Iraq. Unlike their predecessors in the Vietnam era, who were often scruffy and unshaven, these activists are well within the mainstream in their appearance as well as their politics.

Polite but persistent, they include labor activist Andy Stern, a savvy organizer, Roger Hickey with Campaign for America's Future, who normally advocates for health care, and Jon Soltz of Vote Vets, an organization that helped elect Iraq vets to Congress. Soltz said Bush's plan of sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq is "kind of like spitting in the ocean," and the president is "too much of a coward to admit a mistake." MoveOn.org added 65,000 new members in the last 48 hours, executive director Eli Pariser reported. The liberal group is funding bus signs to declare in bold black letters, ENOUGH.

The net roots are pushing hard on Democrats to go beyond symbolic resolutions to oppose the war. But Democrats were so thoroughly chastised and blamed for losing Vietnam that they're wary of getting tagged as the party who undermined the troops. In '72, the country overwhelmingly re-elected President Nixon even after four years of his secret plan to end the war. By the time Congress voted to withhold funds for the war, Jerry Ford was president and American troops had left the battlefield. Without its benefactor, the puppet South Vietnamese government promptly fell, and U.S. personnel fled onto helicopters from the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon. The Democrats got tarred with the loss, along with a lasting reputation for being weak on national security.

The freight train is moving faster this time. The Democrats know they're on borrowed time. They wouldn't be in the majority if it weren't for their opposition to the war. Senator Kennedy introduced legislation to prevent Bush from escalating the conflict without congressional approval, but few of his colleagues are with him. Even Illinois Sen. Barak Obama, who sharply criticized Bush's "surge," is not ready to jump on the Kennedy bandwagon. Sen. Hillary Clinton, another likely '08 contender, conspicuously did not endorse Kennedy's bill. Democrats are moving toward a non-binding resolution opposing the build-up that could attract the support of a dozen Republicans, in addition to every Democrat with the exception of Senator Lieberman, who was re-elected last fall as an independent but caucuses with his old party. Lieberman backs the surge.

This fight is no longer about Democrats versus the White House. It's now a confrontation between the two branches of government on a scale not seen since Vietnam. On the House side, Speaker Pelosi is sounding more aggressive, rallying Democrats in a closed caucus meeting with Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism." She is scheduling a vote on the Bush escalation either next week or shortly after the president's State of the Union address on Jan. 23. An aide said she is looking to Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha, who led the Democratic opposition to the war, and Rep. Ike Skelton, the traditionally hawkish chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to come up with ways to tie Bush's hands short of withholding money from troops in the field.

If you count Bush's initial crowing on the deck of an aircraft carrier that major combat operations were over, this is Bush's fifth rollout of a plan for victory. And it's much bleaker than the others, says Matt Bennett of Third Way, a Democratic centrist group. To have any hope of success, the plan hinges on Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki breaking with his protector, Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is more effective than the Iraqi army. "Pressuring Maliki to go after the Mahdi militia is like depending on the Bush administration to break the NRA," says Bennett. The likelihood of Maliki stepping up to the task is so remote that some lawmakers see the Bush surge as a kind of secret exit plan. In their view, Bush knows he's got a bad deal, and Maliki will never purge the Mahdi army; when the Iraqi prime minister fails to deliver, Bush can blame the Iraqis for being weak and feckless and corrupt, and begin to withdraw U.S. troops. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski dubs this scenario "blame and run."

But Bush could have blamed the Iraqis without sending in more troops. Which leads to the other scenario bruited about in Washington, principally among Democrats: that Bush is using American troops as political pawns. There is a widespread view that the war is lost, and Bush is postponing the inevitable until after he leaves office - or worse, preparing to widen the war to Iran and Syria rather than accept defeat.

What we have is a crisis of confidence in two governments, Baghdad and Washington. A Democratic congressional aide coming away from a meeting at the White House said it was "almost sad" to watch the president "making this pitch and practicing his phraseology," when the only thing that will change people's minds are results on the ground. After four years, there's little hope anything will be different.


8. Bush’s New Iraq Plan: Bomb Tehran – by Tony Karon/Rootless Cosmopolitan

Critics are right to label President Bush’s new Iraq plan an “escalation,” but what was most clear from his speech announcing it is that the object of this escalation is not Iraq, but Iran.

