Tomgram: Dreyfuss on Bush's Wizard-of-Oz Iraq Plan

By Tom Engelhardt
Created Jan 5 2007 - 9:56am

- from TomDispatch [1]

Every now and then, you have to take a lesson or two from history. In the
case of George Bush's Iraq, here's one: No matter what the President
announces in his "new way forward" speech on Iraq next week -- including
belated calls for "sacrifice" [2] from the man [3] whose answer to 9/11 was
to urge Americans to surge into Disney World [4] -- it won't work. Nothing
our President suggests in relation to Iraq, in fact, will have a ghost of a
chance of success. Worse than that, whatever it turns out to be, it is
essentially guaranteed to make matters worse [5].

Repetition, after all, is most of what knowledge adds up to, and the Bush
administration has been repetitively consistent in its Iraqi -- and larger
Middle Eastern -- policies. Whatever it touches (or perhaps the better word
would be "smashes") turns to dross. Iraq is now dross -- and Saddam Hussein
was such a remarkably hard act to follow badly that this is no small
accomplishment.

A striking but largely unexplored aspect of Saddam Hussein's execution [6]
is illustrative. His trial was basically run [7] out of the U.S. embassy in
Baghdad; Saddam was held at Camp Cropper, the U.S. prison near Baghdad
International Airport. He was delivered to the Iraqi government for hanging
in a U.S. helicopter (as his body would be flown back to his home village in
a U.S. helicopter).

Now, let's add a few more facts into the mix. Among Iraqi Shiites, no
individual has been viewed as more of an enemy by the Bush administration
than the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. American troops fought bloody
battles with his Mahdi Army in 2004, destroying significant parts of the old
city of Najaf in the process. American forces make periodic, destructive
raids into the vast Baghdad slum and Sadrist stronghold of Sadr City to take
out his followers and recently killed [8] one of his top aides in a raid in
Najaf. The upcoming Presidential "surge" into Baghdad is, reputedly, in part
to be aimed at suppressing [9] his militia, which a recent Pentagon report
described [10] as "the main threat to stability in Iraq."

Nonetheless at the crucial moment in the execution what did some of the
Interior Ministry guards do? They chanted: "Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!" In
all press reports, this has been described as a "taunting" of Saddam (and
assumedly of Iraqi Sunnis [11] more generally). But it could as easily be
described as the purest mockery of George W. Bush and everything he's done
in the country. If, in such a relatively controlled setting, the Americans
couldn't stop Saddam's execution from being "infiltrated" [12] by al-Sadr's
followers -- who are also, of course, part of Prime Minister Maliki's
government -- what can they possibly do in the chaos of Baghdad? How can a
few more thousands of U.S. troops be expected to keep them, or Badr Brigade
militiamen out of the streets, no less the police, the military, and various
ministries?

Consider the "new way forward," then, just another part of the Bush
administration's endless bubbleworld. And check out exactly what madness to
look forward to in next week's presidential address via Robert Dreyfuss, a
shrewd reporter and the author of the indispensable Devil's Game: How the
United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam [13]. Tom

* * *

The Surge to Nowhere
Traveling the Planet Neocon Road to Baghdad (Again)
By Robert Dreyfuss

Like some neocon Wizard of Oz, in building expectations for the 2007 version
of his "Strategy for Victory" in Iraq, President Bush is promising far more
than he can deliver. It is now nearly two months since he fired Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, installing Robert Gates in his place, and the White
House revealed that a full-scale review of America's failed policy in Iraq
was underway. Last week, having spent months -- if, in fact, the New York
Times is correct [14] that the review began late in the summer -- consulting
with generals, politicians, State Department and CIA bureaucrats, and
Pentagon planners, Bush emerged from yet another powwow to tell [15] waiting
reporters: "We've got more consultation to do until I talk to the country
about the plan."

As John Lennon sang in Revolution: "We'd all love to see the plan."

