If Condi's genuine about talks...

There are claims circulating that the US's new policy of engaging with Iran and Syria have only been made possible by the stubbornness of Condoleezza Rice and the fact that Dick Cheney is out of town.

If this is true then it is profoundly depressing. I said yesterday that I thought this was either an attempt to convince Ahmadinejad that he was in the last chance saloon or a piece of faux diplomacy as a prelude to an American attack upon Iranian nuclear facilities. Cynical, I know, but I admitted that as I wrote it.

However, the idea that Rice has seriously proposed this and that this has only been made possible by the absence of Cheney is something that I find profoundly depressing because I have, until now, never detected any serious wish in the Bush administration to pursue diplomatic channels. If Rice is seriously now wishing to diplomatically engage with Iran and Syria - and this is something that we all hope is the case - then the fact that this was only made possible because Cheney is out of town almost guarantees that the talks will fail.

The policies of Cheney have been given an almost unlimited amount of time to succeed. His policy of non engagement has been the policy of the Bush administration for the past six years.

If Rice seriously wants to start talking then Cheney is going to insist that success must be instant or the talks abandoned and deemed a failure. Whereas he has been allowed six years to pursue his dumb policy of non engagement with absolutely no sign of visible success, any signs of procrastination during talks are going to be seized by the Cheney camp as a validation of his failed policy rather than as an inevitable consequence of the diplomatic process.

As I said yesterday, in time we will find out what is behind this astonishing U-turn from the Bush administration. But if Condi's attempts at negotiation are genuine, then I find this depressing because the odds against her succeeding are stacked so high.

Anyone who has ever sat in a corporate boardroom knows this logic. Hardliners are given an almost unlimited amount of time to prove their cynical worldview, whereas anyone proposing a more difficult and more pragmatic approach to any problem is almost always asked to produce instant success, or at the very least, to produce success within an extremely limited time frame.

This is the way that holders of the Cheney mindset confirm their worldview. Anything that proves difficult or time consuming - which genuine negotiation always does - is deemed to be a waste of time and rewarding an enemy.

The greatest failing of the Cheney mindset is a total inability to delay gratification. Gratification must always be instant which is why bombing is, to his mindset, far preferable to the more arduous process of taking the other sides genuine concerns and opinions into account. The latter requires patience, it requires some degree of empathy. It requires that one imagine what it must be like to stand in your enemies shoes. To attempt to think from your opponent's point of view.

If, and it's a huge bloody if, Condi is being genuine as Bhc and others hint that she might be, then she deserves all the luck in the world.

God knows, she's going to need it.

Tags: Condaleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, US, Iran, negotiations, talks

U.S. Set to Join Iran and Syria in Talks on Iraq

I'm sorry to sound so cynical, but what the Hell are they playing at?

American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush’s avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

This is something that many people, including the Baker Report, have been calling on this administration to do for months. Their response has been to ratchet up tensions and accuse Iran of killing US soldiers, whilst moving carriers within striking distance of Tehran.

And now, going completely against the grain, we get the offer of high level meetings?

Am I the only one to find this a staggering U-turn? Now, there are only two possible things that can be going on here. Either Bush has been ratcheting up the pressure on Iran in order to make Ahmadinejad view this meeting as a sort of last chance saloon. Or, and this is the one the cynic in me finds myself leaning towards, Bush has realised that Iran is not going to as easy a sell as Iraq was and he is going to go through some faux diplomacy before launching his strikes against a Tehran regime that "can't be reasoned with." A bit like the way the Bushites like to tell us that "he tried to go through the UN" before the Iraqi invasion.

The administration are certainly going to some lengths to convince us that they have been engaging in the former, deploying anonymous sources (any more flashbacks to Iraq anyone?) to reassure us that the conflicting signals have been "part of a larger diplomatic strategy for dealing with Iran that verges on a high-level game of chicken."

“We became convinced that the Iranians were not taking us seriously,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to Ms. Rice. “So we’ve done some things to get them to take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy.”

If that was your strategy, why would you now be using anonymous sources to alert the Iranians to your game? Or are they actually warning the Iranians - and by inference the rest of the planet - that this is, indeed, the last chance saloon?

Either way, the Bush regime are about to attempt diplomacy whilst holding a giant gun to Ahmadinejad's head. It's a highly unusual way to conduct diplomatic talks, but with time we'll find out more about what's actually behind this bizarre turn of events.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Bush, Rice, Ahmadinejad, US, Iran, Iraq, talks, diplomacy, meetings

Victory Is Not an Option

Lt. Gen. William Odom, the former director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan and head of Army intelligence, has written a superb op-ed for the Washington Post that destroys the arguments Bush and his followers are using to justify remaining in Iraq and reveals the insanity of any possible intervention against Iran. The article's title: "Victory is not an option" is, in itself, a welcome dose of reality against the onslaught of facile reasoning put forward by William Kristol and his ilk as to why the US should remain engaged in Iraq.

Most of us have long concluded that the US have lost in Iraq and it is something of a relief to find someone in General Odom's position who has the courage to speak so candidly at a time when Bush and his followers portray opposition to their insane plans as some sort of lack of patriotism.

Odum begins by acknowledging the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and it's conclusion that it is not possible to produce what Bush says will be required in order for the United States to declare victory in Iraq: namely, a stable liberal democracy that is pro-American.

His language is refreshingly clear:

To expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis' rising animosity toward the United States.

This has always been one of fatal flaws in the logic of those who argued for the Iraq war. The idea that the two nations who voted to impose punitive sanctions on Iraq for twelve long years, sanctions that were responsible for the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children; the very notion that these same two country's could hope to invade Iraq, label it "liberation" and imagine that they would be greeted as "liberators" is about as fantastical a thing as I think I have ever heard. It is no exaggeration to describe such thinking as simply delusional.