For all the smarmy talk about the Iraq Study Group, Bush bluntly rejected its central premise that the only way the U.S. can salvage anything in Iraq is through a new political agreement both among Iraqis and their neighbors — a process that takes into account the reality that Iran has legitimate interests in Iraq (far more so, quite frankly, than the U.S. does), and envisages a process in which all stakeholders are accommodated. Instead, Bush offered familiar distortions in his description of the reason for failure thus far — al-Qaeda and Iran, were the culprits, the former stoking sectarian violence through terror attacks and the latter ostensibly supporting death squads. Anyone familiar with the current dynamics in the Middle East would have taken President Bush’s outline of the consequences of failure — “radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits” and “would be in a better position to topple moderate governments,” Iran would be emboldened and al-Qaeda would have a new safe haven — as an admission of failure, since all of those consequences are already in play.

But it was the characterization of Iran’s role that was most disturbing. Bush suggested that the Iraqi people had voted for united country at the polls, and seen their dreams dashed by the maneuvering of Iran and Syria and others. That’s a crock. Iran enthusiastically supported those elections, and why wouldn’t they? The Shiite majority voted overwhelmingly in favor of parties far closer to Tehran than they are to Washington. Moreover, while Bush implies that sectarianism was somehow a deviation from what the electorate had chosen, in fact the electorate had voted almost entirely on sectarian and ethnic lines. The sectarian principle is at the heart of the democratically elected government; it’s not some imposition by al-Qaeda or Iran.

Iran and Syria must be addressed, Bush said, but only as a threat — he accused them of offering support to insurgent forces attacking U.S. troops, and vowed to stop them. Almost in the same breath, he added: “We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing _ and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.”

Carrier strike groups and Patriot missile defenses are of no use in the counterinsurgency war in Iraq: They are an attempt to turn up the heat on Iran by preparing for an air strike, and putting in place the means to contain Iran’s response via its missile capability. Bush called for regional support, but only on the basis of his anti-Iran alliance — for the Sunni regimes, support for the U.S. in Iraq was cited as a duty in light of their common purpose in containing Iran.

So, essentially we’re now being asked to believe that the Iraqi government, dominated by Iran-friendly Shiite religious parties, is going to act in concert with Bush’s plan — and even Bush admitted that their support is the critical factor — giving U.S. forces the green light to take control of Sadr City from the Sadrists and so on, even as Washington moves its assets into position for a military strike on Iran. It may be, of course, that Washington is posturing in order to sweat Tehran into believing that a military strike is coming in order to intimidate the Islamic Republic into backing down, but frankly I wouldn’t bet on the collective strategic wisdom of Cheney-Rice and Khamenei-Larijani-Ahmedinajad combining to avoid a confrontation. And if the U.S. is raising the stakes, you can reliably expect Iran to do the same, probably starting in Iraq.

Even within the narrow Iraqi context, no matter what Maliki has told Bush, I wouldn’t bet on him coming through for the U.S. when the battle for Sadr City starts in earnest, and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, appalled by the violence, begins demanding that the U.S. go home.

Equally important, though, the new Bush moves give Iran no incentive to cooperate, and plenty of incentive to tie the U.S. up in an increasingly messy situation in Iraq. And my suspicion is that Tehran has hardly begun to exercise its ability to cause chaos in Iraq.

Again, the Bush Administration has failed to grasp the most basic lesson of his failures in Iraq and elsewhere — that military force has its limits, and that power is a more complex thing. Instead of recognizing what the likes of Baker and Scowcroft have emphasized all along — that the basic crisis in the region is political — Bush is going the Cheney lock-and-load route. Perhaps that’s why Bush warned Americans to expect another year of bloodletting. And stupendously reckless adventurism though it may be, I wouldn’t bet against him launching air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. And then he’ll have to learn the same lesson all over again, because the region will be no safer or any more stable. On the contrary, I’d say it’s a safe bet that by the time he leaves the White House, the U.S. position everywhere from Lebanon, Egypt and the Palestinian territories to Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, will be considerably worse than it is now.


