Of COURSE there’s a plan for Iraq!

January 10th, 2007

There’s always been one — it’s geo-political domination and ever-expanding corporate profit. Dubby just doesn’t want us to see it, so he covers it with rhetoric and faux-patriotism and whips up the Righty’s [who still haven't stopped blaming the liberals for having "given away" Vietnam just as we were on the cusp of "winning."] PNAC gave George the plan a good while ago and he hasn’t waffled on it — he’s been dogged; you couldn’t wrestle that worried old bone from our presidential mutt with a stun gun. Oil runs through this guys veins, and money is his God … the ambitions of the plan and the personal ambitions of this president cannot be untangled. The military-industrial cogs must turn … and everything that gets in the way of that must be eliminated.

“In the president’s proposal, one of the standards that he’s setting for them to meet is that 75 percent of the oil production goes to U.S. companies. This is stunning — 75 percent of the production goes to the U.S. Is this what our kids are over there for?”
~ Nancy Pelosi

The [fleeting] hope that Pappy could do an “intervention” on Sonny Jim was always something of a joke, since the love/hate competition between these two always brings out the worst in George … but the biggest myth in the Baker Report was that it would change course in some way that would serve the American [and Iraqi] public instead of the American empire. ["American Interests," this is called -- whenever you hear that from a politico, think "profit and power."] There are some givens … and it’s given that conservatives in generals and neo-conservatives in particular “want it all” — in political terms, that means rule the world for profit. And that’s what George has set out to do … if he hadn’t been so remarkably incompetent, we’d be in worse shape today [hard to imagine, I know.]

George has burned through his band of NeoCon brothers pretty quickly, they’ve fallen from grace with public scrutiny … which is not to say they haven’t found influence in less visible arenas. [Reference Wolfowitz presiding over the World Bank and William Kristal being given a column in Time mag, for instance.] The NeoCons haven’t kept a low enough profile to satisfy the old guard conservatives and the groups are wrangling for control now — believe it or not, we do have a pony in that race because the old guard, while still hoping to rule the world, have a bit of a reality base and a plodding, less disruptive way of wringing every miserable cent out of a compromised system. “Kinder, gentler” despotism. It’s not too cynical to think that Pappy Bush’s tears the other day came partly from the knowledge that in his first-born’s hands, and with the bumbling help of his NeoCon foot-soldiers, the “big plan” has become dangerously visible and compromised.

That’s not a reality-base we can live with if we’re to remain a Republic and not an Empire … conservative is as conservative does. That’s not the 21st Century we envision.

The Plan, below — big reads. Good to keep all this in mind as you listen to the Decider try to sell us his “New Way Forward” tonight.

Jude

Bush’s Global Mission: His Flawed Logic for Escalating the Iraq War
Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., BuzzFlash
Tue, 01/09/2007

Recently, in one of his special comments, Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s Countdown, remarked, “First we sent Americans to their deaths for your lie, Mr. Bush. Now we are sending them to their deaths for your ego.” This echoes the logic commonly ascribed to Bush for his resolve to send more American troops into harm’s way in Iraq. But this would be to underestimate Bush’s deeper ideological commitment, a resolve that goes well beyond his own ego.

What has allowed the Bush administration to rationalize away and to demand the “sacrifice” of hundreds of thousands of lives, both Iraqi and American alike, is an ideology profoundly more treacherous than vanity alone. As a matter of historical record, it has been one ideology or another, from religious extremism to Nazism, that has enabled human beings to brutally kill or oppress without being deterred by a guilty conscience. In the case of the Bush administration, the ideology in question is one underwritten by the so-called “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC). It was this “Project” that sanctioned invading Iraq in the first place, and it is now the likely basis for Bush’s refusal to leave.

PNAC is a Washington-based, neoconservative think tank founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997 and financed by the oil and weapons industries. Its members include current and former Bush administration officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney; former Chief Advisor to the Vice President I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Jr.; former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; former Deputy Secretary of Defense and current President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz; current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton; former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Pearle; and even the President’s brother, Jeb. The main goal of PNAC is to bring about a “New American Century” in which the United States uses it military muscle to dominate and force corporate privatization throughout the world.

At the root of the PNAC ideology is the proliferation of American interests and values: “We need,” it states, “to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.” In other words, anyone that stands in the way of American economic growth and expansion; any nation or group that refuses to adopt American values; to acquiesce in its corporate culture and to feed its bottom line, are to be counted among “regimes hostile to our interests and values.” To the extent that terrorists and other extremists fall into this category, they make suitable military targets. Thus it was never really about stopping terrorism as such. And, indeed, any nation that happens to be “swimming in oil” like Iraq provides a prime target for engaging military action to stem the “hostility.”

Moreover, PNAC prescribes the same sort of tenacity that Bush has himself demonstrated in remaining true to “the mission”; but what this mission really is, has less to do with the prosperity of Iraq than it has to do with the power and control the U.S. can attain over it through the exercise of military force. Carving out the “access of evil” its words would be prophetic if only they were not themselves the blueprint for U.S. policy under Bush. In its 2000 election year report, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, it flatly states, “We hope that the Project’s report will be useful as a road map for the nation’s immediate and future defense plans.” It declares:

We cannot allow North Korea, Iran, Iraq or similar states to undermine American leadership, intimidate American allies or threaten the American homeland itself….Keeping the American peace requires the U.S. military to undertake a broad array of missions today and rise to very different challenges tomorrow, but there can be no retreat from these missions without compromising American leadership and the benevolent order it secures. This is the choice we face. It is not a choice between preeminence today and preeminence tomorrow. Global leadership is not something exercised at our leisure, when the mood strikes us or when our core national security interests are directly threatened; then it is already too late. Rather, it is a choice whether or not to maintain American military preeminence, to secure American geopolitical leadership, and to preserve the American peace.