Nor has this level of delusional thinking altered after the invasion. Indeed, delusion litters every reason that the Bush camp give as to why the US must stay the course and remain in Iraq, despite the fact that every reasonable person on the planet can see very clearly that the war is lost.

The General then goes on to debunk each of these "reasons" for remaining in Iraq one by one:

1) We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon. Reflect on the double-think of this formulation. We are now fighting to prevent what our invasion made inevitable! Undoubtedly we will leave a mess -- the mess we created, which has become worse each year we have remained. Lawmakers gravely proclaim their opposition to the war, but in the next breath express fear that quitting it will leave a blood bath, a civil war, a terrorist haven, a "failed state," or some other horror. But this "aftermath" is already upon us; a prolonged U.S. occupation cannot prevent what already exists.


2) We must continue the war to prevent Iran's influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president's initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power -- groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.

Here we see shades of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy in Vietnam: widen the war into Cambodia and Laos. Only this time, the adverse consequences would be far greater. Iran's ability to hurt U.S. forces in Iraq are not trivial. And the anti-American backlash in the region would be larger, and have more lasting consequences.

3) We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al-Qaeda in Iraq. But it was the U.S. invasion that opened Iraq's doors to al-Qaeda. The longer U.S. forces have remained there, the stronger al-Qaeda has become. Yet its strength within the Kurdish and Shiite areas is trivial. After a U.S. withdrawal, it will probably play a continuing role in helping the Sunni groups against the Shiites and the Kurds. Whether such foreign elements could remain or thrive in Iraq after the resolution of civil war is open to question. Meanwhile, continuing the war will not push al-Qaeda outside Iraq. On the contrary, the American presence is the glue that holds al-Qaeda there now.

4) We must continue to fight in order to "support the troops." This argument effectively paralyzes almost all members of Congress. Lawmakers proclaim in grave tones a litany of problems in Iraq sufficient to justify a rapid pullout. Then they reject that logical conclusion, insisting we cannot do so because we must support the troops. Has anybody asked the troops?

During their first tours, most may well have favored "staying the course" -- whatever that meant to them -- but now in their second, third and fourth tours, many are changing their minds. We see evidence of that in the many news stories about unhappy troops being sent back to Iraq. Veterans groups are beginning to make public the case for bringing them home. Soldiers and officers in Iraq are speaking out critically to reporters on the ground.

But the strangest aspect of this rationale for continuing the war is the implication that the troops are somehow responsible for deciding to continue the president's course. That political and moral responsibility belongs to the president, not the troops. Did not President Harry S. Truman make it clear that "the buck stops" in the Oval Office? If the president keeps dodging it, where does it stop? With Congress?

Embracing the four myths gives Congress excuses not to exercise its power of the purse to end the war and open the way for a strategy that might actually bear fruit.

There is an undeniable logic to his rebuttals, a welcome honesty that has been singularly lacking from all discussion on this subject from the pro-war proponents.

He then even goes on to offer Bush a way to reverse policy with dignity, stating that his legacy would remember him as a President "capable of reversing direction by turning an imminent, tragic defeat into strategic recovery."

However, most of us realise that this is a president incapable of reversing direction. Indeed, the man who labelled John Kerry a "flip flopper" can hardly reverse course himself without encountering screams from Bill Kristol and the other assorted loons whose support he has fostered.

Gary Younge has an excellent article in today's Guardian Comment explaining Bush's inability to reverse course and detailing how, rather than reverse direction, Bush may actually repeat the mistakes of Iraq by compounding them with an attack on Iran:

George Bush is a man of conviction and clearly a hard man to change. When reality confronts his plans he does not alter them but instead alters his understanding of reality. He stands with a tight band of followers, both deluded and determined, understanding each setback not as a sign to change course but as further proof that they must redouble their efforts to the original goal.

And so we watch the administration's plans for a military attack against Iran unfold even as its official narrative for the run-up to the war in Iraq unravels and the wisdom of that war stands condemned by death and destruction. As though on split screens, we pass seamlessly from reports of how they lied to get us into the last war, to scenes of carnage as a result of the war, to shots of them lying us into the next one.

One moment we see the trial of Dick Cheney's former deputy, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, revealing how the administration sought to discredit critics of the plans to invade Iraq; the next we see them discrediting critics of their plans to attack Iran. On one page, newly released documents reveal how the defence department contorted evidence to justify bombing Baghdad; on the next, the administration is using suspect evidence to justify bombing Iran.

"It is absolutely parallel," Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist, told Vanity Fair magazine. "They're using the same dance steps - demonise the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux."

So, sadly, the good sense of General Odum is likely to fall on deaf ears, as this President continues to confuse and conflate his own legacy and the national interest.

However, the power to stop him still resides in Congress. If Congress had the clarity and courage of it's convictions that Odum is displaying, then this President would be stopped in his tracks before he was capable of causing any more damage.

As Bush careers towards an invasion of Iran, an invasion that would have simply catastrophic implications for the US, the task of true patriots is to stop him.

Click title for Odum's article.

Tags: Lt. Gen. William Odom, George Bush, Iraq war, surge and accelerate, stay the course

Senate Rejects Renewed Effort to Debate Iraq

The Republicans have managed, yet again, to avoid a debate of Bush's Iraq policy in the Senate, although they managed to do so by a vote of 56-to-34, meaning that the vote fell a mere four short of the sixty needed to trigger a debate.

Seven Republicans split from their party to join with the forty eight Democrats calling for a debate, which is five more than joined the Democrats the last time an attempt was made to discuss this matter.

The tide is slowly moving away from Bush and towards the democratic argument.

The Republicans who broke ranks were Senators John W. Warner of Virginia, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, and Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine.

Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader, said the result showed that Senate sentiment was running against the president.