9. Shi'ite time bomb has a short fuse -- by Kaveh L Afrasiabi/Asia Times

"If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a recent conversation, US author and linguist Noam Chomsky repeatedly faulted the Iraq Study Group's (ISG's) report for ignoring the sovereign rights of Iraqi people, the majority of whom favor the end of military occupation of their country.

"One notable feature of the report is its lack of concern for the will of the Iraqi people. The authors surely are aware of the polls that reveal that two-thirds of the population of Baghdad want US troops to be withdrawn immediately, that 70% of all Iraqis want a firm timetable for withdrawal, most of them within a year or less, that 80% believe that the US presence increases violence, and that almost the same percentage believe that the US intends to keep permanent military bases." [1]

Chomsky's criticisms are particularly relevant in light of US President George W Bush's much-anticipated policy speech on Iraq on Wednesday, which was notable for the sheer absence of any major policy shift, other than an incremental troop increase, as well as the minutest reference to Iraq's sovereignty.

It is worth remembering that the bipartisan ISG rejected troop increases "because we do not believe that the needed levels are available for a substantial deployment". This aside, the panel's claim that "no country in the region will benefit in the long term from a chaotic Iraq" deserves a pause, because Israel is the sole exception, benefiting from such chaos that diverts attention from its own policies toward the Palestinians.

Military reductionism is a poor substitute for the multi-layered recommendations of the ISG focusing on a diplomatic offensive. War and military solutions cannot be the extension of diplomacy by other means. A political solution with regional dimensions is needed, which is precisely what is missing in Bush's outlook.

Of course, Bush's omissions are understandable within the context of a US interventionist policy that, nearly four years later, is incapable of coming to terms with the unwanted consequences of the post-Saddam Hussein political process, ie, that the Iraqi government is firmly opposed to the idea of a US troop "surge" and their "embeddedness" with the Iraqi army.

According to John Burns of the New York Times, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki actually wants US forces out of Baghdad and moved to the city's "periphery". And it is not just the embattled prime minister either, recalling how Iraqi President Jalal Talabani lambasted the ISG report and its plethora of recommendations, such as troop embeddedness and various "benchmarks" for the Iraqi government, including a constitutional revision and re-Ba'athification, as a violation of Iraq's sovereignty.

Saving face, though, In Baghdad, according to Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, "President Bush informed the Iraq government in a phone call of the new strategy before announcing it." He added that Iraq would "demand adjusting anything unsuitable in the new US strategy". The Iraqis can demand, but shouldn't count on much satisfaction from a superpower more used to imposing demands.

Unfortunately, news of the objections of Iraqi government leaders does not seem to have reached the White House, nor the fact that per a CNN poll, some 61% of Americans are not in favor of a troop surge. Instead, Bush unveiled a "new strategy" that is helplessly bereft of imagination and relies one-dimensionally on coercive counterinsurgency tactics to salvage the sinking ship of the US-British gambit in Iraq.

The new plan is, in Bush's words, to compensate for past "mistakes", one being that "there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have". What about the restrictions placed by the Iraqi government? Will Bush respect the wishes of Iraq's elected leaders or, instead, contemplate adding the feather of a military coup, harking back to the overthrow of the government in South Vietnam, to his hat?

Indeed, the comparisons with Ngo Dinh Diem's fate in South Vietnam and Iraq are becoming more pronounced. Just as Diem was pressured with conditions on economic aid before his overthrow, Washington is now imposing "benchmarks" on the Iraqi government, such as how to divide up the oil revenue. These demands, irrespective of their merits, have the undesirable consequence of perpetuating the image of Baghdad's regime as a client state pure and simple, hardly conducive to the government's legitimacy requirements, and quest for internal peace and stability.

But don't expect any of the policy hawks behind Bush's make-believe "new strategy" to bother themselves with such details, given their imperial mindset on preventing the impression of an astounding failure. Yet few even in Washington seriously believe that such prescriptions falling seriously short of a "comprehensive new approach" as called for by the ISG and others have even a moderate chance of success. This save for the Israelis and their influence peddlers, who are quietly happy that Bush disregarded the panel's "linkage approach" that would have put the Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians on the United States' policy agenda.

Not only that, instead of adopting the panel's key recommendations for a vigorous US diplomatic initiative in the region by engaging Iran and Syria, Bush, much to the chagrin of the panel's members, opted for the opposite path of confrontation by accusing Tehran and Damascus of harboring "terrorists and insurgents". He also said they were providing material support for attacks on US troops, and promised that he would root out Iranian and Syrian support networks and protect Iraq's borders.

