Saturday, January 06, 2007

Bush resembles Thatcher as he casts non-believers overboard.

On the deck of the Titanic, the chairs are being shuffled as Bush intends to continue with the "surge and accelerate" plans for Iraq that his own military Generals have told him will not work. Obviously, on planet Bush, that means the Generals must be wrong and they, therefore, have to go.

It was not so long ago that Bush was hiding behind the military, claiming that they were in charge of the campaign and that his task was simply to make sure they got what they needed in order to complete the mission. That falsehood has now been abandoned completely and any General who refuses to see the war through Bush's fractured prism must be expended with.

Administration officials confirmed that Mr Bush would replace his two top generals in Iraq, both of whom have expressed unease about proposals to boost the number of troops in the country. Their places will be taken by generals whose track record points to a further hardening of the president's strategy in favour of combat, rather than withdrawal, as preferred by the newly resurgent Democrats.

The top military post in Iraq, currently held by General George Casey, will go to General David Petraeus. He is based in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at a command centre, but is recognised as an expert in counter-insurgency and combat, having led the 101st Airborne Division up towards Baghdad during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003.


In the wider Middle East region, John Abizaid, head of Central Command, is to be replaced by Admiral William Fallon, who has a reputation as a tough commander. He is currently the top US military officer in the Pacific, covering North Korea and China.


Gen Casey's departure appears to have been brought forward by several months. Both outgoing generals have expressed reservations about the wisdom of increasing US troop numbers, with Gen Casey saying last month that, though he was not necessarily opposed to the idea, reinforcements would have to "help us progress to our strategic objectives".
The oddest thing about this is the caveat it has brought forth from John McCain, the man who has been calling for a troops increase all along.
His remarks were echoed yesterday by the Republican senator John McCain, who has previously advocated increasing the US presence in Iraq. "Even if we send additional troops to Iraq in large numbers for a sustained period, there is no guarantee for success," he said. "We have made many mistakes since 2003 and these will not be easily reversed."
It is possible in McCain's remarks to hypothesise that even he holds out no great hope for success, and that - having called for months for a troops increase - he actually accepts that the war is, in reality, lost and that he now hopes to protect himself from any failure that results from a policy that he has publicly called for.

However, the Democrats are challenging Bush's plans to send more troops to Iraq and setting the stage for a major confrontation over the Republican war policy.

Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House, and Harry Reid, the new Senate majority leader, dismissed that approach as a strategy “that has already failed.”

“Adding more combat troops will only endanger more Americans and stretch our military to the breaking point for no strategic gain,” Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid wrote in a letter to Mr. Bush. “We are well past the point of more troops for Iraq,” they added, urging Mr. Bush to begin a “phased redeployment,” or gradual withdrawal.

Nor is opposition to Bush's plans limited to the Democrats:

Many senior officers, including General Casey, have argued that adding American troops will undercut the effort to get the Iraqi government to defend itself.

Some Republican leaders insisted that Congress should not go down that path. “I don’t think that we should be dictating military strategy in Iraq from Capitol Hill,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican minority leader in the House.

Now I know that this new plan is called "surge and accelerate", but it actually looks an awful lot like "stay the course", the plan that Bush was trying to distance himself from a few short months ago.

Indeed, there are many people who voted for Bush who now recognise this new policy as "more like the Cambodian Incursion".

Our departure from the Green Zone is going to look a lot like the US Embassy Saigon, April 30, 1975, than anything else. Unless we start phasing out now, leaving equipment in place for the Iraqis and buying American units new equipment to replace the used up junk in Iraq, we will leave on the skid of the last helicopter out of town, chased by the militias, insurgents and terrorists, battling each other to see who gets to take the last shot at us as we leave.

The truth now is that Bush is on a course that even his supposed "true believers" don't believe in. Rumsfeld was opposed to a troop increase, so he had to go. Ditto, Casey and Abizaid. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group did not say what he wanted to hear - as Kristol pointed out it did not even mention "victory" - therefore it must be tossed to one side.

Bush is calling for a troops increase because his options are so limited. For all his talk of bipartisanship, he remains firmly committed to a policy that prevents him ever having to admit the size of his defeat.

“Mr Bush talks the talk of bipartisanship but then he doesn’t actually change his positions,” says Thomas Mann, congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. “His idea of bipartisanship is for members of both parties to support him.”

This is all happening because Bush insists that the US military must plan for "victory rather than disengagement".

This is the Bill Kristol view of the Iraq war. A view so out of the loop with reality that even people like John McCain are starting to add caveats (now that it looks like they might get what they were calling for).

How many more US troops and Iraqi civilians must die before Bush is forced to admit what is blindingly obvious to the rest of the planet? The Iraq war is lost. The grand neo-con scheme to reshape the Middle East in Israel's favour is dust and ashes in their mouths.

Bush now resembles nothing so much as Margaret Thatcher when the "true believers" started to desert her. The Tory Party were ruthless when they realised that Thatcher had become a liability. From her autobiography:

I had lost the Cabinet's support. I could not even muster a credible campaign team. It was the end.

I was sick at heart. I could have resisted the opposition of opponents and potential rivals and even respected them for it; but what grieved me was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words whereby they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.

Now I know the American Presidential system is different from the British Cabinet system but some similarities remain. The largest of which is that no leader can get too far apart from the beliefs of their supporters, especially if they are seeking re-election and the leader is not, and not expect them to deal with him ruthlessly if they feel the President is actually endangering their future.

Bush is starting to skate on very, very thin ice.

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