“A majority of the United States Senate just voted on Iraq, and a majority of the United States Senate is against the escalation in Iraq,” Mr. Reid said as he withdrew the resolution. He and other party leaders said they intended to introduce quickly more substantive proposals on Iraq when the Senate returns from a weeklong break and begins considering legislation to enact recommendations from the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission.

“We will be relentless,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat. “There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment, all forcing this body to do what it has not done in the previous three years: debate and discuss Iraq.”

The Republicans continue to attempt to tie any debate on the government's Iraq policy to a discussion of troop funding, hoping to convince the public that the Democratic Party is somehow harming troops in the field by withholding funding.

There is an understandable reluctance amongst the Democrats to get into this argument, although there are many occasions in the past when Congress has repeatedly placed limits on military spending and deployments; so, even were the Democrats to do this, it would not be without precedent.

Indeed, "sizeable majorities (of Americans surveyed in late 2006) agree with the goal of pulling out nearly all U.S. combat forces by early 2008, engaging in direct talks with Iran and Syria and reducing U.S. financial support if Iraq fails to make enough progress", so the Democrats appear to be more frightened of using this tactic than they need be.

When asked about some of [The Baker Report's] specific recommendations, respondents are dramatically more supportive. Seventy-nine percent favor shifting U.S. troops from combat to support; 69 percent support withdrawing most combat forces by early 2008; 74 percent support reducing aid if Iraq fails to make progress toward national unity and civil order; and about six in 10 support talking with Syria and Iran to try to resolve the conflict.

The Republicans seem to relish the Democrat's fear of being portrayed as unsupportive of the troops:

If you think we are in the middle of civil war, cut off funding,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said to his colleagues.

Graham and the Republicans might be convincing themselves that they have the Democrats on the back foot here, but the truth is that the public themselves favour withholding money from a war that many now concede is lost.

I think there's another reason why the Democrats are reluctant to withhold funding. I think they suspect that to do so would give Bush the excuse he needs to claim that defeat was because the Democrats withdrew funding rather than because he sent too few troops into a region he barely understood.

The blame for the Iraq debacle lies fully on Bush's shoulders and, perhaps, the Democrats are determined that it should remain there. However, Democratic reluctance to withhold funds shouldn't be an excuse for Congress to avoid debating the Iraq war.

And, as the vote yesterday showed, the day of that debate is coming ever more near. No matter how many games the Republicans play in an attempt to avoid it.

Tags: Iraq war, debate, Congress, Democrats, Republicans

Target Tehran: Washington sets stage for a new confrontation

The US yesterday took another step towards confrontation with Iran despite all the protestations of the Bush regime that they have no intention of engaging in war with Tehran.

Senior US defence officials in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they believed the bombs were manufactured in Iran and smuggled across the border to Shia militants in Iraq. The weapons, identified as "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs) are said to be capable of destroying an Abrams tank.

The officials speaking in Baghdad used aggressive rhetoric suggesting that Washington wants to ratchet up its confrontation with Tehran. It has not ruled out using armed force and has sent a second carrier task force to the Gulf.

"We assess that these activities are coming from senior levels of the Iranian government," said an official in Baghdad, charging that the explosive devices come from the al-Quds Brigade and noting that it answers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. This is the first time the US has openly accused the Iranian government of being involved in sending weapons that kill Americans to Iraq.

The allegations by senior but unnamed US officials in Baghdad and Washington are bizarre. The US has been fighting a Sunni insurgency in Iraq since 2003 that is deeply hostile to Iran.

The insurgent groups have repeatedly denounced the democratically elected Iraqi government as pawns of Iran. It is unlikely that the Sunni guerrillas have received significant quantities of military equipment from Tehran. Some 1,190 US soldiers have been killed by so-called improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But most of them consist of heavy artillery shells (often 120mm or 155mm) taken from the arsenals of the former regime and detonated by blasting caps wired to a small battery. The current is switched on either by a command wire or a simple device such as the remote control used for children's toys or to open garage doors.

Such bombs were used by guerrillas during the Irish war of independence in 1919-21 against British patrols and convoys. They were commonly used in the Second World War, when "shaped charges", similar in purpose to the EFPs of which the US is now complaining, were employed by all armies. The very name - explosive formed penetrators - may have been chosen to imply that a menacing new weapon has been developed.

At the end of last year the Baker-Hamilton report, written by a bipartisan commission of Republicans and Democrats, suggested opening talks with Iran and Syria to resolve the Iraq crisis. Instead, President Bush has taken a precisely opposite line, blaming Iran and Syria for US losses in Iraq.

I've put in bold the points that I find important here. Why would the Shia administration in Iran arm the Sunni insurgency? A Sunni insurgency that is engaged in a civil war with the Shia population of Iraq whom Iran support? This makes absolutely no sense, and yet that is the charge that the Bush administration is making.

Nor do they make this allegation on the record. I notice that these briefings are being made anonymously.

Their argument does not stand up to any logical examination, indeed they are reversing what they previously claimed about Iraqi military capabilities. We are now being told that the Iraqis are so militarily incompetent that they could only possess such weaponry if it were supplied by Iran. However, four years ago we were told that we had to go to war with Iraq because it had the capability of producing a nuclear bomb and a huge arsenal of WMD. Now we are told that they are incapable of producing weapons that Irish guerillas could produce in 1919 without Iranian help.

The case against Iran is even shakier than the case that was produced against Iraq four years ago. However, the very fact that the US are producing anonymous briefings on this displays quite clearly their intent.

It could be argued that their intent is merely to scapegoat Iran for the Bush administration's failings in Iraq; however, if one looks at statements from Perle and Netanyahu I would argue that the administration are now actively making a case for war against Iran. I've argued previously about how insane I think that proposal is, but we should be under no illusion that this is now what the Bush administration is attempting to do.

For the first time, American officials provided a specific casualty total from these weapons, saying they had killed more than 170 Americans and wounded 620 since June 2004, when one of the devices first killed a service member.