These are, indeed, tall orders for a US military stretched thin and plagued with low morale and troop exhaustion. Senator John Warner has warned that Bush's plan would embroil the US in a bloody civil war, thus further complicating the US mission in Iraq, which has led to a "US-Shi'ite alliance", per the words of Washington pundit Edward Luttwak.

Yet a point missed by Luttwak and many other US analysts is the fragility of this alliance and the distinct possibility that under undue pressure by a combined force of Arab Sunnis, Israelis and US hawks, the alliance might crumble and thus turn the majority Shi'ites in Iraq into insurgents.

Should that happen, it is a sure bet that a great deal more troops in Iraq would be needed to quell the Shi'ite-dominated provinces rebelling against the Americans. This nightmare scenario is probably the leading factor mitigating against the Diem scenario in Iraq, which in turn brings us back to the demands of the Iraqi government, due to take full responsibility for security matters by November.

That plan is, however, unreachable, given the abysmal security situation, such as the 11-hour full-scale military confrontation in central Baghdad this week. This reflected a substantive strengthening of the insurgents, who can now add to hit-and-run tactics disciplined attacks in "military formations".

Increasingly beholden to US protectorate firepower, the Iraqi government will soon be caught between incompatible demands, of the radical Shi'ites led by Muqtada al-Sadr calling for US withdrawal and the US push to disarm his Mehdi Army and other militias.

But since the Iraqi army is heavily infiltrated by Muqtada loyalists, it is highly doubtful that the Iraqi government can appease US military advice on the militias and, what is more, one can no longer discount the possibility of a confrontation between the US and the Iraqi army in the near future.

In his speech, Bush vowed to correct the past mistake of vacating insurgent-infested neighborhoods after clearing them, claiming that the US would now have the necessary troop levels to "hold" them. This may turn out a hope against hope, and could translate into nothing more than than more dead on the ground.

According to Leon Paneta, a member of the ISG, "Not one general we spoke to recommended the troop increase, and they all only saw temporary results from such an increase." By replacing his recalcitrant generals who saw the ultimate futility of bandaging a gaping wound through troop increases, Bush has reshuffled the military and diplomatic deck by bringing on board commanders favoring aggressive counterinsurgency tactics, such as forming a "giant security cordon" around Baghdad.

While Bush is adamant that "this plan can work", he has at the same time introduced a sober realism by calling for "patience, sacrifice and resolve" on America's part, predicting that even if the plan is successful, bloodshed would continue and American lives would still be lost.

The consequences of failure, he has warned, would be dire in terms of "radical Islamists" posing even bigger threats to America's precious allies in the oil region and to the US itself, and "Iran will be emboldened to pursue nuclear weapons and to dominate the region".

Thus the gist of Bush's "new strategy" is to make transparent the veiled purpose of long-term US power in Iraq, which is to deter Iranian power, protect America's vital interests and act as a bulwark against Islamist radicals and terrorists, without even an indirect allusion to an exit strategy. In historical retrospective, all this will likely remind us of is yet another US tragedy as previously seen in Vietnam, or the French in Algeria, tragedies inherited from the legacy of Western colonialism.

Avoiding Iraq as the flashpoint
One net result of the White House's new strategy may indeed turn out to be the transformation of Iraq into a flashpoint between Iran and the US, in light of Thursday's news of a US raid on the Iranian Consulate in the city of Irbil, decried by Tehran as an act of provocation.

This will further fracture the US-Shi'ite alliance in Iraq and increase the prospect of a wider war that will not be in the interests of either Iran, the US or any of its allies save Israel. Prudent crisis management is needed whereby US and Iranian diplomats in Iraq meet face to face for constructive dialogue on issues of mutual concern. Sadly, despite strong recommendations for this course of action from the United States' European allies and even from within the US Department of State, there is now little or no prospect of anything but escalating crisis in the region.

(Kaveh L Afrasiabi , PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.)


