Two more US soldiers died in Iraq in the last few hours. Sixteen US soldiers have died since Friday. At least fifty eight US soldiers have died in the last week. For what?
Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com: More and more
Americans are skeptical of Bush's "historic bet" and
are viewing him as a sort of gambling addict sliding
more and more chips onto the table while holding a
losing hand. As any experienced gambler knows, there
is a name for someone who doesn’t know when to fold a
bad hand and pull back from the table: sucker.
But Bush isn't just betting the kid’s college fund.
He’s risking the lives of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi
citizens. He’s also running the risk that his gamble
will increase U.S. vulnerability to terrorism, not
lessen it.
Like an amateur poker player in too deep, George W.
Bush can’t seem to see any alternative but to go in
deeper. In November, the American people will have to
decide whether to escort Bush from the table or to
give him a whole new pile of chips.
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/040904.html
consortiumnews.com
Bush's Tet
By Robert Parry
April 9, 2004
George W. Bush’s defenders were still fuming over Sen.
Ted Kennedy labeling the Iraq War “Bush’s Vietnam”
when the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq suffered what
might be called “Bush’s Tet.”
Like the Vietcong-North Vietnamese offensive during
the Tet holiday in 1968, this April's Iraqi uprising
in both Sunni and Shiite regions has altered the
perception of the reality on the ground. Just as the
Tet offensive shattered the
“light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel” myth in Vietnam, the
Iraqi uprising has destroyed any realistic prospect
that the Bush administration’s wishful thinking about
Iraq might somehow come true.
The uprising – from the street-to-street fighting in
the Sunni city of Fallujah to the running battles with
Moktada al-Sadr’s militia forces in Shiite strongholds
in the south – means that the political side of the
Iraq War is lost and that means the war itself is
effectively lost. The only big questions left are how
many more soldiers and civilians will die – and how
many more angry young Islamic radicals will be driven
into the arms of al-Qaeda.
But the immediate question in Washington is whether
the Bush administration and its legions of defenders
will come to grips with this unpleasant reality on the
ground. As in Vietnam, the temptation is to deny the
reality and to continue the carnage rather than to
make the hard decisions that would reverse course,
save lives and minimize the strategic damage to the
United States.
War Hawks
The New York Times columnist William Safire is an
example of the pro-Bush war hawks who have chosen to
hunker down in the ideological rubble of Bush’s
strategy. “We should keep in mind our historic bet:
that given their freedom from a savage tyrant, the
three groups that make up Iraq could, with our help,
create a rudimentary democracy that would turn the
tide against terrorism,” Safire wrote in an April 7
column.
But that notion of a U.S.-nurtured “democracy” somehow
turning the tide against terrorism is among the
casualties of the Iraqi uprising. It should now be
obvious that the U.S.-led occupation is hated by too
many Iraqis, who are ready to fight and die, for Iraq
ever to submit to a U.S. formula for a future
government.
These Iraqis have made clear that the peaceful
conditions needed for electoral preparations don’t –
and won’t – exist while the occupation continues.
Imagine the fate of some poor U.S.-financed canvasser,
clipboard in hand, walking through the slums of Sadr
City trying to compile a voting list and asking for
everyone’s names and addresses.
Bush’s “historic bet” in Iraq assumed incorrectly that
the U.S.-led invasion would be broadly tolerated by
the Iraqi people. A little more than a year ago,
senior Bush administration officials, such as Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul
Wolfowitz, assured the American people that the U.S.
troops would be welcomed by thankful Iraqis with open
arms and flowers. The administration expected that
civic order would be quickly restored and U.S. troop
levels could be reduced to about 30,000 within months.
Less optimistic military experts, such as Gen. Eric
Shinseki who foresaw the need of several hundred
thousand soldiers, were ridiculed by the likes of
Wolfowitz, who said Shinseki’s estimate was “way off
the mark.” Today, a year after the invasion, U.S.
troop levels are about 135,000 and U.S. commanders are
considering a request for more soldiers.
Bush’s “historic bet” also held that with Saddam
Hussein gone, Iraqis would let the U.S. occupiers
elevate pro-U.S. Iraqis to leadership posts,
“privatize” Iraqi industries, sell oil rights to
international corporations, draft a constitution and
eventually hold elections intended to sanction the
post-invasion status quo.
Phase Two of this “historic bet” foresaw the U.S.
success in Iraq toppling the first of many
anti-American dominoes across the Middle East. More
pragmatic experts, such as former National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft, warned that these ambitious
goals reflected a naivete about the region and could
prove counterproductive.
Iraqi Resistance
Indeed, Bush’s scheme did go awry almost from the
start. After the invasion was launched on March 19,
2003, Iraqi resistance was fiercer than expected. Some
American supply columns were ambushed in towns like
Nasiriyah that were expected to be friendly. In some
battles, Iraqi troops charged into the face of
devastating American firepower and were mowed down.
Meanwhile, special U.S. units searching for weapons of
mass destruction didn’t find any, undercutting Bush’s
principal justification for war and further enflaming
Arab and world opinion. Even as U.S. troops progressed
toward Baghdad, some U.S. military experts were
voicing alarm at the Bush administration’s tendency to
mix wishful thinking with a flawed military strategy.
[For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bay of Pigs
Meets Black Hawk Down.”]