The same report chillingly declares that the “process of transformation” in which the U.S. emerges as the preeminent world power is likely to be a lengthy one unless there is “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.” For PNAC the end justifies the means — no matter how duplicitous and how many lives must be sacrificed.

The logic I am ascribing to Bush is not grounded in a questionable conspiracy theory. It is a simple syllogism the premises of which can readily be extracted from the pronouncements of PNAC:

1. Do not retreat from any military mission essential to establishing American world domination.

2. The mission in Iraq is such an essential mission.

Therefore, do not retreat from the mission in Iraq.

Sadly, the first premise is morally repugnant. It is the same old megalomaniac, dictatorial ideology that has led to world war and holocaust. And the second premise, which treats Iraq as a pawn in attaining global preeminence, is speculative and without empirical grounding.

Bush’s positive argument for sending in more troops is similarly flawed:

1. Do whatever it takes to secure military victory essential for establishing American world domination.

2. Sending more troops into harms way in Iraq is necessary to secure such a military victory.

Therefore, we should send more troops into Iraq.

Regarding premise 2, most military experts have come to the opposite conclusion. Nevertheless, as a devoted trustee of the PNAC credo, Bush is disinclined to scrub “the mission” and his logic instead compels him to escalate it. This logic is clear and simple but it is clearly and simply wrong, and fraught with peril.

A leader of a superpower armed with such simplistic reasoning is dangerously bound to miss reality. Still, knowing the logical hand he is playing — his blind, dictatorial, militaristic commitment to the PNAC ideology — can provide a window into what else might be in store for us. ++

Antonia Juhasz Sizes Up the ‘Bush Agenda’ — Corporate Globalization, Oil, Wealth and Power
BuzzFlash Interview
Fri, 01/05/2007

The Bush Administration is pushing aggressively forward on rewriting Iraq’s oil infrastructure to allow greater control and access to U.S. corporations for its oil under the ground, for exploration and production. I believe that’s what’s keeping the Bush Administration in Iraq and pointed towards having the United States military remain in Iraq.
~ Antonia Juhasz

Antonia Juhasz’s book, The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time, lays out the Bush Administration’s radical economic agenda for global domination. It’s an extreme, unilateral and audacious plan, and one that has created violent opposition to America and Americans among many residents of planet earth. Her book explores the Bush Administration’s plan to shape the world through a corporate globalization agenda, first in Iraq, then the Middle East with the proposed U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area, and ultimately as a cornerstone to the global Bush Doctrine of Pax “Profiteering” Americana.

Are our GIs dying for democracy or economic dominance in the world marketplaces? Juhasz convincingly argues that it is the latter — and that taxpayers are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a war that is about many things, but has the goal of multi-national corporation resource and marketplace expansion at its center.

* * *

BuzzFlash: In your new book, The Bu$h Agenda, you state that George Bush’s twin solutions to virtually every problem in the world are free trade and war.

Antonia Juhasz: Yes, that’s correct. One of the key problems of the Bush Administration that has not been addressed, and should be, is the Administration’s unique approach to corporate globalization with the audacious use of the U.S. military to advance very traditional free trade or corporate globalization policies. The war in Iraq is the most obvious and horrendous example of that under this Administration but that analysis isn’t limited to Iraq. It carries on throughout the rest of the Middle East.

BuzzFlash: You believe our foreign policy is driven by economic interests, not spreading freedom, even though, as a public relations tool, the United States says we’re trying to fight for freedom or spread freedom. As I understand your argument, the rhetoric of freedom is a nice tool to justify foreign policy.

Antonia Juhasz: Right. As many administrations have done before him, the Bush Administration uses the word “freedom” as a master stroke — a term to encapsulate everything good and warm and fuzzy that Americans like to think that they are about.

But in fact, I would say that the Bush Administration is only interested in spreading freedom for U.S. corporate interests and removing barriers to corporate access to countries across the globe. In that way the Bush Administration is following a very standard agenda that other presidents have followed before him.

I argue in the book that what makes the Bush Administration unique is its fairly unprecedented hybrid of corporate executives running the government. The members of the Bush Administration, including the President, have long histories as corporate executives, as do the leading members of the President’s Cabinet and people throughout the administration. The hybrid of corporate and government executives also makes the Administration’s view of the government as simply an extended arm of U.S. corporate interests. What makes the Bush Administration unique beyond that is its willingness to overtly use the U.S. military to advance those interests.

BuzzFlash: In your book you quote from a CIA report that was written in 2000, prior to the September 11th attacks, that predicted that global inequality will “foster political, ethnic, ideological and religious extremism, along with the violence that accompanies it.” You say that this is not really new, that our current U.S. foreign policy actually dates back to World War II, correct?

Antonia Juhasz: Right. I spend a chapter explaining the history of corporate globalization policy, and its roots in U.S. foreign policy following World War II.
And the U.S. interest following the conclusion of the war was to create an economic system that would essentially foster growth through U.S. corporate access.

