1-20-07, 9:20 am
The reviews are in, and they are terrible. The reaction to the President’s speech of January 10 –from the public, the media, and the overwhelming majority of Democrats and many influential Republicans in congress — shows just how isolated George Bush has become on the question of Iraq.
Victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. When George W. Bush launched his illegal war almost four years ago, we who opposed it were an embattled minority. Our voices were only faintly heard amid the triumphal chorus. The public, in the mood for revenge and scared to death by the specter of more 9-11s continuously invoked by the Bush administration’s manipulation machine, supported the invasion by a large margin. Big media, in bed with the administration on the war — the term “embedded” is apt — asked no questions about the legality of the war and few about Bush’s justification or the ultimate cost of the conflict. In Congress, almost all Republicans backed the President enthusiastically while only a handful of Democrats dared mount a spirited opposition.
Now, more than three thousand American military deaths, almost half a trillion dollars, and many false declarations of progress later, many of those who cheered when it seemed it would be an easy task to remake Iraq into a country that would serve U.S. interests in the Middle East have defected.
In a typical poll, Americans opposed Bush’s plan to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq by more than 2 to 1 (66 percent versus 32 percent).
CNN, once willing to use the administration’s public relations language (“Operation Enduring Freedom”), now eschewed “surge” and other euphemisms and called the President’s proposal by its name: Escalation.
Hard-core conservative Republican Senators like Sam Brownback of Kansas and Gordon Smith of Oregon broke rank with Bush. Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a moderate Republican, probably made the strongest statement of all in characterizing the President’s plan as “the most dangerous blunder since Vietnam.”
The Democrats, for once, were virtually unanimous in opposition. Democratic Congressional leaders promised to schedule a vote on a non-binding resolution opposing Bush’s troop increase. Republican leaders in Congress, desperate to prevent a defeat that would expose the depth of rejection of Bush’s plan, including among their own ranks, will use procedural maneuvers to try to prevent a vote from taking place.
Whatever the outcome on the resolution, it seems unlikely that Bush can be stopped from escalating U.S. military involvement in Iraq in the vain hope that it will reverse the disaster and rescue his legacy. It won’t.
Bush’s plan hinges on as many fallacies as the Iraq adventure as a whole. It relies for its success on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his phantom government — a crew that could not even stage a dignified execution.
More generally, the plan assumes smooth cooperation between U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies, an assumption belied, for instance, by the fact that the two sides are unable to agree on whether a group of Iranians detained by the Americans are diplomats or terrorist masterminds. An even more critical but flawed assumption is that Maliki will be willing and able to crack down on the militias, including that of Muqtada al-Sadr, on whose support in parliament Maliki depends on for the survival of his government.
Bush’s “new strategy” also will require the unleashing of the Peshmerga — the Kurdish militia that represents one of the few effective forces fighting on the U.S. side — against Arabs in Baghdad, a move that might further inflame and complicate sectarian violence.
What will happen when, as seems almost certain, Bush’s latest new strategy proves to be yet another failure? Will he implicitly accept defeat and try to cast the best face on it? Or will he come up with and try to sell just one more “new strategy?” And will he be tempted to once more rally the nation behind the Commander-in-Chief by moving from the saber-rattling of last week’s speech to outright military action against Iran and/or Syria?
Never bet against the President’s stubbornness. Today the Congress and the American people must find a way to put on the record that Bush’s escalation was undertaken in the face of the overwhelming opposition of the legislature and the people it represents. Tomorrow we must ensure that this is really the last chance — asfor Bush and for his bloody adventure in Iraq.
From Venezuela in English