U.S. public optimism about the war was revived when
U.S. troops captured Baghdad and toppled Saddam
Hussein’s statue on April 9, 2003. But the
stretched-thin U.S. forces found themselves
confronting looting and chaos. In some restless
cities, such as Fallujah, U.S. troops fired into
crowds of demonstrators, killing civilians and stoking
the beginnings of a resistance.
Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1, 2003,
after donning a flight suit and landing on the
aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. But a
guerrilla war in Iraq was soon underway. Within
months, the number of U.S. soldiers killed during the
occupation exceeded the 138 killed during the
invasion. The number of U.S. dead is now over 600 and
climbing rapidly. [For more details about Bush's
flight-suit miscalculation, see Consortiumnews.com's
"Bush's Iraqi Albatross."]
On the political front, the hand-picked members of the
Iraqi “Governing Council” were widely viewed as
quislings who survived only under the protection of
the U.S. military. Meanwhile, terrorists slipped into
central Iraq and carried out suicide bombings,
including the destruction of the United Nations
headquarters in Baghdad.
Rather than see these setbacks as warning signs, the
Bush administration continued to believe its own P.R.
about progress. So, instead of using existing food
ration lists as voting rolls for quick elections of
Iraqi leaders who could claim some popular support,
U.S. officials dawdled, insisting on a better national
voting list, a fine-tuned interim constitution and
then elections.
The Sovereignty Scam
Those promises of Iraqi national elections now
continue to recede, even as Washington says it will
turn over “sovereignty” to Iraqis on June 30. Rather
than making progress on preparations for elections,
U.S. troops and coalition allies are battling Iraqi
insurgents in cities all over the country.
Even more troubling to U.S. policymakers, the
insurgency appears to have taken deeper root among the
population, with many Iraqis working as merchants or
laborers during the day with their guns ready to fight
the Americans. In addition, Sunnis and Shiites –
normally bitter rivals – have begun to cooperate in
attacks on coalition troops, according to recent press
reports. Even in Sunni towns, portraits of Shiite
cleric Sadr are popping up, the Arab media has
reported.
“The Sunnis and Shiites are now together,” Fatah
Abdel-Razzaq, 31, a falafel-stand owner in Sadr City,
told the Washington Post. “America came and destroyed
the country. … What’s America doing?” [Washington
Post, April 8, 2004]
While the Bush administration continues to insist that
the uprising reflects the discontent of only a small
number of Iraqis, U.S. intelligence has concluded
that, to the contrary, the Shiite uprising is
broad-based, the New York Times reported.
“Intelligence officials now say that there is evidence
that the insurgency goes beyond Mr. Sadr and his
militia, and that a much larger number of Shiites have
turned against the American-led occupation,”
correspondent James Risen wrote. [NYT, April 8, 2004]
The much-touted hand-over of “sovereignty” is also
certain to disappoint the Iraqis since very little
will change. Instead of getting orders from U.S.
political chief, Paul Bremer, the new Iraqi “leaders”
will get their instructions from a U.S. ambassador
housed in the largest U.S. embassy in the world. As
for their “sovereignty,” the Iraqis won’t even have
the power to order occupation troops out of the
country.
The June 30 ceremonies appear more targeted at U.S.
public opinion than the Iraqi people. But the
political risk to the Bush administration could grow
when Americans see continued U.S. casualties and begin
to understand that the hand-over of power in Iraq was
more a shell game than real.
The “sovereignty” shell game in Iraq also is sure to
have its counterpart in the United States. Team Bush
will keep shifting the arguments, sliding away some
claims that are disproved, replacing them with others,
all the while maintaining a steady patter of insults
against critics.
Safire: Vietnam to Iraq
The domestic propaganda strategy is another echo of
Vietnam, with columnist Safire personifying the common
tactics used on the home front of both wars.
As a White House speechwriter during the Nixon
administration, Safire crafted some of Vice President
Spiro Agnew’s classic slams against Vietnam War
critics, such as the phrase “nattering nabobs of
negativism.” Now Safire is doing the same from his
perch on the New York Times editorial page, accusing
anyone who differs with Bush’s war strategy of
effectively aiding and abetting the enemy.
“Do the apostles of retreat realize how their
defeatism, magnified by Arab media, bolsters the
morale of the insurgents and increases the nervousness
of the waverers?” Safire wrote on April 7. “Does our
coulda-woulda-shoulda crowd consider how it dismays
the majority of Iraqis wondering if they can count on
our continued presence as they feel their way to
freedom?”
Rather than applying a dose of realism to Bush’s
“historic bet,” Safire and other Bush defenders are
still trying to marginalize dissenters, a continuation
of a public relations strategy that has been employed
since the pre-war buildup in fall 2002. But the
harrowing pictures from Iraq and the growing list of
casualties are making Bush's P.R. strategy harder to
enforce.
More and more Americans are skeptical of Bush's
"historic bet" and are viewing him as a sort of
gambling addict sliding more and more chips onto the
table while holding a losing hand. As any experienced
gambler knows, there is a name for someone who doesn’t
know when to fold a bad hand and pull back from the
table: sucker.
But Bush isn't just betting the kid’s college fund.
He’s risking the lives of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi
citizens. He’s also running the risk that his gamble
will increase U.S. vulnerability to terrorism, not
lessen it.
Like an amateur poker player in too deep, George W.
Bush can’t seem to see any alternative but to go in
deeper. In November, the American people will have to
decide whether to escort Bush from the table or to
give him a whole new pile of chips.