- President Bush is out of touch with the American people,
the US military, and international political reality.
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- With every poll showing smaller and smaller minorities
approving of Bush and his war in Iraq, with top US generals sending signals
that they want to reduce US troops in Iraq, and with the world at large
viewing Bush as a fanatic who cannot acknowledge his blunders and mistakes,
Bush announced in his weekly radio address that "our efforts in Iraq
and the broader Middle East will require more time, more sacrifice and
continued resolve."
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- Does Bush think he is a dictator?
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- The polls show that it is the American people's resolve
that Bush bring his Iraq venture to an end, an orderly end if possible,
but to an end. Every explanation Bush has given for his invasion of Iraq
has proved to be false. Yet, Bush still speaks of "our noble cause,"
while taking great care to avoid Cindy Sheehan and her question, "What
is the noble cause?"
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- Perhaps Bush supplied the answer in his reference in
his weekly radio address to "our efforts in . . . the broader Middle
East."
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- What are our efforts "in the broader Middle East"?
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- The only American efforts "in the broader Middle
East" that have been defined are in the policy writings of Bush's
neoconservative advisers who cooked up the invasion of Iraq. For the neocons,
our efforts are in behalf of Israel's security.
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- The neocons' belief that Israel is made more secure by
US military aggression in the Middle East is delusional. How is Israel
made secure by an invasion that turns the Muslim world against America
as all polls show and Iraq into a training ground for al Qaeda, as the
CIA says has happened?
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- The US has been defeated in Iraq, both militarily by
a limited insurgency drawn from only 20 percent of the population and politically
by Iraqi divisions as the "constitutional process" demonstrates.
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- As Knight Ridder reported on August 25: "Insurgents
in Anbar province, the center of guerrilla resistance in Iraq, have fought
the US military to a stalemate. After repeated major combat offensives
in Fallujah and Ramadi, and after losing hundreds of soldiers and Marines
in Anbar during the past two years--including 75 since June 1--many American
officers and enlisted men assigned to Anbar have stopped talking about
winning a military victory in Iraq's Sunni heartland."
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- "I don't think of this in terms of winning,"
said Col. Stephen Davis, who commands a task force of about 5,000 Marines
. . . The frustrating part for the (home) audience, if you will, is they
want finality. They want a fight for the town and in the end the guy with
the white hat wins."
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- That's unlikely in Anbar, Col. Davis said.
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- Frustrated by a determined insurgency, Bush administration
officials predict that improvements will follow the Iraq constitution.
However, the constitution may be leading to civil war.
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- Sunnis say they will reject the constitution because
it leaves them out of the oil wealth, which goes to the Kurds in the north
and the Shiites in the south, and because it is punitive toward the old
ruling party, that is, toward Sunnis.
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- Perhaps it is the neocon plan for Shiites and Kurds to
join the US military in a war to the death against Sunnis.
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- But what comes next? How would Turkey regard a largely
autonomous oil rich Kurdistan on the border of its own Kurdish province?
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- And how would a war in Iraq between Shiites and Sunnis
play out in the Middle East divided along those lines? Does the US want
to wed itself to Iranian Shiites against Saudi Sunnis?
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- It sounds like a lot of long term instability. Perhaps
the old Islamic divisions are what the US government is relying on to enable
it to continue to rule the Middle East. Muslims might consume themselves
in their internal hatreds while the US builds its bases to control the
oil.
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- That's been the tried and true practice of Western colonialists
since the fall of the Turkish empire after World War I.
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- Can it work this time? US ambitions are too much of a
threat to other countries which are well positioned to cause us grief.
Will the world be able to resist the opportunities to undermine an over-extended
and self-righteous United States?
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- Sooner or later, too, Shiite and Sunni leaders will realize
that they are pawns in American hands bleeding themselves in behalf of
American power. Sooner or later Muslim humiliation at the hands of the
US and Israel will permit an Osama bin Laden to reunify the Muslim world.
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- These are, of course, speculations. But history has few
events without unintended and unrecognized consequences.
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- Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments
and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics
education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California
at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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- http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08292005.html
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