December 18, 2006
Options after the Deconstruction of Iraq
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction."
Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were
used for the production of biological weapons."
George W. Bush, September 12,
2002
"Intelligence leaves no doubt that Iraq continues to possess and
conceal lethal weapons."
George W. Bush, March 18, 2003
"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of
mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one
reason everyone could agree on."
Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003
"But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing
devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.."
George W. Bush, May 30, 2003
Wars of aggression are the most
barbarous of all human endeavors and are, more often than not, the instruments
of insane tyrants who hear voices. Wars are also waged by warlike gambling leaders
who bet their citizens' houses to fulfill their megalomaniac dreams of
grandeur —And the illegal
military invasion of Iraq was a gigantic gamble from the start. What's more, it
is a war that was planned and executed on the basis of fabricated lies. It
was a war based on false pretenses and on false perceptions of the Muslim
Middle East. For example, it is not true
that Middle Eastern Muslims hate the West "because they hate our way of life, our freedom, and our democracy." Polls indicate
that such ideas are simply based on ignorant prejudices. This wicked war will
be judged by history as one of the most blatant abuses of power by any American
administration ever.
In the process, the Bush-Cheney team, through a combination of design and
blunder, has inflamed the entire Middle East, from Iraq and Afghanistan, to Palestine and Lebanon, and soon, to Iran, and possibly
Syria, Saudi Arabia and even Turkey. In Iraq, nearly four years after the March
20, 2003 invasion of the country, the mess and the destruction are complete,
leaving behind a genuine humanitarian catastrophe and a political near-debacle.
United
Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan, for one, has concluded that the “average
Iraqi’s life” is worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein and
that the situation in Iraq is now "much worse" than a civil war. Even
some republican senators
now say openly that Bush's war in Iraq may be 'criminal'. Only President
George W. Bush and his Rasputin-like vice president, it seems, continue to
think that their wrecking-crew Middle East policy
makes any sense. Even departing Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejects
bluntly their stubborn "stay-the-course" and
“must-complete-the-mission” policy.
However, departing
Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld amazingly listed 20 tactical options
for U.S. policy in Iraq, but no strategic option. It seems that among G. W.
Bush's sorcerer's apprentices, there are a few tacticians, but no strategist.
This may understandable in a government of ideologues. For the Bush-Cheney
administration, ideology is a strategy in itself, and
it is this neoconservative dogma that cannot ever be questioned or modified
without loosing face. Even if all the rosy neocon assumptions about Iraq and
the Middle East have turned out to be wrong and wrong-headed, George W. Bush
has bet his entire presidency on the foolish enterprise and would need a
credible face-saving solution to extirpate himself from the mess he himself
created. As an immature person and as the bully-in-chief, as he has recently
been labeled by economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times,
G. W. Bush cannot face the failure of his adventure in Iraq and will remain in a state of denial as long as he is allowed to do so by Congress.
And now, the 10-member Baker-Hamilton bipartisan
commission has made it unanimous and officially
concluded that Bush's Iraq policies have failed. But, amazingly, the Commission watered
downed its recommendations for fear that Bush would reject them out of hand. As
a consequence, its 79-some recommendations deal more with tactical changes than
fundamental strategic realignments. For one, the Commission refrained from calling for a timetable for a real withdrawal of U.S.
troops from Iraq or even for a real troops reduction. In this sense, the
Baker-Hamilton commission did not produce the face-saving plan of withdrawal
from Iraq that the current U. S. President and American politicians from both sides of the isle could
have leaned on to extirpate themselves from the blunder they made in the fall
of 2002. Secondly, the report did not establish how the Iraq adventure is a
costly distraction from the real threat of Islamist al Qaeda-type terrorism,
which is in resurgence in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
But all is not completely bleak, even if you are a
Neocon who has been "mugged by reality."
Indeed, obliterating Iraq from the map, as a country opposed to Israel, and taking
control of its oil reserves, were the core objectives behind the pro-Israel
neocon policy of invading that country; they were well camouflaged under the
terms "liberation" and "democracy". It's not sure,
therefore, that the mess that the Bush-Cheney administration has created in
Iraq was solely the result of abysmal ignorance and incompetence.
When George W. Bush invaded
Iraq in March 2003, he did not only topple the Saddam Hussein regime, one of
George W. Bush's juvenile fantasies, but he made sure that the entire
infrastructure of the country was also destroyed: the army was dismembered, security
services were abolished, and, the ruling Sunni-dominated Baath Party was
dissolved and its members purged from any administrative positions. An enormous
political vacuum resulted, opening the gates to a bloody civil war between the
Sunnis in the center, the Chiites in the south and the Kurds in the north.
In this sense, the debacle in Iraq was a planned
failure. The final chapter of this drama would be the official break-up of the
country into pieces along religious and/or ethnic lines, to
the great satisfaction of two countries, i.e. Iran and Israel, the only two
countries bound to profit directly from the fragmentation of
Iraq.
This is probably what we are going to
witness in the coming months. But, just as President Richard Nixon promised to get
Americans out of Vietnam in 1968, and only succeeded in doing in 1973, after
20,000 more young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died there,
President George W. Bush will try to temporize and save face, as thousands more
Americans and Iraqis die. —It is a terrible shame.
Rodrigue Tremblay
lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
Also visit his blog
site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's Website:
www.thenewamericanempire.com
Posted,
December 18, 2006, at 5:30 am
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