They are now anonymously claiming that Iranians are killing Americans and, for the first time, supplying actual numbers to support their insane contention.

Robert Gates can state as many times as he wants that the US has no plans to attack Iran but only a fool would pretend that the administration has not now actively started to make it's case for such a war publicly.

And with the recent news that this war could start within the next couple of months, it is time that Democrats started to seriously question what Bush is planning to do. And hopefully, unlike Edwards, they will seriously start to question the administration's "logic".

Click title for full article.

tag: Iraq, Bush, Iraq war study group, Netanyahu, Iran, Ahmadinejad, Perle, neo-cons

Obama says troops out by 2008

Obama says enough is enough. It's fascinating to see how it is now possible for mainstream US politicians to say things that were considered by the Republicans as "treason" and "cutting and running" two years ago. This is the proof of how much Bush has lost the argument.

As Obama says, "The time for patience is over."



tag: Barak Obama, Iraq war, surge and accelerate, The Baker Report, Iraq Survey Group

US must abandon Iraqi cities or face nightmare scenario, say experts

The Brooks Institution have advised the US government to prepare "to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran."

This startling conclusion is based on the assumption that Bush's latest "surge and accelerate" plan will fail and the further assumption that Washington will not be able to simply walk away from any chaos that Iraq descends into.

Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised." But it was the "least bad option" open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.

US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be", as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.

The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq's "spill-over" potential across the Persian Gulf region.

It warns of radicalisation and possible secession movements in adjacent countries, an upsurge in terrorism, and of intervention by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Ending an all-out civil war, the report says, would require a force of 450,000 - three times the present US deployment even after the 21,500 "surge" ordered by President Bush this month.

As civil war in Iraq gathers pace the likelihood of war between the US and Iran would intensify as Iran would be seen as "the unambiguous adversary" of the US.

Indeed, everything indicates that that is already happening. The study appeared on the same day as the Iranian ambassador in Iraq told The New York Times that Tehran intended to expand its influence in Iraq. US commanders now claim that thousands of Iranian advisers are arming and training Shia militias.

Nonetheless, the Brookings report urges the creation of a regional group to help contain a civil war. That would see exactly the contacts with Iran and Syria that the Bush administration steadfastly refuses. An alternative in the report would be "red lines" which, if crossed by Tehran, could lead to a military attack by the US on Iran.

The Brookings report will be ignored exactly as the Baker report was ignored. The blind ideologues currently running US policy have ignored every sensible piece of advice they have ever been given. If there was ever a time for the US to reach out to Iran and Syria it is now.

Ignoring this advice will only heighten the chance of a war between Iran and the US, an outcome that might be welcomed by the likes of Bill Kristol, but can only fill the rest of us with horror.

I watched an astonishing Despatches programme last night called "Iraq's death squads" which told the story of how Shia gangs are carrying out ethnic cleansing and being protected as they do so by the Iraqi government which needs their support in order to survive.

The violence being carried out against the Sunnis is horrific. As the Washington Post reported:

Reports last week in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times chronicled how Iraqi Interior Ministry commando and police units have been infiltrated by two Shiite militias, which have been conducting ethnic cleansing and rounding up Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency. Hundreds of bodies have been appearing along roadsides and in garbage dumps, some with acid burns or with holes drilled in them. According to the searing account by Solomon Moore of the Los Angeles Times, "the Baghdad morgue reports that dozens of bodies arrive at the same time on a weekly basis, including scores of corpses with wrists bound by police handcuffs." The reports followed a raid two weeks ago by U.S. troops on a clandestine Baghdad prison run by the Interior Ministry, where some 170 men, most of them Sunni and most of them starved or tortured, were found.

The danger this development poses to Iraq, and to the prospects of a successful end to the U.S. mission there, ought to be obvious. A dirty war conducted by the Iraqi government against one ethnic group will make civil war inevitable. It will render impossible a political accord among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, while increasing the likelihood that Iraq will splinter. U.S. commanders will be unable to hand responsibility off to Iraqi forces without inviting a bloodbath, and the training mission that President Bush described at length in his speech on Wednesday will be utterly discredited. If there is to be any chance of achieving Mr. Bush's goals of a united and democratic Iraq that protects the rights of its minorities, the state-sponsored death squads and torture chambers must be dismantled.

Civil war in Iraq is upon us, with the Bush regime - in effect - arming and backing one side in the dispute.

I have argued previously that only a negotiated settlement can have any chance of success. The current course, where the US backs the Shias as they eliminate their Sunni rivals is simply stoking the fire of the civil war.

I also accept that the task of bringing about a negotiated settlement is a huge one and would require the US talking to groups that it has previously been fighting against, either literally (in the case of Sunni fighters) or politically (in the case of Iran).

The neo-con mindset prevalent in Washington is insisting that a military solution is possible. This is nonsense. Iraq is fractured and on the brink of splitting into it's ethnic elements.

Only dialogue can bring us back from this abyss. Sadly, the current US leadership are refusing to countenance walking any such sensible path and the chances of regional escalation are multiplying.

Click title for full article.

tag: Iraq war, Iran, regional escalation, civil war

Robert Fisk: Bush's new strategy - the march of folly

So into the graveyard of Iraq, George Bush, commander-in-chief, is to send another 21,000 of his soldiers. The march of folly is to continue...

There will be timetables, deadlines, benchmarks, goals for both America and its Iraqi satraps. But the war against terror can still be won. We shall prevail. Victory or death. And it shall be death.

President Bush's announcement early this morning tolled every bell. A billion dollars of extra aid for Iraq, a diary of future success as the Shia powers of Iraq ­ still to be referred to as the "democratically elected government" ­ march in lockstep with America's best men and women to restore order and strike fear into the hearts of al-Qa'ida. It will take time ­ oh, yes, it will take years, at least three in the words of Washington's top commander in the field, General Raymond Odierno this week ­ but the mission will be accomplished.