Unfortunately for Bush, most of the American public may have already checked
out. By and large, Americans have given up on the war in Iraq. The November
election, largely a referendum on the war, was a repudiation of the entire
effort, and the vote itself was a marker along a continuing path of rapidly
declining approval ratings [16] both for President Bush personally and for
his handling of the war. It's entirely possible that when Bush does present
us with "the plan" next week, few will be listening. Until he makes it clear
that he has returned from Planet Neocon by announcing concrete steps to end
the war in Iraq, it's unlikely that American voters will tune in. As of
January 1, every American could find at least 3,000 reasons [17] not to
believe that President Bush has suddenly found a way to put Humpty Dumpty
back together again.

What's astonishing about the debate over Iraq is that the President -- or
anyone else, for that matter, including the media -- is paying the slightest
attention to the neoconservative strategists who got us into this mess in
the first place. Having been egregiously wrong about every single Iraqi
thing for five consecutive years, by all rights the neocons ought to be
consigned to some dusty basement exhibit hall in the American Museum of
Natural History, where, like so many triceratops, their reassembled bones
would stand mutely by to send a chill of fear through touring
schoolchildren. Indeed, the neocons are the dodos of Washington, simply too
dumb to know when they are extinct.

Yet here is Tom Donnelly, an American Enterprise Institute neocon, a
co-chairman of the Project for a New American Century [18], telling a
reporter sagely that the surge is in. "I think the debate is really coming
down to: Surge large. Surge small. Surge short. Surge longer. I think the
smart money would say that the range of options is fairly narrow."
(Donnelly, of course, forgot: Surge out.) His colleague, Frederick Kagan of
AEI, the chief architect of the Surge Theory for Iraq, has made it clear
that the only kind of surge that would work is a big, fat one.

Nearly pornographic in his fondling of the surge, Kagan, another of the
neocon crew of armchair strategists and militarists, makes it clear that
size does matter. "Of all the 'surge' options out there, short ones are the
most dangerous," he wrote in the Washington Post [19] last week, adding
lasciviously, "The size of the surge matters as much as the length. . The
only 'surge' option that makes sense is both long and large."

Ooh -- that is, indeed, a manly surge. For Kagan, a man-sized surge must
involve at least 30,000 more troops funneled into the killing grounds of
Baghdad and al-Anbar Province for at least 18 months.

President Bush, perhaps dizzy from the oedipal frenzy created by the
emergence of Daddy's best friend James Baker and his Iraq Study Group, seems
all too willing to prove his manhood by the size of the surge. According to
a stunning front-page piece [20] in the Times last Tuesday, Bush has all but
dismissed the advice of his generals, including Centcom Commander John
Abizaid, and George Casey, the top U.S. general in Iraq, because they are
"more fixated on withdrawal than victory." At a recent Pentagon session,
according to General James T. Conway, the commandant of the U.S. Marines,
Bush told the assembled brass: "What I want to hear from you now is how we
are going to win, not how we are going to leave." As a result, Abizaid and
Casey are, it appears, getting the same hurry-up-and-retire treatment that
swept away other generals who questioned the wisdom on Iraq transmitted from
Planet Neocon.

That's scary, if it means that Bush -- presumably on the advice of the
Neocon-in-Chief, Vice President Dick Cheney -- has decided to launch a major
push, Kagan-style, for victory in Iraq. Not that such an escalation has a
chance of working, but there's no question that, in addition to bankrupting
the United States, breaking the army and the Marines, and unleashing all-out
political warfare at home, it would kill perhaps tens of thousands more
Iraqis.

Personally, I'm not convinced that Bush could get away with it politically.
Not only is the public dead-set against escalating the war, but there are
hints that Congress might not stand for it, and the leadership of the U.S.
Armed Forces is opposed.

