Yankees going home?
- From: "Lance" <lachenicht@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 24 Aug 2005 04:16:33 -0700
FEATURES
ALLISTER SPARKS
Are the Yankees going home?
While we South Africans were preoccupied with the Cosatu revolt over
Jacob Zuma last week, a funny thing happened across the Atlantic.
President George W. Bush's approval ratings for his handling of the
Iraq war plunged to 34%.
That is startlingly close to the 32% approval rating President Lyndon
Johnson got for his handling of the Vietnam war in March 1968. Later
that month Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election -
thereby starting the process that eventually led to the United States's
withdrawal from Vietnam.
The point is that you can't continue fighting a war if your people no
longer believe it is winnable. The Vietnam war was lost on the home
front, now Iraq is going the same way. It is only a matter of time -
and it may not be too long because leading members of Bush's Republican
Party are beginning to worry about the impact of this war on next
year's mid-term congressional elections.
There was a straw in the wind earlier this month when Paul Hackett, a
little-known marine newly returned from fighting in Iraq, ran as a
Democrat in a special election in a bedrock Republican district and
came close to winning after a strongly anti-war campaign in which he
called the president a "chicken hawk". The election was symbolic for it
was in Ohio, the state which gave Bush his re-election victory last
year.
The ripples of concern are reaching into the highest echelons of the
Republican Party. Newt Gingrich, a party guru, described Hackett's
near-victory as "a wake-up call" and described Bush's continuing
efforts to reassure the American people that "we are on track and
making progress" as "nonsense".
Republican senator Chuck Hagel was even more explicit. Warning that
public support for the war had become shaky, he said: "The dam has
burst. We should start figuring how we get out of there."
Henry Kissinger, a long-time Republican icon, has gone so far as to
publish an article in the Washington Post giving advice on how to exit
a war, based on his own experience of the Vietnam withdrawal.
Political analysts in the U.S. say a convergence of events has caused a
fundamental shift in public perceptions of the war. These include the
fact that the U.S. casualty list is now nearing 2 000 dead in a war
that appears to be going nowhere, with the insurgents continuing to
destabilise the country with fresh suicide bombings every day and
Iraq's elected representatives still unable to agree on a constitution
eight months after their election.
All this has found a focus in the anguish and anger of a mother, Cindy
Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in what appears to have been a
botched mission just five days after landing in Iraq. Cindy is now
camping with several hundred other protesters outside Bush's Texas
ranch where he is on holiday. She wants to see the president to tell
him the shoddy story of how Casey died, but he is lying low and won't
come out to speak to her.
The media are there, of course, and Sheehan is all over American TV
screens telling her story and at last giving this remote and impersonal
war a human face. Bush's refusal to see her, and his spin doctors'
attempts to smear her as a "crackpot", have raised popular ire, which
reached new heights last weekend when the Bush cavalcade of cars swept
past her on a dirt road covering her with dust.
This, rather than sober analysis, is the kind of thing that moves
American public opinion.
What will happen now? To the extent that Bush is saying anything at all
as he hunkers down on his ranch, he is sticking to his line that "we
will stay the course". But the man who is actually running the war,
General George Casey, has set what sounds like a timetable for "some
fairly substantial reductions" starting in May.
Officially this is supposed to relate to the Iraqi elections due in
December, but I suspect it is more closely tied to the start of
campaigning in the U.S. congressional elections in November 2006.
So a war that was begun with a political motive is likely to end with
another one. And the two could be equally disastrous - as Kissinger
himself warned in his advice on an exit strategy. Everything, the old
pro said, would depend on whether the new Iraqi army would be competent
enough to contain the insurgency, which it manifestly is not.
Kissinger also warned that exiting Iraq would be more difficult and
dangerous than quitting Vietnam because the guerrilla threat was
greater, and if a Taliban-style fundamentalist regime were to emerge
after the American departure "shock waves would ripple through the
Islamic world".
"Radical forces in Islamic countries or Islamic minorities in
non-Islamic states would be emboldened in their attacks on existing
governments," Kissinger wrote. "The safety and internal stability of
all societies within reach of militant Islam would be imperilled."
So much for Bush's mantra that his war on Iraq would make the world
safe from terrorism. It has greatly increased that danger.
Nor is this the only irony. This war was supposed to start a domino
process of democratising the whole Arab Middle East. Bush had a vision
of the grateful Iraqis meeting their American liberators "with sweets
and flowers" after which a fire of democratic fervour would spread
throughout the troubled region.
Instead, what Bush will leave behind when his troops depart is an
Islamic state where Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship existed
before. Moreover, it will be a Shi'ite Islamic state closely allied to
Iran, part of Bush's "axis of evil".
The demographics of the place will determine this. Sixty percent of
Iraqis are Shi'ites, 20% are Sunni Muslims and another 20% are Kurds.
For decades the Sunni minority dominated the Shi'ite majority, brutally
under Saddam. Now the Shi'ites are on top and mean to stay there.
The U.S.'s experiment with democracy enabled them to win the January
election and they will win again in December.
The Shi'ites want an Islamic state with Sharia law, which would govern
the lives of individuals in matters such as marriage, divorce,
property, child custody and the status of women.
Moreover, the two most powerful Shi'ite parties, Dawa and the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), want an Iranian-style
political system. They are already promoting Iranian interests, Iraq's
most influential religious leader, Grand Ayatolla Ali al-Sistani, is
himself Iranian by birth, and on July 7 the Iranian and Iraqi defence
ministers signed an agreement on military co-operation that will have
the Iranians train the Iraqi army.
The Sunnis want none of this. Nor do the Kurds. This is why the elected
representatives are having such trouble agreeing on a constitution. The
Kurds have enough military strength to ensure virtual independence,
while the Sunnis already constitute the core of the insurgency and are
increasingly targeting Shi'ites more than the Americans. Fighting will
continue and the country will probably break up into three parts.
As Cindy Sheehan might ask, is this what young Casey died for?
Allister Sparks, a former editor of the Rand Daily Mail, is a veteran
South African journalist and political commentator.
The Witness
Publish Date: 24 August 2005
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