Mission accomplished. Wasn't that the refrain almost four years ago, on that lonely aircraft carrier off California, Bush striding the deck in his flying suit? And only a few months later, the President had a message for Osama bin Laden and the insurgents of Iraq. "Bring 'em on!" he shouted. And on they came. Few paid attention late last year when the Islamist leadership of this most ferocious of Arab rebellions proclaimed Bush a war criminal but asked him not to withdraw his troops. "We haven't yet killed enough of them," their videotaped statement announced.

Well, they will have their chance now. How ironic that it was the ghastly Saddam, dignified amid his lynch mob, who dared on the scaffold to tell the truth which Bush and Blair would not utter: that Iraq has become "hell" .

It is de rigueur, these days, to recall Vietnam, the false victories, the body counts, the torture and the murders ­ but history is littered with powerful men who thought they could batter their way to victory against the odds. Napoleon comes to mind; not the emperor who retreated from Moscow, but the man who believed the wild guerrilleros of French-occupied Spain could be liquidated. He tortured them, he executed them, he propped up a local Spanish administration of what we would now call Quislings, al-Malikis to a man. He rightly accused his enemies ­ Moore and Wellington ­ of supporting the insurgents. And when faced with defeat, Napoleon took the personal decision "to relaunch the machine" and advanced to recapture Madrid, just as Bush intends to recapture Baghdad. Of course, it ended in disaster. And George Bush is no Napoleon Bonaparte.

No, I would turn to another, less flamboyant, far more modern politician for prophecy, an American who understood, just before the 2003 launch of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, what would happen to the arrogance of power. For their relevance this morning, the words of the conservative politician Pat Buchanan deserve to be written in marble:

"We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On to Berlin' bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict ... For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ...

"The one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon... We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before."

But George Bush dare not see these armies of the past, their ghosts as palpable as the phantoms of the 3,000 Americans ­ let us forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis ­ already done to death in this obscene war, and those future spirits of the dead still living amid the 20,000 men and women whom Bush is now sending to Iraq. In Baghdad, they will move into both Sunni and Shia "insurgent strongholds" ­ as opposed to just the Sunni variety which they vainly invested in the autumn ­ because this time, and again I quote General Odierno, it is crucial the security plan be " evenhanded". This time, he said, "we have to have a believable approach, of going after Sunni and Shia extremists".

But a "believable approach" is what Bush does not have. The days of even-handed oppression disappeared in the aftermath of invasion.

"Democracy" should have been introduced at the start ­ not delayed until the Shias threatened to join the insurgency if Paul Bremer, America's second proconsul, did not hold elections ­ just as the American military should have prevented the anarchy of April 2003. The killing of 14 Sunni civilians by US paratroopers at Fallujah that spring set the seal on the insurgency. Yes, Syria and Iran could help George Bush. But Tehran was part of his toytown "Axis of Evil", Damascus a mere satellite. They were to be future prey, once Project Iraq proved successful. Then there came the shame of our torture, our murders, the mass ethnic cleansing in the land we said we had liberated.

And so more US troops must die, sacrificed for those who have already died. We cannot betray those who have been killed. It is a lie, of course. Every desperate man keeps gambling, preferably with other men's lives.

But the Bushes and Blairs have experienced war through television and Hollywood; this is both their illusion and their shield.

Historians will one day ask if the West did not plunge into its Middle East catastrophe so blithely because not one member of any Western government ­ except Colin Powell, and he has shuffled off stage ­ ever fought in a war. The Churchills have gone, used as a wardrobe for a prime minister who lied to his people and a president who, given the chance to fight for his country, felt his Vietnam mission was to defend the skies over Texas.

But still he talks of victory, as ignorant of the past as he is of the future.

Pat Buchanan ended his prophecy with imperishable words: "The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."

tag: Bush, Iraq, Iraq war, Stay the course, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report, sacrifice, surge and accelerate

History will not be kind to George Bush.

"The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people - and it is unacceptable to me," he said in a prime-time address from the White House. "Where mistakes have been made the responsibility rests with me."

These are the first honest words George Bush has spoken in years. However, the American people and he differ over what should now be done. Most Americans are opposed to the escalation that he is implementing. Not that you would know this from his speech tonight. Just as when he mentioned the Iraq Study group one would be forgiven for imagining that he was doing things roughly in line with their views, rather than totally ignoring their recommendations.

It was a startlingly dishonest speech. Once again he implied that a future 9-11 could only be prevented through success in Iraq, as if the two events were in some way connected. Once again he threatened Iran, rather than engaging them in dialogue as the Baker Report suggested.

Explicitly admitting that he was acting on the advice of Joe Liebermann - no doubt in an attempt to sound bipartisan - he said that people who disagreed must point out how their way could guarantee success, implying that success was somehow still possible, a success which most of us have now accepted as unachievable.

He then - again - attempted to lay the responsibility for the defeat of the insurgency at the door of Maliki's government:

If Mr Maliki did not uphold the pledge, he risked losing US support, Mr Bush warned. "I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment to Iraq is not open-ended," the president said.

In other words, clean up my mess or I am out of here.

All in all, it was the speech that we all expected. Bush has no other avenue open to him. His legacy will be the Iraq war and it is a war that he has lost in spectacular fashion. We expect too much if we expect him to admit this.

So he would rather risk the lives of more US troops rather than admit his defeat and go down in history as the worst American President ever. Although I feel this title is his no matter what he now does in Iraq.

Even Republican senators have been voicing their disapproval of Bush's latest harebrained scheme:

Gordon Smith, said US troops were being placed "in the role of a traffic cop in someone else's civil war".

Mr Gordon added: "American patience is not inexhaustible, and they [the administration] have about worn it out."

