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The Bush administration, losing the
war in Iraq, has come with a "new" strategy: setting
a timetable for Iraq's puppet regime and its fledgling army to
"stand up" to the task of running the country so that
the U.S. military can "stand down."
If you think this brilliant
"new" plan sounds remarkably like the one proposed
earlier this year by many Democrats, who were accused at that
time of "cutting and running" for proposing just such
a withdrawal timetable, you're right.
` It also sounds like yet another
one of those Bush/Rove scams that are pulled out at each election
to trick gullible voters into thinking the president is actually
going to do something dramatic when he is really just talking.
The truth is this plan is no more serious than Bush's early announcement
of a plan to send Americans to the moon and on to Mars.
That plan, of course, was a
joke from the start. The president didn't offer any money for
a Moon or Mars project, and never had any intention of doing
so. It was just more of the same at NASA, blowing money on the
giant white elephant in the sky called the International Space
Station. And of course, we don't hear anything about Mars anymore.
The new Iraq plan being touted
by the administration, which notably involves doing nothing for
a year, and then calls for a phased drawdown of U.S. troops over
subsequent years, basically shoving off any significant change
in Iraq until after Bush is safely out of office and holed up
somewhere in Paraguay, behing a barricade of defense lawyers.
On its face, this "new"
plan also would require remarkable cooperation and forbearance
on the part of the Iraqi resistance, which has shown no inclination
to ease up on its attacks on U.S. forces and on Iraq's puppet
regime, and which moreover has no incentive to ease up, since
it is the resistance's increasing success at attacking and killing
Americans that is driving the administration to talk about withdrawal.
What we actually have here
is an election gambit: if the administration tells the voters
that it is changing course and making plans to get out of the
quagmire in Iraq, maybe at least some voters will reward them
by voting for embattled Republican congressional candidates.
But it is in fact all just
a scam. Saying that the government of Prime Minister Nauri Kamal
al-Maliki must start effectively cracking down on sectarian killings,
must clean up its police forces and get them to stop behaving
like gangsters and death squads, and must turn its joke of an
army into a dedicated fighting force that will stand up to the
forces of rebellion and revolution arrayed against it and the
U.S. military is not going to make it happen. After all, that's
supposedly what the Iraqi government has been trying to do now
for two years, right? And the situation has not improved at all.
In fact the situation in Iraq for the government has gotten noticeably
worse. Why anyone would think that giving this pathetic colonial
regime some kind of a "timetable" for doing those things
would make them accomplish something that they have been congenitally
unable to accomplish to date is beyond me.
But then, that's not the point.
Like most of what this administration
offers up in the run-up to national elections, this is all about
appearances, not about substance.
This is an admistration that
knows all about fooling some of the people some of the time.
What Karl Rove long ago figured
out is that it doesn't matter that you can't fool all of the
people all the time, or even some of the people all of the time.
All you have to do is fool some of them enough of the time to
get through an election cycle with a narrow win. Then people
move on to other concerns and forget what you promised. By the
time the next election cycle rolls around, you can come up with
some new promises and fool some of them again.
It's a question whether the
scam will work this time, though.
People seem to be waking up
to the reality that there is a serious disaster in Iraq, that
it is not going to be solved by continuing to slaughter Iraqis
and by continuing to let American kids get chewed up and sent
hom in boxes or with parts of their bodies missing.
People seem to be waking up
to the fact that "staying the course" is just another
way of not having to say, "We're sorry, but we f***ed up."
What we all need to be doing
now is demanding some answers from this administration and its
enablers in Congress:
* Why hasn't the US been demanding
action from the Iraqi government for the past two years?
* Why did some 2000 Americans
have to die over that period of time, if all we are doing is
something we could have done two years ago?
* Why are Democrats "cut
and runners" for proposing a phased withdrawal, but Republicans
are not "cut and runners" for proposing the same thing?
* If the success of this plan
involves negotiating with the insurgents and giving them--including
the Baathists we supposedly overthrew in 2003--a role in the
future Iraq, doesn't that mean we lost the war after all?
If not, then why weren't we
negotiating with them a long time ago?
If so, then what did the other
several hundred Americans die for in the early days of the invasion
and occupation?
If the US has been "stupid
and arrogant" in its Iraq policies, as administration sources
are finally admitting, just who are the stupid and arrogant people
we are talking about here?
If those "stupid and arrogant"
people are the president, the vice president, the secretary of
defense and the national security adviser/secretary of state,
what is to be the consequence of their stupiditdy and arrogance--particularly
given that this stupidity and arrogance has cause the deaths
of as many as 600,000 innocent Iraqi civilians and 3000 Americans?
Enough of the game playing.
It's time for a little truth
and consequences in America.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.