There is a belief in this mythical economic idea of a rising tide of wealth lifting all boats, or Reagan’s trickle-down economics — that what was good for GM would be good for the world. Institutions were created, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and much later the World Trade Organization to advance those ideas.

I use the CIA quote to make clear that the ramifications of these policies have been well known for decades — that they work very well to increase the wealth of the largest corporations, but they have devastating and detrimental effects on economies worldwide. The CIA, I believe, rightfully identified one year before 9/11, that these dramatic increases in inequality and shifting power to “the haves from the have-nots” have created greater instability and animosity around the world. It is certainly a contributing factor to the extremism that led to the September 11th attacks.

BuzzFlash: I interviewed Mike Scheuer, who was a former CIA analyst, and who, in fact, ran the CIA’s bin Laden unit. I asked him pointedly if he thought that extremism against the United States is perpetuated by our economic policy. He rebuffed that and indicated that the al-Qaeda hijackers were from the upper-middle class. They were engineers and doctors and pilots, and he felt that the attack had no real connection to an economic disparity in the Middle East.

I disagree with him. Although the al-Qaeda operatives that carried out the attacks individually may be in an upper-class bracket, the fostering ground that perpetuates extremism and terrorism is rooted in inequality. Is that a fair assessment?

Antonia Juhasz: The baseline that I’m pointing to isn’t just the fact of inequality. I’m not arguing that poverty breeds terrorism. Rather what I’m arguing is people throughout the world witnessing and experiencing U.S. policy — economic, political and military — is seen quite clearly as solely advancing the interests of the United States, and it creates anger and hostility.

Michael Scheuer, whose book Hubris I quote from extensively in my book, made very clear in his assessments that he thought the invasion of Iraq was solely motivated by the economic interests of the Bush Administration. Scheuer felt very strongly that the policies of the United States in nations such as Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East are the root of terrorist activities against the United States.

The link that he’s failing to make, and that many people fail to make, is that economic policies are witnessed by people and experienced by people around the world as tools of imperialism. Just as the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia is witnessed as a tool of imperialism, so is the occupation of Iraq. There’s a distinction that I’m making which is not, as I said, that poverty breeds terrorism, but rather imperial economic policies breed terrorism.

BuzzFlash: On page 28, you listed three key documents that articulate America’s ambitions for empire. They are the 1992 “Defense Planning Guidance”; “Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Strategy Forces and Resources for a New Century” from 2000; and in 2002, the “National Security Strategy for the United States of America.” As we speak, would you say that America is an empire? Have we reached that critical mass yet?

Antonia Juhasz: Certainly, and the reason I go into detail with those documents, which many authors have done before me and since, is to look at the economic elements of empire in those documents. They’re usually simply viewed as military documents, and the economic aspects are ignored. My focus is on the economic agenda that exists through the three documents, and how do they help us understand what the Bush Administration is up to right now.

Many people on the left talk about the Project for the New American Century. The reason why we do that isn’t just because it’s published some really blatant documents, but because a full sixteen members of the Bush Administration participated in the project. The leading members, Cheney, and now former leading members Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, and many other people who are core to the Bush Administration, participated in the project.

They made clear in their writings the United States is an empire similar to that of Rome, and that this type of empire is what they want to continue to have. The way to do that, they argue, is not only through an advanced military, but through the United States taking on the economies of countries around the world, opening up those economies and creating more access for U.S. companies.

BuzzFlash: The Bush Administration fervently believes that, without the United States as an empire, the world would somehow become uncertain and unstable, and that we’re actually doing a service to the world by being so dominant. Can you imagine in the future a more humble and equivocating administration, whoever is the next president, whose foreign policy is about equal sharing of power? Is that a real possibility or part of the solution?

Antonia Juhasz: Well, not one that’s being proposed by either party at the moment. The Democrats tend to put forward the idea of a more benevolent empire, whereas the Republicans put forward an aggressive and imperial empire, meaning an empire that seeks to spread its sway across the globe.

I certainly don’t believe in either version. I think the United States will be happier, and the world will be a happier place, if the United States is a partner to other nations and tries to seek out its harmonious role, as opposed to an imperial role. No leading party or leading candidate for president has put forward that vision.

I do think, in terms of the choice between two evils, it is far better for us, and for most people in the world, if the United States is thought to be a benevolent empire as opposed to an aggressive empire. The results of the Bush Administration and its policies have been to make the world, not just the United States, a far less safe place. The world is not going to be willing to spend another eight years with America continuing in that vein. So it’s certainly our responsibility to shift that vein as soon as we can.

BuzzFlash: Let me play devil’s advocate. The United States intervened in Somalia in 1992 and 1993 to stabilize the country amidst the horrific famine and the warring factions that took over the country. And the United States also intervened in the mid-nineties in the Balkans and fought the Kosovo war with air power to stop the atrocities. Although the Somali incursion turned out to be a debacle, and the Kosovo war ended relatively successful, would you agree that the interventions were noble?

Antonia Juhasz: Would I characterize them as noble? No.

BuzzFlash: Were there economic advantages to the United States intervening in Somalia or Kosovo?

Antonia Juhasz: There were certainly economic advantages to both. There always are. But the incursions are different for one very simple and important reason. Neither of them was a full military invasion and occupation to the extent that the war in Iraq has been.

There is an enormous difference in terms of cost of life, both for those on the receiving end and those on the giving end, when you talk about a full military invasion and occupation. And the loss of life in Iraq has obviously been profound since the invasion, and the loss of life for American soldiers has also been profound.