10. The Same Game, Only More So
The Ironies of Bush and Iraq
By LAITH al-SAUD/Counterpunch

On a personal note I have written very little on Iraq since 2006. There is good reason-nothing has changed. The same abusers of human rights exercise power with impunity, however incompetently. The democrats took office but they seemed poised to continue to support the war. And, of course, the year went out with a bang with the execution of Saddam Hussein, which was nothing less than an exhibition of Iraqi (and American) incompetence and stupidity. I personally was left wondering if this is how the Iraqi government kills someone when the whole world is watching imagine the final moments of the countless, nameless Iraqis who are found dead on Baghdad's streets everyday. In fact, little is left to the imagination, as the hundreds upon hundreds of dead tortured bodies found each month in Iraq are found blind folded and tied we can imagine those tragic last moments. Indeed, what could be left to the imagination? We know the current regime in Iraq is corrupt, incompetent and brutal; just as we know the current regime in Washington is corrupt, incompetent and brutal. Yet, the war machine rolls on and President Bush has announced that it will roll on with greater vigor.

Tragedy often involves irony and Bush's latest ploy to send more troops to Iraq is, perhaps, the most ironic twist of this war since the elections. If you are wondering whether I mean the US or Iraqi elections-let me be clear-I mean both. The elections of 2005 were hailed as "milestones" in Middle Eastern history. Do you recall the elation, not just amongst this administration, or even commentators who supported the war, but even amongst supposed "ordinary" Iraqis who held up their ink stained fingers in pride. The fact that most Iraqis were voting the occupation out in the early election of 2005 was little mentioned in the mainstream media. As you may recall, some of the major "winners" in those elections ran on a platform to end the occupation, including Hizb'dawa, the party to which the current Prime Minster of Iraq, Nuri al-Maliki belongs. After those "elected" assumed power, they position vis-à-vis the occupation quickly changed. The Americans convinced the Iraqi government that they needed the Americans there to protect the nascent government.

Then the bombing of the Samarra Mosque in February of 2006 happened. This bombing served as a centerpiece for Bush's speech regarding sending more troops to Iraq. As Bush put it: "They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam - the Golden Mosque of Samarra - in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked." The "they" that Bush is referring to is al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents. Yet, which one is it? Is it al-Qaeda or the Sunni insurgents? If either term means anything anymore they are certainly not one and the same thing in Iraq. By Sunni insurgents does he mean those secular Ba'athists that de-emphasized sectarian differences? Or by al-Qaeda does he mean anybody who bombs anything? Well a look at the current situation in Somalia should confirm for us that, in fact, US missile tips now define who is and is not al-Qaeda-look under the rubble of any US air strike and there you will find al-Qaeda, they may look a lot like innocent women and children to you but Bush knows better. Ironically, after the Sammarra bombing, Bush convinced the Sunnis-who supposedly make up the bulk of the resistance-that they too needed American protection. The truth is sectarian violence has served as a convenient pretext for continuing American involvement in Iraq.

This war has been fraught with irony. Fareed Zakaria, whose column is a mouthpiece for American imperialism, wrote last November that Iraq's Sunnis need to realize that America is there to "protect" them. I thought America was there to liberate the Shi'a from the oppressive clutches of the Sunni? Should it matter what the "Sunni of Iraq" actually think I suggest Zakaria campaign American protectionism in Falluja and Ramadi, cities devastated by American "protection." Dexter Filkins of the New York Times commented on a radio broadcast that Sunni's have realized that "the Americans are not their real enemies but the Shi'a are." What is ironic, of course, is that the Sunni and Shi'a were not the "real enemies" of one another until the Americans showed up. This sectarian narrative directed much of Bush's speech. The idea is that sectarian violence is now the threat to Bush's "democratic" vision in the Middle East.

Bush's speech had little to do with the reality in Iraq it was just another spin at the end (I hope) of a long list of spins. How else could this president justify the continued presence of American forces in Iraq, by citing the long list of American successes? You would almost have the impression that things were moving along well in Iraq before the bombing occurred. What non-sense. Fact: Before the Samarra bombing and after $4 billions dollars Iraqis had, and continue to have, less electricity than before the invasion. Fact: Throughout much of the tenure of the CPA, Robert J. Stein Jr. was put in charge of reconstruction finances, in spite of his being convicted of felony fraud in the 1990's. Fact: Private security contractors have been guilty of committing acts of murder, fraud and negligence throughout Iraq but are immune from prosecution in Iraq. Fact: By the end of 2005, roughly only half of Iraq's supposed reconstruction projects were completed. And, finally, fact: by the end of 2005 hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were dead as a result of this war-the actual number is difficult to determine because, as General Tommy Franks so famously once said, the U.S. "don't do body counts." These statistics and facts are only those most readily available, and yet it is clear that Iraq was a huge mess before the Sammarra bombing and the sectarian violence.

