Bush’s ideological quagmire

Iraq has become as much a quandary as it is a quagmire. If American troops leave precipitously, the country will descend into a horrific civil war, perhaps even worse than what is happening now. Yet so long as our troops remain, more Iraqis are provoked into supporting the insurgency, and the situation continues to deteriorate.

The best and perhaps only way out is a negotiated settlement, reached under the auspices of the United Nations and Iraq’s neighbors — which could eventually persuade the Sunni nationalist rebels to lay down their weapons and enter the nascent political system instead. The way to bring the insurgents to the bargaining table is to promise that if they agree to a cease-fire and begin talks with the Iraqi government, we will begin to withdraw troops — and to assure the Iraqis that a successful negotiation would lead to our complete withdrawal.

No doubt Bush would reply that we must not “negotiate with terrorists,” but that would merely be more diversionary and meaningless verbiage. The long-standing policy of the U.S. government is to deal when necessary with governments that sponsor terror, such as Pakistan and Iran — and to encourage our allies, such as Israel, to negotiate with terrorist groups. Certainly we can negotiate with the Sunni insurgents, despite their vile tactics, in order to bring peace and stability to Iraq.

Should that effort ultimately succeed, it could bring a valuable dividend. If and when the Sunni rebels decide to end their insurgency, they may well decide that the time has come to expel (or kill) Zarqawi and his irreconcilable gang of Islamist murderers. To whatever extent the former Baathists and other disgruntled Sunnis have been working with their old enemies in al-Qaida or other radical Islamists, their alliance of convenience is likely to crumble after the invasion and occupation that brought them together are over. By decoupling Arab nationalism from Islamist terrorism, the damage that Bush’s war has done to American interests can begin to be repaired.

Joe Conason | Salon (read more. . .)

September 24th, 2005 || PermaLink

Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense

American withdrawal would undoubtedly leave a riven, impoverished Iraq, awash in a sea of weaponry, with problems galore, and numerous possibilities for future violence. The either/or of this situation may not be pretty, but on a grim landscape, a single reality stands out clearly: Not only is the American presence the main source of civilian casualties, it is also the primary contributor to the threat of civil war in Iraq. The longer we wait to withdraw, the worse the situation is likely to get — for the U.S. and for the Iraqis.

Michael Schwartz | TomDispatch(read more. . .)

September 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

Immediate Withdrawal

Not long after Baghdad fell to American troops, it was already apparent that the United States was part of the problem, not part of the solution, in Iraq; and that, as long as the American military occupied the country, matters would just get worse. Every passing month has only predictably confirmed that reality. There’s no reason to believe that the next year of our military presence will be any less destabilizing than the last.

Of course, as is now notoriously well known, the Bush administration helped such predictions along their un-merry course in a particularly heavy-handed way. At least three crucial aspects of Bush policy created a fatal brew, insuring that the complex situation in Iraq in 2003 would devolve in quick-time into today’s catastrophic tinderbox: First, there was the emphasis the President and his top officials put on the use of force as a primary response to global problems. (On this matter, they were fundamentalists.) Such an approach (when combined with the stripped-down, lean and mean U.S. military-lite Donald Rumsfeld was creating) acted as a recruiting agent for the insurgency that soon followed. Second, there was the deep-seated urge of Bush’s nearest and dearest to plunder the world, which meant, in the case of Iraq, those no-bid, cost-plus contracts to crony corporations which led to an Iraqi “reconstruction” that, in its essential corruption, deconstructed the country. Finally, let’s not forget their deepest urge of all, which was to occupy a key country smack in the middle of the oil heartlands of our planet and not depart. This guaranteed, as certainly as night follows day, both the insurgency that arose in Sunni areas and the angry feelings of Shiites toward their own “liberation.”

It is now a commonplace in Washington to point out that the Bush administration had no exit strategy from Iraq, but to this day few bother to say the obvious: It had no exit strategy because its top officials never planned on or expected to leave that country. That this was so is easy enough to chart via one of the least well-covered subjects of the period, the Pentagon’s determination to build huge, and hugely impressive, permanent military bases (called for a time “enduring camps”) in that country. As we know from a single New York Times front-page piece published just after Baghdad fell, the Pentagon was already planning four such permanent bases then. Among the hundred or so bases, encampments, and outposts of every size constructed since, they have never stopped building and upgrading a small number of them for endless future occupancy, which tells you all you need to know about their present plans to “withdraw” or “draw down” our Iraqi presence.

Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch (read more. . .)

September 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

More Blood, Less Oil

It has long been an article of faith among America’s senior policymakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil — a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today. Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region.