I believe that the scale of the invasion is unique because the economic goal is so much more profound in Iraq.

U.S. oil companies and U.S. administrations have wanted their hands on some of the world’s largest reserves of oil in Iraq for decades. Now, however, the war in Iraq has successfully altered and overturned Iraq’s economic infrastructure. I certainly believe that is the heart of this Administration’s agenda in Iraq, and this Administration’s agenda in the Middle East.

BuzzFlash: You’re saying that the war in Iraq was as much economic invasion as it was a militarily one.

Antonia Juhasz: Yes, the two most important chapters of my book cover the economic invasion of Iraq and the Middle East trade area and point to what I think are the heart of the problems. The Bush Administration is pushing aggressively forward on rewriting Iraq’s oil infrastructure to allow greater control and access to U.S. corporations for its oil under the ground, for exploration and production. I believe that’s what’s keeping the Bush Administration in Iraq and pointed towards having the United States military remain in Iraq.

Iraq isn’t the end. One month after the invasion, the Bush Administration announced plans to expand the Middle East as a free trade area. That free trade pact is moving along quickly, with individual countries making deals with the U.S. out of fear of economic or military retribution. Included in those agreements are increased access to those countries’ oil.

The Democratic Congress is going to have to be forced to address these free trade agendas, both in Iraq and across the Middle East, and to reject them. The occupation of Iraq has to end, but not just the military occupation, also the corporate occupation. The United States cannot use the stick of the war to press its own economic agenda across the Middle East. The results will be just as devastating to the rest of the Middle East as they have been in Iraq, and, of course, reverberate back to the United States.

BuzzFlash: In Darfur, where there are egregious human rights abuses and genocide, the United States has done virtually nothing about ending those atrocities. Would you say that our inaction in Darfur is because Sudan does not offer us substantial economic gains or interests?

Antonia Juhasz: I think that Sudan is very complicated after all of these incursions. First of all, Sudan does have oil. It has oil that the United States would like to have access to, but has been shut out of having access to. Sudan also offers the Bush Administration continuous insider information, supposedly on al-Qaeda.

The Bush Administration appears to have been making quite a few deals with the Sudanese government, a tit for tat, and has stayed out of Darfur in any meaningful way. I in no way would advocate the U.S. military being involved in any response to what’s happening in Darfur.

The U.S. has stayed out, I think, because it’s trying to do this dance with Sudan, trying to gain access to intelligence and also trying to figure out some way to re-open U.S. access to Sudanese oil.

The United States, in particular Bush Senior, tried to do a similar dance with Saddam Hussein, and did that dance for many years, beginning with the Reagan Administration. The Bush Senior Administration, tried gaining U.S. access to the oil and getting contracts for U.S. oil companies but never got the big prize, which is Iraq’s oil under the ground. Now, as we speak, just in the wake of Hussein’s execution, the U.S. is about to get what they spent a lot of time trying to get to, which is Iraq’s oil under the ground.

BuzzFlash: There are many competing doctrines on how to control the world. One, you could say the Baker-Scowcroft doctrine, which is you tolerate oppressive regimes as long as there is relative stability for U.S . economic interests, versus, as you say, intervening in those countries and using imperialism to dominate them.

Right now, a lot of people feel that the United States should not intervene in other countries unless somehow our economic interests are impacted. But at the same time, being a progressive, it is difficult to watch atrocities around the world be glossed over. How do we come to terms with those two competing ideologies?

Antonia Juhasz: Well, frankly, there are many definitions of “intervene.” And there are many ways to be a good liberal or progressive and seek resolution of atrocities around the world that have nothing to do with military invasion or occupations. There are options that have everything to do with international negotiation, international pressure, international legal means of influencing other governments, and governments that are acting outside of the realm of accepted legal norms, which is what is happening in the Sudan.

The United Nations, for all of its problems, of which there are many, particularly with the Security Council, is still the best body in place for such actions to take place. And peacekeeping forces, I believe, are still the best method when outside force is needed.

The problem that we’ve entered into with the rubric of the Bush Administration is — and it’s somehow being accepted on the left — that unless you militarily invade, you’re not doing anything. And that’s simply not, in my mind, the appropriate role for the United States to take anywhere.

However, the Bush Administration is clearly not doing anything in Darfur and it’s something that is not at all an imperial position to be taking on the left to seek resolution in the Sudan. But a unilateral approach by the United States isn’t something that I would advocate in response to any of the problems that we face.
BuzzFlash: Antonia, thank you for speaking with us.

Antonia Juhasz: Thank you very much. ++

Interview conducted by Senior Editor Scott Vogel

Claiming the Prize: Bush Surge Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil
Chris Floyd, TruthOut
Tuesday, 09 January 2007

I. The Twin Engines of Bush’s War

The reason that George W. Bush insists that “victory” is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it’s that his definition of “victory” is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned “surge” of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new “hydrocarbon law” essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports. The new bill will “radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world,” say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. “It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972.” If the government’s parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq’s nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush Administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise “contingency plans” for divvying up Iraq’s oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American “advisory committee” overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq’s oil: Bush’s Petro-Cartel Almost Has
Iraq’s Oil and The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil.