Over the past few days, a swarm of Republican senators has come out against
the surge, including at least three Republican senators up for reelection in
2008 in states that make them vulnerable: Gordon Smith of Oregon, whose
remarkable speech calling the war [21] "criminal" went far beyond the normal
bland rhetoric of discourse in the U.S. capital, along with John Sununu of
New Hampshire and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. In addition, Saxby Chambliss of
Georgia, less vulnerable but still facing voters in 2008, has questioned the
surge idea. And a host of Republican moderates -- Chuck Hagel (NE), Dick
Lugar (IN), Susan Collins (ME) -- have lambasted it. (Hagel told Robert
Novak [22]: "It's Alice in Wonderland. I'm absolutely opposed to the idea of
sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly.") Even Sam Brownback, one of
the Senate godfathers of the neocon-backed Iraqi National Congress, has
expressed skepticism, saying: "We can't impose a military solution."
According to Novak, only 12 of the 49 Republican senators are now willing to
back Sen. John McCain's blood-curdling cries for sending in more troops.

Meanwhile, says Novak, the Democrats would not only criticize the idea of a
surge but, led by Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations
Committee, might use their crucial power over the purse. "Biden," writes
Novak, "will lead the rest of the Democrats not only to oppose a surge but
to block it." Reports the Financial Times of London: "Democrats have hinted
that they could use their control over the budget process to make life
difficult for the Bush administration if it chooses to step up the military
presence in Iraq." A Kagan-style surge would require a vast new commitment
of funds, and with their ability to scrutinize, put conditions on, and even
strike out entire line items in the military budget and the Pentagon's
supplemental requests, the Democrats could find ways to stall or halt the
"surge," if not the war itself.

Indeed, if President Bush opts to Kaganize the war, he will throw down the
gauntlet to the Democrats. Unwilling until now to say that they would even
consider blocking appropriations for the Iraq War, the Democrats would have
little choice but to up the ante if Bush flouts the electoral mandate in
such a full-frontal manner. By escalating the war in the face of
near-universal opposition from the public, the military, and the political
class, the president would force the Democrats to escalate their own --
until now fairly mild-mannered -- opposition to the war.

However, it's possible -- just possible -- that what the President is
planning to announce will be something a bit more Machiavellian than the
straightforwardly manly thrust Kagan wants. Perhaps, just perhaps, he will
order an increase of something like 20,000 American troops, but put a tight
time limit on this surge -- say, four months. Perhaps he will announce that
he is giving Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki that much time to square the circle
in Iraq: crack down on militias and death squads, purge the army and police,
develop a plan to fight the Sunni insurgency, find a formula to deal with
the Kurds and the explosive, oil-rich city of Kirkuk which they claim as
their own, un-de-Baathify Iraq, and create a workable formula for sharing
the fracturing country's oil wealth.

By surging those 20,000 troops into a hopeless military nowhere-land, Bush
will say that he is giving Maliki room to accomplish all that -- knowing
full well that none of it can, in fact, be accomplished by the weak,
sectarian, Shiite-run regime inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. So,
sometime in the late spring, the United States could begin to un-surge its
troops and start the sort of orderly, phased withdrawal that Jim Baker and
the Carl Levin Democrats have called for.

Levin suggested [23] as much as 2006 ended. "A surge which is not part of an
overall program of troop reduction that begins in the next four to six
months would be a mistake," said Levin, who will chair the Armed Services
Committee. "Even if the president is going to propose to temporarily add
troops, he should make that conditional on the Iraqis reaching a political
settlement that effectively ends the sectarian violence."

That may be too much to ask for a Christian-crusader President, still lodged
inside a bubble universe and determined to crush all evil-doers. And it may
be too clever by half for an administration that has been as utterly inept
as this one.

At the same time, it may also be too much to expect that the Democrats will
really go to the mat to fight Bush if, Kagan-style, he orders a surge that
is "long and large." Maybe they will merely posture and fulminate and
threaten to. well, hold hearings.

If so, it will be the Iraqis who end the war. It will be the Iraqis who
eventually kill enough Americans to break the U.S. political will, and it
will be the Iraqis who sweep away the ruins of the Maliki government to
replace it with an anti-American, anti-U.S.- occupation government in Iraq.
That is basically how the war in Vietnam ended, and it wasn't pretty.

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam [24]. He covers national security for Rolling
Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the
Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington
Post, Tomdispatch, and other sites, and writes the blog, The Dreyfuss Report
[25], at his website [26].

Copyright 2007 Robert Dreyfuss
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson