Before the Flood: The Great Storm Building Beneath the "Surge"
Written by Chris Floyd
http://chris-floyd.com/Friday, 07 December 2007
Jonathan Steele offers a good analysis of the situation in Iraq: another glimpse at the truth behind the "surge success" propaganda, which, as Steele notes, has completely defanged the already feeble Democratic "opposition" to the murderous enterprise. The piece is worth reading in full, and excerpting at length. He begins by noting the shameful silence that greeted the Bush-Maliki announcement of plans for an "agreement" between the conqueror and his vassals for an "enduring" American military presence in Iraq:
More alarming was the Democratic party's reaction and indeed that of the US media. The revelation produced no burst of headlines or commentaries, even though it rides roughshod over most Americans' wishes. A Pew Research poll two weeks ago found 54% wanted the troops home "as soon as possible".
Yet the Democratic contenders for the presidency barely murmured. The passion for a clear timetable of an early US troop pullout that was raging in large sections of the Democratic party last spring, in the weeks after it regained control of the House and Senate, has fizzled out.
Whatever effect Bush's "surge" of extra troops has had in Iraq, it has clearly worked in Washington. The Democrats are in retreat, and the Bush strategy of entrenching the Iraq occupation still further and handing the mess to his successor is proceeding virtually unopposed.
Hillary Clinton, in a recent article in the journal Foreign Affairs, pledged to maintain US troops in Iraq indefinitely to train and equip Iraqi forces, as well as keeping "specialised units" to protect the trainers and confront al-Qaida. She would also leave troops in the northern Kurdish regions. Barack Obama told the New York Times last month that he would need 16 months after taking office to withdraw all US combat troops from Iraq, and would retain a residual force on an open-ended basis "to counter terrorism". He might decide this force would be better based outside Iraq, he suggested, so his position is marginally better than Clinton's. Neither candidate is willing to propose a total US troop withdrawal, as the US agreed in Vietnam in 1973 when it finally resolved to end its disastrous involvement there.
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But of course, this is precisely what is not going to happen as long as one member or another of Washington's "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" is in charge. Neither the Republicans or Democrats want the Iraqis to work out their own future; both parties want a compliant client state, with its oil resources opened to favored Western firms. And both parties want to retain American military dominance of the region. Barring some miraculous epiphany of wisdom and moral courage in the next occupant of the White House -- which is almost inconceivable, given the gaggle of third-rate goobers being offered up as "major," "serious" candidates and likely winners -- we are certainly destined to see much more bloodshed, more atrocity, more chaos and deadly privation in Iraq, until, at last, as in Vietnam, the Americans are driven out by force.
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