[Update: Bush will make explicit the connection between the "surge" and the oil law when he reveals his "New Way Forward" on Wednesday, the New York Times reports. According to senior Bush minions talking up the plan for what is not a surge but a long-term escalation of urban warfare that the U.S. ground commander in Iraq says will likely last for years, Bush's new "stratergery" includes "benchmarks" that the natives must meet to keep in favor with their colonial master. One of the most prominent of these is the demand that Iraq "finalize a long-delayed measure on the distribution of oil revenue." As we can see by the Independent stories quoted here, that benchmark should be done and dusted within weeks.]

From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush Administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation’s oil industry - while letting Bush’s Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their “infrastructure investments” have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq’s oil profits - more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes.

Of course, at the moment, the “security situation” - i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush’s “war of choice” has wrought in Iraq - prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush’s overwhelming urge to “surge” despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives.

The American “surge” will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government’s Shiite militia-riddled “security forces” on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will “support” the “pacification effort” with what Maliki says calls “house-to-house” sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: “ethnic cleansing.”

The “surged” troops - mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty - are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq’s hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on - and it will go on and on - the Bush Administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises uphold the “hydrocarbon law” and those profitable PSAs. If “Al Qaeda in Iraq” vowed to open the nation’s oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from “terrorists” into “moderates” - as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom’s champions.

So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse - as it almost certainly will - Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but “stability” - a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. “Where is the oil going to come from” to slake the world’s ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, then answered his own question. “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”

And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world’s second largest oil reserves; it also has the world’s most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: “The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada’s tar sands.”

This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits - and command the heights of the global economy. It’s not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in “full spectrum domination” of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neocons and the “national greatness” fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.

II. The Win-Win Scenario

And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about “victory.” This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don’t really care what happens on the ground in Iraq - they care about what comes out of the ground. The end - profit and dominion - justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.

And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction - and the elite interests they represent - has already won the war in Iraq. I’ve touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below.

Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation - indeed, the world - as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them - not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don’t apply to the elite, as Bush’s own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the “inherent power” of the “unitary executive” to override any law he pleases.

The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions - like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh — have cashed in their insider chips for blood money.

The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the U.S. arms industry - and from the fast-expanding “private security” industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite’s latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses.

But that’s not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything - their bases, their contracts, their collaborators - the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by U.S. taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it’s impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan U.S. war machine - 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic “opposition” has promised to expand the military.

Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths - or stand against the American public’s demand for cheap gas, big vehicles and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world’s oil. As for Wall Street - both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush’s war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome.

[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues - the neocons - somehow "hijacked" U.S. foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined on an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neocons and their bag of tricks - their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes - as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.]

As I noted earlier this year:

Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they’ve won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they’ve won even though they’ve lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic “centrist” - who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state - until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that’s not going to happen.

So Bush’s confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq - these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is - and they like it. ++

Who Is Planning Our Next War?
Patrick J. Buchanan, AntiWar
January 9, 2007

As George Bush reflects on his legacy, an urgent question must be pressing in upon him each day.

Will I leave here as the man who launched failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost thousands of U.S. dead, to no avail? Or can I yet enter history as the Churchillian statesman who used U.S. power to save America and Israel from the mortal threat of atomic weapons in the hands of the Iranian mullahs?

Which legacy would Bush prefer? Or Cheney?

As Americans await Bush’s address announcing a “surge” of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq, we may be missing the larger picture. The War Party is turning its attention from Iraq - to Iran.

Nor is it simply an analysis of the character of George Bush that causes one to so conclude.

Tehran is now two weeks into a 60-day deadline to answer a Security Council resolution directing it to cease enriching uranium. While the sanctions are mild, the resolution passed unanimously and gives Bush the U.N. cover he used to wage war on Iraq. If Iran defies the United Nations, Bush will demand further sanctions. Up the escalator we go.

Moreover, a second U.S. carrier battle group is heading for the Gulf.

More interesting, the new CentCom commander, replacing Gen. John Abizaid, is no soldier, but Adm. William J. Fallon, commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific.

What Fallon does not know about securing streets, he does know about taking out targets from the air and keeping sea lanes open in a time of war.

Bush may be sending signals, but the Israelis are preparing for war. The London Sunday Times reports that Israeli pilots have been making the 2,000-mile run to Gibraltar to train for strikes with bunker-busting nuclear bombs on Iran’s heavy water plant at Arak, the uranium hexaflouride facility at Isfahan and the centrifuge cascade at Natanz.

Israel angrily denies the report. But, on Dec. 30, retired Gen. Oded Tira, who headed up all Israeli artillery units, burst into print with this admonition:

“As an American air strike in Iran is essential for our existence, we must help (Bush) pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and U.S. newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iranian issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure.”

“Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran,” writes Tira. Thus, Israel and its U.S. lobbying arm “must turn to Hillary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party so that they publicly support immediate action by Bush against Iran.”

“The Americans must act,” Tira concludes. “If they don’t, we’ll do it ourselves … (and) we must immediately start preparing for an Iranian response to an attack.”

According to UPI editor-at-large Arnaud De Borchgrave, Tira’s line tracks the New Year’s Day message of Likud superhawk “Bibi” Netanyahu, the former prime minister.

Said Netanyahu, Israel “must immediately launch an intense, international public relations front first and foremost on the U.S. The goal being to encourage President Bush to live up to specific pledges he would not allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons. We must make clear to the (U.S.) government, the Congress and the American public that a nuclear Iran is a threat to the U.S. and the entire world, not
only Israel.”