American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf. When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States. This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish — rather than enhance — America’s access to foreign oil.

Michael T. Klare | TomDispatch (read more. . .)

September 22nd, 2005 || PermaLink

Afghanistan: Mission not yet accomplished

It has been four years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington prompted an American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and the al-Qaida terror network it harbored. But despite last year’s presidential election of Hamid Karzai and Sunday’s apparently successful parliamentary elections, huge problems remain. Al-Qaida commander Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar remain at large. There is increasing violence, not just by the Taliban insurgents but also by criminal groups. Drug cultivation and trafficking, often supported by corrupt government officials, are skyrocketing. Powerful warlords limit the writ of the Karzai regime, which has not dared to confront them; some of those warlords, who helped tear the country apart, may soon be elected governmental officials. And many ordinary Afghans resent international aid groups, which they see as wasteful, ineffective and cut off from the people they are supposedly helping.

These problems threaten what had the potential to be an international success story. The stakes are high: If the international effort here fails, Afghanistan could again become a haven for radical Islamist groups and a center of narco-terrorism. With Iraq a mess, the U.S. and the West would be ill-prepared to deal with a failed Afghanistan as well.

Mitchell Prothero | Salon (read more. . .)

September 21st, 2005 || PermaLink

Dodging the Costs of the Warfare State

Fierce criticism of White House policies is routinely compatible with support for militarism. When the Times condemned the Bush administration’s handling of hurricane relief in a Sept. 2 editorial, the final paragraph included this unequivocal sentence: “America clearly needs a larger active-duty Army.”

Now, fiscal conservatives in Congress are squawking about what federal expenditures for the Gulf Coast will do to the deficit. Contradictions between humane rhetoric and death-machine spending are more glaring than ever. The domestic economic toll of U.S. militarism should be on the table — not swept under the rug.

The people of the United States are far ahead of politicians in Washington and top editors in the New York Times building. On Saturday, the Times reported the results of a poll it had just completed in tandem with CBS News. Nationwide support for the Iraq war has fallen to an all-time low. (”Only 44 percent now say the United States made the right decision in taking military action against Iraq.”) And the survey also found: “With Hurricane Katrina already costing the federal government tens of billions of dollars, more than 8 in 10 Americans are very or somewhat concerned that the $5 billion being spent each month on the war in Iraq is draining away money that could be used in the United States.”

The enormous financial burden of continuing with U.S. military intervention in Iraq is an issue that could be devastating for the right-wing zealots who now hold state power along Pennsylvania Avenue. But liberal elites who refuse to call for swift withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq — whether congressional leaders of the Democratic Party or members of the New York Times editorial board — are in no position to hammer on that issue.

The public should be hearing, much more often, the kind of insights that were expressed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

September 20th, 2005 || PermaLink

This is a Mess of Our Own Making

The Iraqi army was defeated - it walked away from most fights - but was then dismissed without pay to join the ranks of the looters smashing the little infrastructure left, and to rail against their treatment. The Baath party was left undisturbed. The careful records it kept were destroyed with precision munitions by the coalition; the evidence erased, they were left with a free rein to agitate and organize the insurrection. A vacuum was created in which the coalition floundered, the Iraqis suffered and terrorists thrived.

One cannot help but wonder what it was all about. If it was part of the war on terror then history might notice that the invasion has arguably acted as the best recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda ever: a sort of large-scale equivalent of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry in 1972, which in its day filled the ranks of the IRA. If it was an attempt to influence the price of oil, then the motorists who queued last week would hardly be convinced. If freedom and a chance to live a dignified, stable life free from terror was the motive, then I can think of more than 170 families in Iraq last week who would have settled for what they had under Saddam. UK military casualties reached 95 last week. I nightly pray the total never reaches 100.

The consequences of this adventure may run even deeper. Hurricane Katrina has caused a reappraisal of the motives and aims of this war in the US. The storm came perhaps in the nick of time as hawks in Washington were glancing towards Iran and its newly found self-confidence in global affairs. Meanwhile, China and India are growing and sucking up every drop of oil, every scrap of concrete or steel even as the old-world powers of the UK and US pour blood and treasure into overseas campaigns which seem to have no ending and no goal.

It is time for our leaders to explain what is going on. It was as a battalion commander trying to explain to his men why they would embark on a war that I came to public notice. The irony is that I made certain assumptions that my goodwill and altruistic motivations went to the top. Clearly I was naive. This time it is the role of the leaders of nations to explain where we are going and why. I, for one, demand to know.

Colonel Tim Collins | Guardian/UK (read more. . .)