There is something deeply troubling about having to point these blatant facts out time and time again in opposition to his war. President Bush is an ass and a criminal ass at that; at what point do the American people who support this war cease becoming mere asses and begin to recognize their political antipathy as criminal? The democrats who ran on a platform opposed to the war seem likely to lead America into the criminal camp. Bush's plan depends a great deal on Iraqi forces to commit to securing Baghdad's many neighborhoods, yet sadly the fact that Iraq's security forces are responsible for a great deal of the violence was touched upon by Dick Durbin-but did Durbin suggest ending the occupation? The democrats position vis-à-vis the war has been it's a bad habit but here is more money for it Mr. President. It goes without saying that this policy is analogous to condemning the addiction but giving many to the addict, an exercise in irony.


11. New Plan for Iraq, Much More of the Same
Blood for Face
By DAVE LINDORFF/Counterpunch

This isn't blood for oil; it's blood for face.

President Bush's "new and improved" plan for "prevailing" in the Iraq War he started almost four years ago--to send an additional 21,500 US troops into the chaos of Baghdad and Anbar Province--turns out to be nothing more than a coward's way of trying to avoid having to say the war has been lost.

Over 3000 Americans and several hundred thousand innocent Iraqis have died because Bush and his handlers decided early in his first disastrous administration that they needed a bully little war to solidify his position, win the Congress, and grab dictatorial powers by setting him up as a "war president."

The scheme worked at first. Bush got his war, he won control of Congress in 2002, and squeaked back into office in 2004, all by running as a commander in chief in time of war. He also managed to usurp powers from Congress and undermine the Constitution, again by playing commander in chief.

But his war didn't go as planned.

The Iraqi people didn't want to be invaded, much less occupied, and a home-grown insurgency in that ravaged nation of 24 million, armed with just RPGs and AK-47 rifles, has brought the world's most powerful military to its knees.

Rather than admit that his Iraq adventure has been an unmitigated disaster--one which has essentially handed the world's third largest oil-producing nation over to the control of its neighbor, Iran--Bush has decided to escalate the slaughter.

The 21,500 additional troops, 17,500 of whom will be in Baghdad, and 4000 of whom will be in Anbar, will be fighting the overwhelmingly popular Mahdi army of Moktada al Sadr in Baghdad, and the entrenched and battle-hardened Sunni fighters in Anbar. Casualties on the American side will predictably soar.

The slaughter of innocent Iraqis in both places, but particularly in the slums of Baghdad, will also mount, because the way Americans fight is with heavy (and indiscriminate) weapons and aerial bombardment, not hand-to-hand.

This carnage will not produce peace and stability in Iraq, but will rather energize support for the resistance to US occupation, and in turn, the influence of Iran, which backs that resistance.

Bush, in his address to the nation, continued the fiction that the violence in Iraq is the work of Al Qaeda and "foreign fighters," though the military brass, and soldiers on the ground, know otherwise.

As Lt. Gen (ret.) William Odom, commenting after Bush's address in an interview on ABC News, put it, "I expected to hear a clearer view of the enemy we are fighting. What I heard was `foreign fighters.' In fact, there are several wars going on: US against many forces, Sunnis against Shias, and Al Qaeda as allies of the Sunnis. So I don't think he (Bush) understands the nature of the war."

Odom may be correct as far as our inarticulate and famously uninquisitive president is concerned. You can't learn too much when your entire research effort consists of scanning one-page executive summaries each day. But Bush's advisers, and particularly his political advisers, are well aware of what they are up against, and know that the war is already a lost cause--and one which at least 70 percent of the American public have already decided should be ended.

Since they can't admit to that, they've decided to let some more young Americans (and a hell of a lot of innocent Iraqi men, women and children) take the bullets for them, in hopes that they can stretch out the day of reckoning past January 19, 2009, when it will be the next president's job to watch the helicopters departing from the US embassy roof of the Green Zone.