Israel’s war, says Bibi, must be sold as America’s war.

We are thus forewarned. A propaganda campaign, using Israeli agents and their neocon auxiliaries and sympathizers, who stampeded us into war in Iraq, is being prepared to stampede us into war on Iran.

We are to be convinced that Iran, with no air force or navy to speak of, an economy not 2 percent of ours, which has not started a single war since the revolution, 27 years ago, is about to give to terrorists, to use on us, a nuclear bomb it may be 10 years away from even being able to build.

Will Congress be duped again into giving Bush a blank check for war? Or will this new Congress summon the courage to take the war option out of Bush’s hands, to decide itself, for the nation, when, where and whether America should ever go to war against Iran?

Every presidential candidate should be asked: Does President Bush have the authority to attack Iran without specific congressional authorization? And would you support giving him that authority?

Needed today are courageous men and women of both parties who will introduce and pass a congressional resolution stating, “In the absence of a direct Iranian attack on U.S. forces or personnel, or an imminent threat of such an attack, President Bush has no authority to launch a pre-emptive strike or a preventive war on Iran.”

If we are going to war, let us do it constitutionally, for once, and not leave it up solely to George W. Bush and Brother Cheney. ++

Bush’s Rush to Armageddon
Robert Parry
Jan 9 2007

George W. Bush has purged senior military and intelligence officials who were obstacles to a wider war in the Middle East, broadening his options for both escalating the conflict inside Iraq and expanding the fighting to Iran and Syria with Israel’s help.

On Jan. 4, Bush ousted the top two commanders in the Middle East, Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, who had opposed a military escalation in Iraq, and removed Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who had stood by intelligence estimates downplaying the near-term threat from Iran’s nuclear program.

Most Washington observers have treated Bush’s shake-up as either routine or part of his desire for a new team to handle his planned “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq. But intelligence sources say the personnel changes also fit with a scenario for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and seeking violent regime change in Syria.

Bush appointed Admiral William Fallon as the new chief of Central Command for the Middle East despite the fact that Fallon, a former Navy fighter pilot and currently head of the Pacific Command, will oversee two ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The choice of Fallon makes more sense if Bush foresees a bigger role for two aircraft carrier groups now poised off Iran’s coastline, such as support for possible Israeli air strikes against Iran’s nuclear targets or as a deterrent against any overt Iranian retaliation.

Though not considered a Middle East expert, Fallon has moved in neoconservative circles, for instance, attending a 2001 awards ceremony at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think tank dedicated to explaining “the link between American defense policy and the security of Israel.”

Bush’s personnel changes also come as Israel is reported stepping up preparations for air strikes, possibly including tactical nuclear bombs, to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, such as the reactor at Natanz, south of Tehran, where enriched uranium is produced.

The Sunday Times of London reported on Jan. 7 that two Israeli air squadrons are training for the mission and “if things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete [at Natanz]. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole.”

The Sunday Times wrote that Israel also would hit two other facilities - at Isfahan and Arak - with conventional bombs. But the possible use of a nuclear bomb at Natanz would represent the first nuclear attack since the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II six decades ago.

While some observers believe Israel may be leaking details of its plans as a way to frighten Iran into accepting international controls on its nuclear program, other sources indicate that Israel and the Bush administration are seriously preparing for this wider Middle Eastern war.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has called the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb an “existential threat” to Israel.

After the Sunday Times article appeared, an Israeli government spokesman denied that Israel has drawn up secret plans to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. For its part, Iran claims it only wants a nuclear program for producing energy.

Negroponte’s Heresy

Whatever Iran’s intent, Negroponte has said U.S. intelligence does not believe Iran could produce a nuclear weapon until next decade.

Negroponte’s assessment in April 2006 infuriated neoconservative hardliners who wanted a worst-case scenario on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, much as they pressed for an alarmist view on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Unlike former CIA Director George Tenet, who bent to Bush’s political needs on Iraq, Negroponte stood behind the position of intelligence analysts who cited Iran’s limited progress in refining uranium.

“Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade,” Negroponte said in an interview with NBC News. Expressing a similarly tempered view in a speech at the National Press Club, Negroponte said, “I think it’s important that this issue be kept in perspective.”

Some neocons complained that Negroponte was betraying the President.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a leading figure in the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, called for Negroponte’s firing because of the Iran assessment and his “abysmal personnel decisions” in hiring senior intelligence analysts who were skeptics about Bush’s Iraqi WMD claims.

In an article for Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, Gaffney attacked Negroponte for giving top analytical jobs to Thomas Fingar, who had served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kenneth Brill, who was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which debunked some of the U.S. and British claims about Iraq seeking uranium ore from Africa.

Fingar’s Office of Intelligence and Research had led the dissent against the Iraq WMD case, especially over what turned out to be Bush’s false claims that Iraq was developing a nuclear bomb.

“Given this background, is it any wonder that Messrs. Negroponte, Fingar and Brill . gave us the spectacle of absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons?” wrote Gaffney, who was a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.

Gaffney also accused Negroponte of giving promotions to “government officials in sensitive positions who actively subvert the President’s policies,” an apparent reference to Fingar and Brill. The neocons have long resented U.S. intelligence assessments that conflict with their policy prescriptions…

In his personnel shakeup, Bush shifted Negroponte from his Cabinet-level position as DNI to a sub-Cabinet post as deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. To replace Negroponte, Bush nominated Navy retired Vice Admiral John McConnell, who is viewed by intelligence professionals as a low-profile technocrat, not a strong independent figure.