September 19th, 2005 || PermaLink

Bush’s ideological quagmire

Iraq has become as much a quandary as it is a quagmire. If American troops leave precipitously, the country will descend into a horrific civil war, perhaps even worse than what is happening now. Yet so long as our troops remain, more Iraqis are provoked into supporting the insurgency, and the situation continues to deteriorate.

The best and perhaps only way out is a negotiated settlement, reached under the auspices of the United Nations and Iraq’s neighbors — which could eventually persuade the Sunni nationalist rebels to lay down their weapons and enter the nascent political system instead. The way to bring the insurgents to the bargaining table is to promise that if they agree to a cease-fire and begin talks with the Iraqi government, we will begin to withdraw troops — and to assure the Iraqis that a successful negotiation would lead to our complete withdrawal.

No doubt Bush would reply that we must not “negotiate with terrorists,” but that would merely be more diversionary and meaningless verbiage. The long-standing policy of the U.S. government is to deal when necessary with governments that sponsor terror, such as Pakistan and Iran — and to encourage our allies, such as Israel, to negotiate with terrorist groups. Certainly we can negotiate with the Sunni insurgents, despite their vile tactics, in order to bring peace and stability to Iraq.

Should that effort ultimately succeed, it could bring a valuable dividend. If and when the Sunni rebels decide to end their insurgency, they may well decide that the time has come to expel (or kill) Zarqawi and his irreconcilable gang of Islamist murderers. To whatever extent the former Baathists and other disgruntled Sunnis have been working with their old enemies in al-Qaida or other radical Islamists, their alliance of convenience is likely to crumble after the invasion and occupation that brought them together are over. By decoupling Arab nationalism from Islamist terrorism, the damage that Bush’s war has done to American interests can begin to be repaired.

Joe Conason | Salon (read more. . .)

September 24th, 2005 || PermaLink

Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense

American withdrawal would undoubtedly leave a riven, impoverished Iraq, awash in a sea of weaponry, with problems galore, and numerous possibilities for future violence. The either/or of this situation may not be pretty, but on a grim landscape, a single reality stands out clearly: Not only is the American presence the main source of civilian casualties, it is also the primary contributor to the threat of civil war in Iraq. The longer we wait to withdraw, the worse the situation is likely to get — for the U.S. and for the Iraqis.

Michael Schwartz | TomDispatch(read more. . .)

September 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

Immediate Withdrawal

Not long after Baghdad fell to American troops, it was already apparent that the United States was part of the problem, not part of the solution, in Iraq; and that, as long as the American military occupied the country, matters would just get worse. Every passing month has only predictably confirmed that reality. There’s no reason to believe that the next year of our military presence will be any less destabilizing than the last.

Of course, as is now notoriously well known, the Bush administration helped such predictions along their un-merry course in a particularly heavy-handed way. At least three crucial aspects of Bush policy created a fatal brew, insuring that the complex situation in Iraq in 2003 would devolve in quick-time into today’s catastrophic tinderbox: First, there was the emphasis the President and his top officials put on the use of force as a primary response to global problems. (On this matter, they were fundamentalists.) Such an approach (when combined with the stripped-down, lean and mean U.S. military-lite Donald Rumsfeld was creating) acted as a recruiting agent for the insurgency that soon followed. Second, there was the deep-seated urge of Bush’s nearest and dearest to plunder the world, which meant, in the case of Iraq, those no-bid, cost-plus contracts to crony corporations which led to an Iraqi “reconstruction” that, in its essential corruption, deconstructed the country. Finally, let’s not forget their deepest urge of all, which was to occupy a key country smack in the middle of the oil heartlands of our planet and not depart. This guaranteed, as certainly as night follows day, both the insurgency that arose in Sunni areas and the angry feelings of Shiites toward their own “liberation.”

It is now a commonplace in Washington to point out that the Bush administration had no exit strategy from Iraq, but to this day few bother to say the obvious: It had no exit strategy because its top officials never planned on or expected to leave that country. That this was so is easy enough to chart via one of the least well-covered subjects of the period, the Pentagon’s determination to build huge, and hugely impressive, permanent military bases (called for a time “enduring camps”) in that country. As we know from a single New York Times front-page piece published just after Baghdad fell, the Pentagon was already planning four such permanent bases then. Among the hundred or so bases, encampments, and outposts of every size constructed since, they have never stopped building and upgrading a small number of them for endless future occupancy, which tells you all you need to know about their present plans to “withdraw” or “draw down” our Iraqi presence.

Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch (read more. . .)

September 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

More Blood, Less Oil

It has long been an article of faith among America’s senior policymakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil — a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today. Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region.