Or maybe ABC commentator Mark Shields was onto something when he suggested, following the Bush speech, that perhaps it was all a plan to "give everything" to the Iraqi government, say it's the Iraqi government's chance to get the country in order, and then blame the failure on the Iraqis. If so, it's just another dirty trick on the Americans who are being sent into battle to kill and die as cover for Bush's debacle.

(Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal .His n book of CounterPunch columns titled " This Can't be Happening! " is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest book is " The Case for Impeachment ", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky. He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com)


12. Cliff Ahead! Stomp on the Gas!
Less Than Zero
By WILLIAM S. LIND/Counterpunch

On the surface, President Bush's Wednesday night speech adds up to precisely nothing. The President said, "It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq," but the heart of his proposal, adding more than 20,000 U.S. troops, represents no change in strategy. It is merely another "big push," of the sort we have seen too often in the past from mindless national and military leadership. Instead of Dave Petraeus, why didn't Bush ask Sir Douglas Haig to take command?

Relying on more promises from Iraq's nominal government and requiring more performance from the Iraqi army and police are equally empty policies. Both that government and its armed forces are mere fronts for Shiite networks and their militias. If the new troops we send to Baghdad work with Iraqi forces against the Sunni insurgents, we will be helping the Shiites ethnically cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis. If, as Bush suggested, our troops go after the Shiite militias in Baghdad and elsewhere, we will find ourselves in a two-front war, fighting Sunnis and Shiites both. We faced that situation briefly in 2004, and we did not enjoy it.

All this, again, adds up to nothing. But if we look at the President's proposal more carefully, we find it actually amounts to less than zero. It hints at actions that may turn a mere debacle into disaster on a truly historic scale.

First, Mr. Bush said that previous efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two reasons, the second of which is that "there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have." This suggests the new "big push" will be even more kinetic that what we have done in the past, calling in more firepower -- airstrikes, tanks, artillery, etc. -- in Baghdad itself. Chuck Spinney has already warned that we may soon begin to reduce Baghdad to rubble. If we do, and the President's words suggest we will, we will hasten our defeat. In this kind of war, unless you are going to take the "Hama model" and kill everyone, success comes from de-escalation, not from escalation.

Second, the President not only upped the ante with Syria and Iran, he announced two actions that only make sense if we plan to attack Iran, Syria or both. He said he has ordered Patriot missile batteries and another U.S. Navy aircraft carrier be sent to the region. Neither has any conceivable role in the fighting in Iraq. However, a carrier would provide additional aircraft for airstrikes on Iran, and Patriot batteries would in theory provide some defense against Iranian air and missile attacks launched at Gulf State oil facilities in retaliation.

To top it off, in questioning yesterday on Capitol Hill, the Tea Lady, aka Secretary of State Rice, refused to promise the administration would consult with Congress before attacking Iran or Syria.

As I have said before and will say again, the price of an attack on Iran could easily be the loss of the army we have in Iraq. No conceivable action would be more foolish than adding war with Iran to the war we have already lost in Iraq. Regrettably, it is impossible to read Mr. Bush's dispatch of a carrier and Patriot batteries any other way than as harbingers of just such an action.

The final hidden message in Mr. Bush's speech confirms that the American ship of state remains headed for the rocks. His peroration, devoted once more to promises of "freedom" and democracy in the Middle East and throughout the world, could have been written by the most rabid of the neo-cons. For that matter, perhaps it was. So long as our grand strategy remains that which the neo-cons represent and demand, namely remaking the whole world in our own image, by force where necessary, we will continue to fail. Not even the greatest military in all of history, which ours claims to be but isn't, could bring success to a strategy so divorced from reality. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's words give the lie to those who have hoped the neo-cons' influence over the White House had ebbed. >From Hell, or the World Bank which is much the same place, Wolfi had to be smiling.

No, Incurious George has offered no new strategy, nor new course, nor even a plateau on the downward course of our two lost wars and failed grand strategy. He has chosen instead to escalate failure, speed our decline and expand the scope of our defeat. Headed toward the cliff, his course correction is to stomp on the gas.

(William S. Lind , expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.)