A Freer Hand

Negroponte’s departure should give Bush a freer hand if he decides to support attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Bush’s neocon advisers fear that if Bush doesn’t act decisively in his remaining two years in office, his successor may lack the political will to launch a preemptive strike against Iran.

Bush reportedly has been weighing his military options for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities since early 2006. But he has encountered resistance from the top U.S. military brass, much as he has with his plans to escalate U.S. troop levels in Iraq.

As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, a number of senior U.S. military officers were troubled by administration war planners who believed “bunker-busting” tactical nuclear weapons, known as B61-11s, were the only way to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities buried deep underground.

A former senior intelligence official told Hersh that the White House refused to remove the nuclear option from the plans despite objections from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Whenever anybody tries to get it out, they’re shouted down,” the ex-official said. [New Yorker, April 17, 2006]

By late April 2006, however, the Joint Chiefs finally got the White House to agree that using nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, less than 200 miles south of Tehran, was politically unacceptable, Hersh reported.

“Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” one former senior intelligence official said. [New Yorker, July 10, 2006]

But one way to get around the opposition of the Joint Chiefs would be to delegate the bombing operation to the Israelis. Given Israel’s powerful lobbying operation in Washington and its strong ties to leading Democrats, an Israeli-led attack might be more politically palatable with the Congress.

Attacks on Iran and Syria also would fit with Bush’s desire to counter the growing Shiite influence across the Middle East, which was given an unintended boost by Bush’s ouster of the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

The original neocon plan for the Iraq invasion was to use Iraq as a base to force regime change in Syria and Iran, thus dealing strong blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

This regional transformation supposedly would have protected Israel’s northern border and strengthened Israel’s hand in dictating final peace terms to the Palestinians. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq backfired, descending into a sectarian civil war with Iraq’s pro-Iranian Shiite majority gaining the upper hand.

In effect, by ousting Saddam Hussein, Bush had eliminated the principal buffer who had been holding the line against the radical Shiites in Iran since 1979. By tipping the strategic balance to the Shiites, Bush also unnerved the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia.

A Nightmare

By 2006, the dream of a U.S.-orchestrated transformation of the Middle East had turned into a nightmare of rising Shiite radicalism. To address this unanticipated development, Bush began pondering how best to throttle Shiite expansionism.

In summer 2006, Washington Post foreign policy analyst Robin Wright wrote that U.S. officials told her that “for the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East.” [Washington Post, July 16, 2006]

Bush’s advisers also blamed the governments of Syria and Iran for supporting anti-U.S. fighters in Iraq.

Yet lacking the military and political capacity to expand the conflict beyond Iraq, the Bush administration turned to Israel and its new Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. By summer 2006, Israeli sources were describing Bush’s interest in finding a pretext to take Syria and Iran down a notch.

That opening came when border tensions with Hamas in Gaza and with Hezbollah in Lebanon led to the capture of three Israeli soldiers and a rapid Israeli escalation of the conflict into an air-and-ground campaign against Lebanon.

Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the Israeli-Lebanese conflict as an opening to expand the fighting into Syria and achieve the long-sought “regime change” in Damascus, Israeli sources said.

One Israeli source told me that Bush’s interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered “nuts” by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime Minister Olmert generally shared Bush’s hard-line strategy against Islamic militants….

In an article on July 30, 2006. the Jerusalem Post also hinted at Bush’s suggestion of a wider war into Syria. “Defense officials told the Post that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria,” the newspaper reported.

In August 2006, the Inter-Press Service added more details, reporting that the message was passed to Israel by Bush’s deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, who had been a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.

“In a meeting with a very senior Israeli official, Abrams indicated that Washington would have no objection if Israel chose to extend the war beyond to its other northern neighbor, leaving the interlocutor in no doubt that the intended target was Syria,” a source told the Inter-Press Service.

In December 2006, Meyray Wurmser, a leading U.S. neoconservative whose spouse is a Middle East adviser to Vice President Cheney, confirmed that neocons inside and outside the Bush administration had hoped Israel would attack Syria as a means of undermining the insurgents in Iraq.

“If Syria had been defeated, the rebellion in Iraq would have ended,” Wurmser said in an interview with Yitzhak Benhorin of the Ynet Web site. “A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hezbollah. If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and (changed) the strategic map in the Middle East.”

But the Israeli summer offensives in Gaza and Lebanon fell short of Olmert’s objectives, instead generating international condemnation of Tel Aviv for the large numbers of civilian casualties from Israel’s bombing raids.

Wounded Leaders

Now, as two politically wounded leaders, Bush and Olmert share an interest in trying to salvage some success out of their military setbacks. So, they are looking at possible moves that are much more dramatic than minor adjustments to the status quo.

Democrats and some Republicans are questioning why Bush wants to send 20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq and offer Iraqis some jobs programs, when similar tactics have been tried unsuccessfully in the past.

Indeed, one source familiar with high-level thinking in Washington and Tel Aviv said an unstated reason for Bush’s troop “surge” is to bolster the defenses of Baghdad’s Green Zone if a possible Israeli attack on Iran prompts an uprising among Iraqi Shiites.

The two U.S. aircraft carrier strike forces off Iran’s coast could provide further deterrence against Iranian retaliation. But the conflict would almost certainly spread anyway.

