The Rag Blog

“I see the imminent death of 20,000 men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds …
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.”
Hamlet, Act IV; according to White House spin part of reading-adverse President George W Bush’s book list during the summer of 2006.

And so, after a tsunami surge of spin, US President George W Bush is heading toward escalation, summoning his 21,500 men, supported by barely 11% of Americans. Escalation in Iraq is the name of the president’s game, and that also applies to Somalia – the new Afghanistan.

In far from accidental timing, the good old “war on terror” is back from the grave (nobody really related to the “long war” newspeak). After all, the galleries had to be reminded that there’s a Pentagon-concocted “arc of instability” running from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East and then to the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Himalayas. The “war on terror” has expanded to the business of killing Africans, now afforded membership of the ever-expanding “axis of evil”.

Bush, in front of a stack of books he never reads, blamed al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni Arab resistance and “Shi’ites supported by Iran” for his failures; committed five more brigades to Baghdad and 4,000 extra troops to guerrilla and al-Qaeda-controlled al-Anbar province. As if these shock troops will be enough to pursue the “fight against terror”. Bush’s plan ultimately breaks down to a slightly bulkier US militia in Iraq capable of killing more Arabs.

Taking the bull by the Horn

With some aplomb, the White House/Pentagon axis has managed to turn Somalia into the new Afghanistan, in more ways than one and just in time for Bush’s announcement of his escalation-tainted “new way forward”. The Pentagon maintained it had “credible” intelligence before it decided to strike alleged al-Qaeda-infested villages in southern Somalia. This is highly suspect.

The intelligence was provided by unsavory, corrupt Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi – who came up with the clever plot of concocting a fictitious jihad conducted by “neo-Taliban” in Somalia and selling it handsomely to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon. He’s now posing as a prime US ally in the “war on terror”, just as Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov did in the autumn of 2001.

Zenawi’s US-trained Ethiopian troops, the ones who invaded Somalia, are infested with CIA operatives and Special Forces – all of them flown in from the strategic US-controlled (since September 11, 2003) Camp Le Monier in Djibouti.

Arab media are having a field day reporting that Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf, a reconverted warlord “elected” by fellow warlords (all armed by the US) and then legitimized by the United Nations, told African journalists in Mogadishu that the US had the right to bomb “anywhere in the world”. According to the Kenyan newspaper The Daily Nation, this new US campaign of targeted assassinations has in fact killed scores of civilians.

But with the help of Ethiopia’s dictatorship – whose soldiers it trained – Washington is being rewarded with one more client regime, and a crucial foothold in the Horn of Africa, right on the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, very close to the Red Sea and literally next door to Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

The basic fact remains that Bush’s escalation is designed to smash Muqtada’s Mehdi Army. That can only mean, in practice, a mini-genocide of vast masses of unruly, extremely dispossessed Shi’ites: the coming battle of Sadr City, which the Pentagon has been itching to launch since the spring of 2004. The Pentagon is actually declaring war on no fewer than 2.2 million (poor) people. A sinister symmetry still applies: the Pentagon will attack dispossessed Shi’ite masses – just as the Israeli Defense Forces attacked dispossessed Shi’ite masses in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US forces are likely to deliberately target both Shiite and Sunni extremist leaders under a new no holds barred policy for Baghdad agreed to by the Iraqi government, a senior US military official said.

The official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said the Iraqis had agreed to lift restrictions that in the past have prevented US forces from deliberately targeting certain extremist leaders.

“One way to erode their military capability is get to at their leadership,” said the official, referring to sectarian militias and death squads. “So, yes, I expect extremist leaders on both sides of the equation to be targeted.”

George W. Bush has an urge to surge. Like every junkie, he asks for just one more fix: let him inject just 21,000 more troops and that will win the war.

Terrorists fired a rocket from across the street into the US embassy in Athens on Friday morning. The rocket exploded in the bathroom on the third floor but did not cause casualties.

Greek leftist groups have targeted the US embassy and its personnel in the past, and passions run high in Greece against the US role in Iraq, which is generally seen as mere predatory imperialism and capitalist grasping.

The United States had 165,000 troops in Iraq in late 2005/early 2006 for the Iraqi national elections.

The Pentagon rotated troops out over the ensuing months and never replaced them until the troop level dropped by more than 35,000.

Now the administration is going to add 22,000 more troops in its vaunted “surge,” yet even after all the surge troops are rotated into Iraq, the total number of U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq will be less than the 165,000 we had in there in late 2005/early 2006.

The Washington Post put it this way:

Bush said it is now clear that there have not been sufficient troops in Baghdad, and that part of the difference in this approach is that the plan will be adequately resourced. Yet the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq after the planned increase will be about 153,000, less than the peak of about 165,000 in December 2005. Military experts last night wondered, as one said, how a “thin green line” of 17,500 additional soldiers in Baghdad could affect the security situation in a city where many of the 5 million residents are hostile to the U.S. presence. “Too little, too late — way too late,” said retired Col. Jerry Durrant, who has worked as a trainer of Iraqi forces.

So how is Bush’s vaunted troop surge really so different than previous administration war policy?

It seems to me to be just another dog and pony show designed by the administration’s propaganda-meisters to delay the inevitable withdrawal of U.S. troops from a ruptured and destroyed Iraq.

The big news story that night? President Lyndon B. Johnson’s State of the Union address.

The topic that dominated all others: Vietnam.

I’m going to guide you to some excerpts of that address — exactly 40 years ago tonight.