Another Republican senator and possible presidential candidate, Sam Brownback, who was on a visit to Iraq, sent back a message to Washington registering his opposition.

Senator Norm Coleman also joined in, saying Mr Bush's plans would only put more US troops in the crosshairs of a sectarian insurgency. "I oppose the troop surge in Baghdad because it is not a strategy for victory," he said.

So Bush now stands spectacularly alone. He has dispensed with any generals who gave advice contrary to that which he wanted to hear. He has lost the support of the American public and he is losing the support of some members of the Republican Party itself.

They say the quality of leadership is the ability to fashion a vision that others will willingly follow. There can be no greater testament to Bush's failure than the fact that he is totally and completely on his own here. There are no crowds rushing to follow his vision, no public united against his enemies.

For most reasonable people have long concluded that Iraq is lost and that Baker offered the only hope of withdrawal without a descent into civil war. Bush has ignored him.

As Fisk points out today, in an article I will reprint in full, history is littered with leaders who thought they could batter their way to victory against all the odds:

It is de rigueur, these days, to recall Vietnam, the false victories, the body counts, the torture and the murders ­ but history is littered with powerful men who thought they could batter their way to victory against the odds. Napoleon comes to mind; not the emperor who retreated from Moscow, but the man who believed the wild guerrilleros of French-occupied Spain could be liquidated. He tortured them, he executed them, he propped up a local Spanish administration of what we would now call Quislings, al-Malikis to a man. He rightly accused his enemies ­ Moore and Wellington ­ of supporting the insurgents. And when faced with defeat, Napoleon took the personal decision "to relaunch the machine" and advanced to recapture Madrid, just as Bush intends to recapture Baghdad. Of course, it ended in disaster. And George Bush is no Napoleon Bonaparte.

No, I would turn to another, less flamboyant, far more modern politician for prophecy, an American who understood, just before the 2003 launch of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, what would happen to the arrogance of power. For their relevance this morning, the words of the conservative politician Pat Buchanan deserve to be written in marble:

"We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On to Berlin' bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict ... For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ...

"The one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon... We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before."

So Bush, alone, is calling on the troops to make one more charge. George Bush is no Napoleon Bonaparte. Though he is about to experience a similar defeat.

The real tragedy here though will be experienced by the young men and women who will now be placed in mortal danger because an arrogant leader is unwilling to admit that he is wrong.

History will not be kind to George Bush. It will rightly see that he risked the lives of others - not for the patriotic reasons that he trumpeted - but rather, because he lacked the grace to admit that he had lost.

There can be no more dishonourable legacy than that.

tag: Bush, war on terror, Iraq, Iraq war, Stay the course, sacrifice, surge and accelerate, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report

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.

tag: Bush, Iraq, Iraq war, Stay the course, surge and accelerate, sacrifice, Nancy Pelosi, democratic agenda, Bipartisan politics, US foreign policy, neo-cons, Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report

The mind-numbing stupidity of Bill Kristol.

As Bush prepares to ignore all common sense opinion and send a further 30,000 troops into Iraq to appease the opinions of people like Bill Kristol, Anonymous Liberal has an article at Glenn Greenwald's site quoting Kristol before the Iraq war. It makes simply staggering reading now because of how arrogant, smug and totally wrong his presumptions have turned out to be.

That Bush could be prepared to listen again to someone who was so spectacularly wrong defies belief. It certainly defies common sense. Here are Kristol's own words:

We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.

Of course, now that both history and reality have weighed in and proved Kristol to be wrong to a shocking degree, has he offered any apology? Has he stopped pontificating?

Oh, no. Now, apart from wanting an additional 30,000 troops to be sent to Iraq, he also proposes that the US should take action against Iran.

The Baker Report was a polite attempt at intervention, a way of saying "enough is enough". As Bush prepares to give lunatics like Kristol exactly what they want and increase the troop levels in Iraq, another type of intervention is required.

Impeachment, anyone?

Read the Glenn Greenwald article by clicking on the title of this article.

tag: Bush, Iraq, Iraq war, "Stay the course", Bill Kristol

Democrats to go on offensive as new Congress convenes

As Nancy Pelosi is sworn in as speaker, George Bush's days of enjoying a rubber stamp Congress are truly over. Pelosi has announced that she intends to have a dramatic first hundred hours pushing through a raft of legislation that has been anathema to the Bush administration including an increase in the federal minimum wage and federal funding for stem cell research.

But it is on the subject of Iraq where Bush is likely to feel the strongest heat as some fellow Republicans - facing re-election in 2008 - line up with the Democrats rather than Bush on the subject that will define Bush's Presidency more than any other.

In its first weeks, Congress could be asked to support a White House proposal that would allow the Pentagon to suspend the present restrictions on the call-up of National Guard and reservist troops in order to free up the forces who could be sent to Iraq for a temporary surge.

"It's going to be much tougher for him. He is going to have people who are more aggressive with oversight with what he is doing as an executive," said Judd Legum of the Centre for American Progress, a Democratic thinktank. "He is going to have to deal with these issues and it's going to be fairly constant."

In addition, Mr Bush may face rising criticism from fellow Republicans. As many as 12 Republican senators are said to oppose the idea of a temporary surge of additional US forces for Iraq, the conservative columnist Robert Novak reported. "It's Alice in Wonderland," the columnist quoted the moderate Republican senator Chuck Hagel as saying. "I'm absolutely opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly."

There is every indication that Bush will ignore the Baker Report and attempt a last throw of the dice by sending up to 30,000 more troops into Iraq.

I was rereading State of Denial yesterday and had forgotten just how much Henry Kissinger is an unofficial part of this White House and just how much influence he has over this particular President.