Likely Hezbollah missile strikes against Israel would offer another pretext for Israel to invade Syria and finally oust Hezbollah’s allies in Damascus, as the U.S. neocons had hope would happen in summer 2006, the source said.

In the neoconservative vision, this wider war would offer perhaps a last chance at achieving the regional transformation that has been at the heart of Bush’s strategy of “democratizing” the Middle East through violence if necessary.

However, few Middle East experts believe that Bush really would want the results of truly democratic elections in the region because Islamic militants would almost surely win resoundingly amid the anti-Americanism that has grown even more intense since the hanging of Saddam Hussein in late December.

An Israeli assault on Iran could put the region’s remaining pro-American dictators in jeopardy, too. In Pakistan, for instance, Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaeda have been gaining strength and might try to overthrow Gen. Pervez Musharraf, conceivably giving Islamic terrorists control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

For some U.S. foreign policy experts, this potential for disaster from a U.S.-backed Israeli air strike on Iran is so terrifying that they ultimately don’t believe Bush and Olmert would dare implement such the plan.

But Bush’s actions in the past two months - reaffirming his determination to achieve “victory” in Iraq - suggest that he wants nothing of the “graceful exit” that might come from a de-escalation of the war.

Losing Faith

Bush has dug in his heels even as some senior administration officials have lost faith in his strategy.

On Nov. 6, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent Bush a memo suggesting a “major adjustment” in Iraq War policy that would include “an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases” from 55 to five by July 2007 with remaining U.S. forces only committed to Iraqi areas that request them.

“Unless they [the local Iraqi governments] cooperate fully, U.S. forces would leave their province,” Rumsfeld wrote.

Proposing an option similar to a plan enunciated by Democratic Rep. John Murtha, Rumsfeld suggested that the commanders “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions - cities, patrolling, etc. - and move U.S . forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.”

And in what could be read as an implicit criticism of Bush’s lofty rhetoric about transforming Iraq and the Middle East, Rumsfeld said the administration should “recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) - go minimalist.” [NYT, Dec. 3, 2006]

On Nov. 8, two days after the memo and one day after American voters elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Bush fired Rumsfeld. The firing was widely interpreted as a sign that Bush was ready to moderate his position on Iraq, but the evidence now suggests that Bush got rid of Rumsfeld for going wobbly on the war.

On Dec. 6, when longtime Bush family counselor James Baker issued a report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group urging a drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq, Bush wasted little time in slapping it down.

Instead, Bush talked about waging a long war against Islamic “radicals and extremists,” an escalation from his original post-9/11 goal of defeating “terrorists with global reach.”

At his news conference on Dec. 20, Bush cast this wider struggle against Islamists as a test of American manhood and perseverance by demonstrating to the enemy that “they can’t run us out of the Middle East, that they can’t intimidate America.”

Bush suggested, too, that painful decisions lay ahead in the New Year.

“I’m not going to make predictions about what 2007 will look like in Iraq, except that it’s going to require difficult choices and additional sacrifices, because the enemy is merciless and violent,” Bush said.

Rather than scale back his neoconservative dream of transforming the Middle East, Bush argued for an expanded U.S. military to wage this long war.

“We must make sure that our military has the capability to stay in the fight for a long period of time,” Bush said. “I’m not predicting any particular theater, but I am predicting that it’s going to take a while for the ideology of liberty to finally triumph over the ideology of hate.

“We’re in the beginning of a conflict between competing ideologies - a conflict that will determine whether or not your children can live in a peace. A failure in the Middle East, for example, or failure in Iraq, or isolationism, will condemn a generation of young Americans to permanent threat from overseas.”

Escalation

Since then, Bush has floated the idea of a troop “surge” and replaced commanders who disagreed with him. Bush also removed U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, a Sunni Muslim generally considered a voice for moderation in U.S. policy who privately objected to Bush’s decision to press ahead with the hanging of Saddam Hussein.

There are even indications of tension between Bush and Cheney, who like his old friend Rumsfeld, appears to have grown disillusioned with the war.

In a little-noticed comment on Jan. 4, Sen. Joseph Biden, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Cheney and Rumsfeld “are really smart guys who made a very, very, very, very bad bet, and it blew up in their faces. Now, what do they do with it? I think they have concluded they can’t fix it, so how do you keep it stitched together without it completely “unraveling?”
[Washington Post, Jan. 5, 2007]

But Bush does not appear to share that goal of limiting the damage. Instead, he is looking for ways to “double-down” his gamble in Iraq by joining with Olmert - and possibly outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair - in expanding the conflict.

Since the Nov. 7 congressional elections, the three leaders have conducted a round-robin of meetings that on the surface seem to have little purpose. Olmert met privately with Bush on Nov. 13; Blair visited the White House on Dec. 7; and Blair conferred with Olmert in Israel on Dec. 18.

Sources say the three leaders are frantically seeking options for turning around their political fortunes as they face harsh judgments from history for their bloody and risky adventures in the Middle East.

But there is also a clock ticking. Blair, who now stands to go down in the annals of British history as “Bush’s poodle,” is nearing the end of his tenure, having agreed under pressure from his Labour Party to step down in spring 2007.

So, if the Bush-Blair-Olmert triumvirate has any hope of accomplishing the neoconservative remaking of the Middle East, time is running out. Something dramatic must happen soon. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves