- The war in Iraq is lost.
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- This fact is widely recognized by American military officers
and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez,
the commander of US forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted
occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Gen. Sanchez
says, is "to stave off defeat," and that requires more intelligence
and leadership than Gen. Sanchez sees in the entirety of our national political
leadership: "I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in
leadership at this time."
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- More evidence that the war is lost arrived June 4 with
headlines reporting: "U.S.-led soldiers control only about a third
of Baghdad, the military said on Monday." After five years of war
the US controls one-third of one city and nothing else.
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- A host of US commanding generals have said that the Iraq
war is destroying the US military. A year ago Colin Powell said that the
US Army is "about broken." Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn says Bush has
"piecemealed our force to death." Gen. Barry McCafrey testified
to the US Senate that "the Army will unravel."
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- Col. Andy Bacevich, America's foremost writer on military
affairs, documents in the current issue of The American Conservative that
Bush's insane war has depleted and exhausted the US Army and Marine Corps:
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- "Only a third of the regular Army's brigades qualify
as combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that standard. When
the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of the president's strategy
of escalation, the US will be left without a ready-to-deploy land force
reserve."
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- "The stress of repeated combat tours is sapping
the Army's lifeblood. Especially worrying is the accelerating exodus of
experienced leaders. The service is currently short 3,000 commissioned
officers. By next year, the number is projected to grow to 3,500. The Guard
and reserves are in even worse shape. There the shortage amounts to 7,500
officers. Young West Pointers are bailing out of the Army at a rate not
seen in three decades. In an effort to staunch the losses, that service
has begun offering a $20,000 bonus to newly promoted captains who agree
to stay on for an additional three years. Meanwhile, as more and more officers
want out, fewer and fewer want in: ROTC scholarships go unfilled for a
lack of qualified applicants."
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- Bush has taken every desperate measure. Enlistment ages
have been pushed up from 35 to 42. The percentage of high school dropouts
and the number of recruits scoring at the bottom end of tests have spiked.
The US military is forced to recruit among drug users and convicted criminals.
Bacevich reports that wavers "issued to convicted felons jumped by
30 percent." Combat tours have been extended from 12 to 15 months,
and the same troops are being deployed again and again.
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- There is no equipment for training. Bacevich reports
that "some $212 billion worth has been destroyed, damaged, or just
plain worn out." What remains is in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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- Under these circumstances, "staying the course"
means total defeat.
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- Even the neoconservative warmongers, who deceived Americans
with the promise of a "cakewalk war" that would be over in six
weeks, believe that the war is lost. But they have not given up. They have
a last desperate plan: Bomb Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney is spear-
heading the neocon plan, and Norman Podhoretz is the plan's leading propagandist
with his numerous pleas published in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary
to bomb Iran. Podhoretz, like every neoconservative, is a total Islamophobe.
Podhoretz has written that Islam must be deracinated and the religion destroyed,
a genocide for the Muslim people.
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- The neocons think that by bombing Iran the US will provoke
Iran to arm the Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing rocket propelled
grenades and with surface to air missiles and unleash the militias against
US troops. These weapons would neutralize US tanks and helicopter gunships
and destroy the US military edge, leaving divided and isolated US forces
subject to being cut off from supplies and retreat routes. With America
on the verge of losing most of its troops in Iraq, the cry would go up
to "save the troops" by nuking Iran.
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- Five years of unsuccessful war in Iraq and Afghanistan
and Israel's recent military defeat in Lebanon have convinced the neocons
that America and Israel cannot establish hegemony over the Middle East
with conventional forces alone. The neocons have changed US war doctrine,
which now permits the US to preemptively strike with nuclear weapons a
non-nuclear power. Neocons are forever heard saying, "what's the use
of having nuclear weapons if you can't use them."
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- Neocons have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will
show the Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to
the will of the US government. Insurgency and terrorism cannot prevail
against nuclear weapons.
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- Many US military officers are horrified at what they
think would be the worst ever orchestrated war crime. There are reports
of threatened resignations. But Dick Cheney is resolute. He tells Bush
that the plan will save him from the ignominy of losing the war and restore
his popularity as the president who saved Americans from Iranian nuclear
weapons. With the captive American media providing propaganda cover, the
neoconservatives believe that their plan can pull their chestnuts out of
the fire and rescue them from the failure that their delusion has wrought.
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- The American electorate decided last November that they
must do something about the failed war and gave the Democrats control of
both houses of Congress. However, the Democrats have decided that it is
easier to be complicit in war crimes than to represent the wishes of the
electorate and hold a rogue president accountable. If Cheney again prevails,
America will supplant the Third Reich as the most reviled country in recorded
history.
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- Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant
secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor
of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including
The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous
academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political
economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University,
and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He
has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress
on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service
Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal
of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell
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