See how it compares to some of the excerpts from President Bush’s speech that were just released minutes ago:

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war–a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror – and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year–or come next year. Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight, that he can go on fighting longer than we can, and longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: Our South Vietnamese allies are also being tested tonight. Because they must provide real security to the people living in the countryside. And this means reducing the terrorism and the armed attacks which kidnaped and killed 26,900 civilians in the last 32 months, to levels where they can be successfully controlled by the regular South Vietnamese security forces. It means bringing to the villagers an effective civilian government that they can respect, and that they can rely upon and that they can participate in, and that they can have a personal stake in. We hope that government is now beginning to emerge.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: This forward movement is rooted in the ambitions and the interests of Asian nations themselves. It was precisely this movement that we hoped to accelerate when I spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in April 1965, and I pledged “a much more massive effort to improve the life of man” in that part of the world, in the hope that we could take some of the funds that we were spending on bullets and bombs and spend it on schools and production.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting post up about supporters of this insane Iraq “Surge” idea. His notes that Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the architects of this surge plan, argues for a necessarily large increase in the number of American troops in Iraq. In fact, Kagan states pretty plainly that the surge won’t work unless many thousand more troops than are currently available are deployed to the region.

The president must request a substantial increase in ground forces end strength. This increase is vital to sustaining the morale of the combat forces by ensuring that relief is on the way. The president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this generation.

Glenn then makes a connection that’s patently obvious. If you are one such young Americans, and you support Bush’s war and Kagan’s plan for its escalation, you should enlist to serve your country in Iraq. And not only for the sake of rhetorical consistancy.

At this point, to continue supporting a policy that has caused such a cataclysmic loss of life, American, Iraqi and otherwise, one would have to think that “victory” in Iraq was the single most important cause of our time. After all, it would have to be worth several thousand American lives and, at best, several hundred thousand Iraqi lives.

I do not personally believe this, nor did I think that any such victory was attainable at any point during Bush’s Iraqi Adventure. So I did not support the war, because why should Americans or Iraqis die for something that isn’t truly essential for our survival, or that wasn’t even possible?

But if I did believe this, well…I’d only have a few options:

(1) Go off to war.

(2) Admit to myself and anyone else who asked that I’m a coward, willing to send other men to die for what I think is important but unwilling to potentially sacrifice my own life or the lives of close friends and family members.

(3) Find a way to aid the war effort significant enough to substitute for my presence on a battlefield.

The so-called right-wing “chickenhaws,” young men or the parents of young men who strongly support Bush’s war but refuse to serve, tend to go with #3. They claim that their writing about the war and bringing issues to the public’s attention compensate for their absence from the field of battle.

Everyone knew what Bush was going to say before he made his address tonight. And the ‘surge’ which Democrats hoped to block had already begun with advance elements of the 82nd Airborne already in Baghdad to arrange for arrivals of 17,500 more troops. “If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home,” Bush said. But the Iraqis are responsible for running their own government, and if they don’t shape up, that’s it for them.

Bush made clear he is embarking on a straightforward pacification program in Baghdad, made possible by an occupation run by American troops. This is to be an American military occupation. Maybe with a façade of Iraqis, but run by Americans, just as yesterday, American GIs ended up running the show in Haifa Street fighting.

As Bush has said in the past, Americans know what the word victory means, So, whatever happens, no matter what anyone says, we have to win the war. “Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States,” Bush said.

Observers grasp wildly for explanations as to why Bush does what he does. No matter what one thinks of the President, when push comes to shove, it’s hard to believe he really wants to drag out the war so it can be handed over to a successor in 2008; or that he is such a psycho that he can’t stop calling defeat victory. The Bushes doubtless don’t consider their family legacy to be made of such stuff.

There may well be a much more sinister game at play here. That centers around the emergence of Henry Kissinger over the last year as an outside advisor to Bush and other top officials in Washington.

Gareth Porter, the historian who ran the Indochina Resource Center in the early 70s, points out in a January 11 article on Asia Online that “although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi’ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the US position in the war is actually weak and unstable.“

To listen to Bush’s speech on Wednesday, you would imagine that al-Qaeda has occupied large swathes of Iraq with the help of Syria and Iran and is brandishing missiles at the US mainland. That the president of the United States can come out after nearly four years of such lies and try to put this fantasy over on the American people is shameful.

The answer to “al-Qaeda’s” occupation of neighborhoods in Baghdad and the cities of al-Anbar is then, Bush says, to send in more US troops to “clear and hold” these neighborhoods.

But is that really the big problem in Iraq? Bush is thinking in terms of a conventional war, where armies fight to hold territory. But if a nimble guerrilla group can come out at night and set off a bomb at the base of a large tenement building in a Shiite neighborhood, they can keep the sectarian civil war going. They work by provoking reprisals. They like to hold territory if they can. But as we saw with Fallujah and Tal Afar, if they cannot they just scatter and blow things up elsewhere.

Bush could not help taking swipes at Iran and Syria. But the geography of his deployments gives the lie to his singling them out as mischief makers. Why send 4,000 extra troops to al-Anbar province? Why ignore Diyala Province near Iran, which is in flames, or Babel Province southwest of Baghdad? Diyala borders Iran, so isn’t that the threat? But wait. Where is al-Anbar? Between Jordan and Baghdad. In other words, al-Anbar opens out into the vast Sunni Arab hinterland that supports the guerrilla movement with money and volunteers, coming in from Jordan. If Syria was the big problem, you would put the extra 4,000 troops up north along the border. If Iran was the big problem, you’d occupy Diyala. But little Jordan is an ally of the US, and Bush would not want to insult it by admitting that it is a major infiltration root for jihadis heading to Iraq.