American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf. When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States. This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish — rather than enhance — America’s access to foreign oil.

Michael T. Klare | TomDispatch (read more. . .)

September 22nd, 2005 || PermaLink

Afghanistan: Mission not yet accomplished

It has been four years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington prompted an American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and the al-Qaida terror network it harbored. But despite last year’s presidential election of Hamid Karzai and Sunday’s apparently successful parliamentary elections, huge problems remain. Al-Qaida commander Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar remain at large. There is increasing violence, not just by the Taliban insurgents but also by criminal groups. Drug cultivation and trafficking, often supported by corrupt government officials, are skyrocketing. Powerful warlords limit the writ of the Karzai regime, which has not dared to confront them; some of those warlords, who helped tear the country apart, may soon be elected governmental officials. And many ordinary Afghans resent international aid groups, which they see as wasteful, ineffective and cut off from the people they are supposedly helping.

These problems threaten what had the potential to be an international success story. The stakes are high: If the international effort here fails, Afghanistan could again become a haven for radical Islamist groups and a center of narco-terrorism. With Iraq a mess, the U.S. and the West would be ill-prepared to deal with a failed Afghanistan as well.

Mitchell Prothero | Salon (read more. . .)

September 21st, 2005 || PermaLink

Dodging the Costs of the Warfare State

Fierce criticism of White House policies is routinely compatible with support for militarism. When the Times condemned the Bush administration’s handling of hurricane relief in a Sept. 2 editorial, the final paragraph included this unequivocal sentence: “America clearly needs a larger active-duty Army.”

Now, fiscal conservatives in Congress are squawking about what federal expenditures for the Gulf Coast will do to the deficit. Contradictions between humane rhetoric and death-machine spending are more glaring than ever. The domestic economic toll of U.S. militarism should be on the table — not swept under the rug.

The people of the United States are far ahead of politicians in Washington and top editors in the New York Times building. On Saturday, the Times reported the results of a poll it had just completed in tandem with CBS News. Nationwide support for the Iraq war has fallen to an all-time low. (”Only 44 percent now say the United States made the right decision in taking military action against Iraq.”) And the survey also found: “With Hurricane Katrina already costing the federal government tens of billions of dollars, more than 8 in 10 Americans are very or somewhat concerned that the $5 billion being spent each month on the war in Iraq is draining away money that could be used in the United States.”

The enormous financial burden of continuing with U.S. military intervention in Iraq is an issue that could be devastating for the right-wing zealots who now hold state power along Pennsylvania Avenue. But liberal elites who refuse to call for swift withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq — whether congressional leaders of the Democratic Party or members of the New York Times editorial board — are in no position to hammer on that issue.

The public should be hearing, much more often, the kind of insights that were expressed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

September 20th, 2005 || PermaLink

This is a Mess of Our Own Making

The Iraqi army was defeated - it walked away from most fights - but was then dismissed without pay to join the ranks of the looters smashing the little infrastructure left, and to rail against their treatment. The Baath party was left undisturbed. The careful records it kept were destroyed with precision munitions by the coalition; the evidence erased, they were left with a free rein to agitate and organize the insurrection. A vacuum was created in which the coalition floundered, the Iraqis suffered and terrorists thrived.

One cannot help but wonder what it was all about. If it was part of the war on terror then history might notice that the invasion has arguably acted as the best recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda ever: a sort of large-scale equivalent of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry in 1972, which in its day filled the ranks of the IRA. If it was an attempt to influence the price of oil, then the motorists who queued last week would hardly be convinced. If freedom and a chance to live a dignified, stable life free from terror was the motive, then I can think of more than 170 families in Iraq last week who would have settled for what they had under Saddam. UK military casualties reached 95 last week. I nightly pray the total never reaches 100.

The consequences of this adventure may run even deeper. Hurricane Katrina has caused a reappraisal of the motives and aims of this war in the US. The storm came perhaps in the nick of time as hawks in Washington were glancing towards Iran and its newly found self-confidence in global affairs. Meanwhile, China and India are growing and sucking up every drop of oil, every scrap of concrete or steel even as the old-world powers of the UK and US pour blood and treasure into overseas campaigns which seem to have no ending and no goal.

It is time for our leaders to explain what is going on. It was as a battalion commander trying to explain to his men why they would embark on a war that I came to public notice. The irony is that I made certain assumptions that my goodwill and altruistic motivations went to the top. Clearly I was naive. This time it is the role of the leaders of nations to explain where we are going and why. I, for one, demand to know.

Colonel Tim Collins | Guardian/UK (read more. . .)

September 19th, 2005 || PermaLink