Does Anyone Know What We Are Doing in Iraq?
- From: "tony" <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 08:26:35 +0800
August 29, 2005
Does Anyone Know What We Are Doing in Iraq?
by Paul Craig Roberts
President Bush is out of touch with the American people, the U.S. military,
and international political reality.
With every poll showing smaller and smaller minorities approving of Bush and
his war in Iraq, with top U.S. generals sending signals that they want to
reduce U.S. troops in Iraq, and with the world at large viewing Bush as a
fanatic who cannot acknowledge his blunders and mistakes, Bush announced in
his weekly radio address that "our efforts in Iraq and the broader Middle
East will require more time, more sacrifice, and continued resolve."
Does Bush think he is a dictator?
The polls show that it is the American people's resolve that Bush bring his
Iraq venture to an end, an orderly end if possible, but to an end. Every
explanation Bush has given for his invasion of Iraq has proved to be false.
Yet Bush still speaks of "our noble cause," while taking great care to avoid
Cindy Sheehan and her question, "What is the noble cause?"
Perhaps Bush supplied the answer in his reference in his weekly radio
address to "our efforts in . the broader Middle East."
What are our efforts "in the broader Middle East"?
The only American efforts "in the broader Middle East" that have been
defined are in the policy writings of Bush's neoconservative advisers who
cooked up the invasion of Iraq. For the neocons, our efforts are in behalf
of Israel's security.
The neocons' belief that Israel is made more secure by U.S. military
aggression in the Middle East is delusional. How is Israel made secure by an
invasion that turns the Muslim world against America as all polls show and
Iraq into a training ground for al-Qaeda, as the CIA says has happened?
The U.S. has been defeated in Iraq, both militarily by a limited insurgency
drawn from only 20 percent of the population and politically by Iraqi
divisions as the "constitutional process" demonstrates.
As Knight Ridder reported on Aug. 25: "Insurgents in Anbar province, the
center of guerrilla resistance in Iraq, have fought the U.S. military to a
stalemate. After repeated major combat offensives in Fallujah and Ramadi,
and after losing hundreds of soldiers and Marines in Anbar during the past
two years - including 75 since June 1 - many American officers and enlisted
men assigned to Anbar have stopped talking about winning a military victory
in Iraq's Sunni heartland."
"'I don't think of this in terms of winning,' said Col. Stephen Davis, who
commands a task force of about 5,000 Marines. . 'The frustrating part for
the [home] audience, if you will, is they want finality. They want a fight
for the town and in the end the guy with the white hat wins.'"
That's unlikely in Anbar, Col. Davis said.
Frustrated by a determined insurgency, Bush administration officials predict
that improvements will follow the Iraq constitution. However, the
constitution may be leading to civil war.
Sunnis say they will reject the constitution because it leaves them out of
the oil wealth, which goes to the Kurds in the north and the Shi'ites in the
south, and because it is punitive toward the old ruling party, that is,
toward Sunnis.
Perhaps it is the neocon plan for Shi'ites and Kurds to join the U.S.
military in a war to the death against Sunnis.
But what comes next? How would Turkey regard a largely autonomous oil rich
Kurdistan on the border of its own Kurdish province?
And how would a war in Iraq between Shi'ites and Sunnis play out in the
Middle East divided along those lines? Does the U.S. want to wed itself to
Iranian Shi'ites against Saudi Sunnis?
It sounds like a lot of long term instability. Perhaps the old Islamic
divisions are what the U.S. government is relying on to enable it to
continue to rule the Middle East. Muslims might consume themselves in their
internal hatreds while the U.S. builds its bases to control the oil.
That's been the tried and true practice of Western colonialists since the
fall of the Turkish empire after World War I.
Can it work this time? U.S. ambitions are too much of a threat to other
countries that are well positioned to cause us grief. Will the world be able
to resist the opportunities to undermine an overextended and self-righteous
United States?
Sooner or later, too, Shi'ite and Sunni leaders will realize that they are
pawns in American hands bleeding themselves in behalf of American power.
Sooner or later, Muslim humiliation at the hands of the U.S. and Israel will
permit an Osama bin Laden to reunify the Muslim world.
These are, of course, speculations. But history has few events without
unintended and unrecognized consequences.
http://antiwar.com/roberts/
.
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