Kissinger is advising Bush that Vietnam must not be repeated and that the only possible exit strategy is through victory. However, the Kissinger mindset is working from the assumption that victory is possible. There are many of us, myself included, who have come to the conclusion that the war is lost which means that Bush is simply sacrificing more young Americans for a lost cause.

One must never forget that Bush is highly aware that the outcome of this war will define his legacy and that he has said that he will keep fighting it even if he is supported by only Laura and Barney the dog.

The people who Bush is currently listening to - Kissinger, Kristol - are a group who believe that Vietnam could have been won if the US had not lost it's nerve.

Think on that. 58,000 American lives were lost for a country that - when it fell - did not lead to the domino effect for Communism that these people stated was the reason for fighting the war, and yet they are saying that more should have died for that misguided cause. Just as they are now arguing that more should die for the lost cause of Iraq.

Scepticism will abound too at the Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq, due to start on 9 January and run for three weeks. Joe Biden, the panel's Democratic chairman, says he is "totally" opposed to a troop increase, adding that one would be "contrary to the overwhelming body of informed opinion, both by people inside the administration and outside the administration".

Although a 30,000 increase to the existing deployment of 145,000 troops is feasible, by delaying rotation of units and lengthening tours of duty, many senior generals say it could only be temporary, given the existing overstretch of the military. At some point the troops would have to leave, irrespective of the level of violence at the time.

New figures show that 1,930 Iraqi civilians died in December, which was also the deadliest month in two years for US servicemen, taking the lives of 111 soldiers. Since the 2003 invasion, more than 3,000 have been killed and about 25,000 injured. More American troops would merely invite more casualties, critics contend.

The President's new approach also would signal the abandonment, at least temporarily, of the strategy of turning security over to Iraqi forces. This was the policy favoured by General George Casey, the highest-ranked US general in Iraq.

But for all the Pentagon claims that more and more Iraqi units were now trained for the job, the violence has only increased.

General Casey is now likely to be removed, probably within the next two months, while Lt-Gen John Abizaid, the head of Central Command and in overall charge of the Iraq war, is also due to step down.

So Bush will now remove Casey and make him yet another scapegoat for his failed Iraq policy.

When will he be forced to realise that it is the policy itself that has failed rather than it's implementation? The idea of a foreign power, who had imposed sanctions through the United Nations that killed half a million Iraqi infants, invading Iraq and being greeted as "liberators" was always fanciful in the extreme.

The Baker Report attempted to give Bush a face saving way to exit Iraq and it now looks likely that he is going to reject it's findings. Faced with a new Democratic Congress, Bush is likely to portray any opposition to his plans as unpatriotic and harmful to American troops.

However, the person harming the troops is Bush by seeing his own legacy and what is good for the country as indistinguishable from each other. They are actually very different things.

A failed President is implementing a failed policy. And he is doing so against the majority of public opinion.

I hope Pelosi and the Dems never forget that and have the courage to face Bush when he attacks their patriotism and their concern for American troops. Whilst I applaud the Democrats plans to challenge Bush over the minimum wage and stem cell research, it is their position on Iraq on which they will ultimately be judged.

A man who says he will keep fighting a war even if he is only supported by his wife and his dog can hardly be said to be someone with the troops best interests at heart. He is fighting for his own legacy, and no American soldier or Iraqi civilian should be asked to die for such a lost cause.

The Dems need to remember that.

tag: Bush, Iraq, Iraq war, Baker report, Republican Party, James T Baker, Nancy Pelosi

Bush 'to reveal Iraq troop boost'

The BBC are reporting that Bush is to make his announcement on the new Iraq policy next week, and that the central theme of his speech is to be "sacrifice".

The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers.

The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.

The proposal, if it comes, will be highly controversial.

Already one senior Republican senator has called it Alice in Wonderland.

The need to find some way of pacifying Iraq has been underlined by statistics revealed by various ministries in the Iraqi government, suggesting that well over 1,000 civilians a month are dying.

This is a typical Bush reaction to the sensible suggestions that were contained in the Baker Report. I note that Bush will consider troop increases and yet is still avoiding the Baker Report's suggestion that Iraq's neighbours, Syria and Iran, be approached and consulted.

The Baker Report advised:

The United States should immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region. This diplomatic effort should include every country that has an interest in avoiding a chaotic Iraq, including all of Iraq’s neighbors. Iraq’s neighbors and key states in and outside the region should form a support group to reinforce security and national reconciliation within Iraq, neither of which Iraq can achieve on its own.

Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events within Iraq and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage them constructively.

Bush, it would appear, is going to ignore these recommendations completely. Likewise, it is safe to assume that he will also ignore the Baker Report's call for a renewed effort to bring peace in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a call echoed by Tony Blair as the most important way of winning the war on terror.

Instead, the increase in troop levels will be the equivalent of the "last push" that many right wing commentators have been calling for.

And, of course, this "last push" will take place in an Iraq further divided by the hanging of Saddam Hussein, and act which brought hundreds of pro-Saddam supporters on to the streets vowing revenge and rendering Maliki's hope that it would be seen as a unifying action as the pipe-dream many of us always thought it was.

The death of Saddam will only make reconciliation between the Shias and the Sunnis even harder to obtain, which means, of course, that Bush is sending more US troops into an even more bitterly divided Iraq - were such a place imaginable.

Nor is this policy one that is even backed by General Casey, the top commander in Baghdad, who has said that further troops were not needed, indeed, Casey argues that they may actually prove counter-productive:

In a telephone interview on Friday, General Casey continued to caution against a lengthy expansion in the American military role. “The longer we in the U.S. forces continue to bear the main burden of Iraq’s security, it lengthens the time that the government of Iraq has to take the hard decisions about reconciliation and dealing with the militias,” he said.

It would appear that Bush is still intent on achieving "victory" in Iraq, a victory that most sensible people on the planet now realise is impossible to achieve. To this end, more young Americans will be called upon to make a "sacrifice".

How many more must die before Bush admits that he has lost? The Baker Report offered Bush a face-saving exit strategy, but it would appear that Bush is about to ignore that Report and march on into madness.

Is Pelosi still opposed to impeachment? It's perhaps time for her to reconsider this.

Click title for full article.

tag: Bush, war on terror, Iraq, Iraq war, troops, US foreign policy, civil war, Baker report, Iraq Survey Group, stay the course

When Resolve Turns Reckless

Kerry, at a time when Bush looks set to ignore the Baker Report and embark on a mission of madness rather than admit his defeat, gives us this timely article.

There's something much worse than being accused of "flip-flopping": refusing to flip when it's obvious that your course of action is a flop.

I say this to President Bush as someone who learned the hard way how embracing the world's complexity can be twisted into a crude political shorthand. Barbed words can make for great politics. But with U.S. troops in Iraq in the middle of an escalating civil war, this is no time for politics. Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous -- it is immoral.

I'd rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.

No one should be looking for vindication in what is happening in Iraq today. The lesson here is not that some of us were right about Iraq or that some of us were wrong. The lesson is simply that we need to change course rapidly rather than perversely use mistakes already made and lives already given as an excuse to make more mistakes and lose even more lives.

When young Americans are being killed and maimed, when the Middle East is on the brink of three civil wars, even the most vaunted "steadfastness" morphs pretty quickly into stubbornness, and resolve becomes recklessness. Changing tactics in the face of changing conditions on the ground, developing new strategies because the old ones don't work, is a hell of a lot smarter than the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again with the same tragic results.

Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial died after America's leaders knew that our strategy in that war was not working. Was then-secretary of defense Robert McNamara steadfast as he continued to send American troops to die for a war he knew privately could not be won? History does not remember his resolve -- it remembers his refusal to confront reality.

Clark Clifford, the man who succeeded McNamara in 1968, was handpicked by President Lyndon B. Johnson because he was a renowned hawk. But the new defense secretary reviewed the Vietnam policy and concluded that "we cannot realistically expect to achieve anything more through our military force, and the time has come to begin to disengage." By the time he left office, he had refused to endorse a further military buildup, supported the halt in our bombing, and urged negotiation and gradual disengagement. Was Clifford a flip-flopper of historic proportions, or did he in fact demonstrate the courage of his convictions?

We cannot afford to waste time being told that admitting mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory. We've already lost years being told that we have no choice but to stay the course of a failed policy.

This isn't a time for stubbornness, nor is it a time for halfway solutions -- or warmed-over "new" solutions that our own experience tells us will only make the problem worse. The Iraq Study Group tells us that "the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." It joins the chorus of experts in and outside of Baghdad reminding us that there is no military solution to a political crisis. And yet, over the warnings of former secretary of state Colin Powell, Gen. John Abizaid and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington is considering a "troop buildup" option, sending more troops into harm's way to referee a civil war.

We have already tried a trimmed-down version of the McCain plan of indefinitely increasing troop levels. We sent 15,000 more troops to Baghdad last summer, and today the escalating civil war is even worse. You could put 100,000 more troops in tomorrow and you're only going to add to the number of casualties until Iraqis sit down together at a bargaining table and compromise. The barrel of a gun can't answer the question of how you force Iraqi nationalism to trump sectarian loyalty.

The only hope for stability lies in pushing Iraqis to forge a sustainable political agreement on federalism, distributing oil revenues and neutralizing sectarian militias. And that will happen only if we set a deadline to redeploy our troops.

Last May, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the head of U.S. forces in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad gave the new Iraqi government six months to make the necessary political compromises. But a deadline with no teeth is only lip service. How many times do we have to see that Iraqi politicians respond only to firm, specific deadlines -- a deadline to transfer authority, deadlines to hold two elections and a referendum, and a deadline to form a government -- before we understand that it's time to make it clear that we are leaving and that we will not sacrifice American lives for the sake of squabbling Iraqi politicians?

Another case where steadfastness long ago gave way to stubbornness is our approach to Iraq's neighbors. Last week in Damascus, Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and I met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. We were clear about U.S. expectations for change in his regime's policies, but we found potential for cooperation with Syria in averting a disaster in Iraq -- potential that should be put to the test. Washington can't remain on the sidelines, stubbornly clinging to a belief that talking to our enemies rewards hostile regimes.

Conversation is not capitulation. Until recently, it was widely accepted that good foreign policy demands a willingness to seize opportunities and change policy as the facts change. That's neither flip-flopping nor rudderless diplomacy -- it's strength.

How else could we end up with the famous mantra that "only Nixon could go to China"? For decades, Richard Nixon built his reputation as a China hawk. In 1960, he took John Kennedy to task for being soft on China. He called isolating China a "moral position" that "flatly rejected cowardly expediency." Then, when China broke with the Soviet Union during his presidency, he saw an opportunity to weaken our enemies and make Americans safer. His 1972 visit to China was a major U.S. diplomatic victory in the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan was no shape-shifter, either, but after calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire," he met repeatedly with its leaders. When Reagan saw an opportunity for cooperation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he reached out and tested our enemies' intentions. History remembers that he backed tough words with tough decisions -- and, yes, that he changed course even as he remained true to his principles.

President Bush and all of us who grew up in the shadows of World War II remember Winston Churchill -- his grit, his daring, his resolve. I remember listening to his speeches on a vinyl album in the pre-iPod era. Two years ago I spoke about Iraq at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., where Churchill had drawn a line between freedom and fear in his "iron curtain" speech. In preparation, I reread some of the many words from various addresses that made him famous. Something in one passage caught my eye. When Churchill urged, "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in," he added: "except to convictions of honour and good sense."

This is a time for such convictions.

jk@johnkerry.com

Click title for source.

tag: Bush, Iraq war, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report, John Kerry