Thursday, November 30, 2006

Iraq: More Dubya Talk

Also at Kos.

The "meeting of the mindless" has taken place in Jordan, and young Mister Bush has declared that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is "the right guy for Iraq" and that "We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done so long as the government wants us there."

Guess what. The Iraqi government is going to want us there as long as al-Maliki is the government. That's why he's the "right guy."

Bush and Maliki have agreed to speed up the process of training Iraqi troops, but won't set a timetable for doing that.

Guess what. If there's no timetable for training up Iraqi troops, they won't get trained up.

Mister Bush says the training of Iraqi troops is "evolving from ground zero."

Guess what. Iraqi troop training was at ground zero three years ago. With no timetable for bringing them up to ground one, they'll be at ground zero three years from now.

Guess what else. It doesn't matter how fast Iraqi troops "stand up" because they'll still insist on sitting down on the job. Time and time and time again, Iraq's army has refused to participate in operations because its soldiers don't want to fight other Iraqis, and its police force is more corrupt than Chicago's cops were during the Al Capone era.

When asked by reporters when he expects the transfer of responsibility to Iraqi forces to take place, Bush said, "As soon as possible… I've been asked about timetables ever since we got into this. All the timetables mean is a timetable for withdrawal… All that does is set people up for unrealistic expectations."

"Unrealistic expectations" is the most realistic thing Bush has said in six years. It's unrealistic to expect that Maliki can deliver a political solution in Iraq, and it's unrealistic to think that Bush has any intention of ever pulling troops out of Iraq.

And the sad reality is that the longer Bush and his coterie of yes men are in charge of America, and the longer they're able to molest the Middle East situation, the more impossible it will be to ever extract ourselves from it.

Which means everything's going according to plan, I'd guess.

Guess Again

In case you haven't noticed, the big media have been running the next round of Iran boo noise lately. Everything going wrong in Iraq is Iran's fault. Iran is training and arming the Shiite militias.

It's a funny thing, though. The real problem in Iraq, according to Bush, is al-Qaeda, which is "fomenting" all the sectarian violence, even though the Pentagon says that al-Qaeda only represents a tiny fraction of the "enemy" forces in Iraq.

But here's an even funnier thing. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace, who also says al-Qaeda is the main culprit in Iraq, is pulling troops out of the al-Anbar province, al-Qaeda in Iraq's base of operations, and putting them in Baghdad, smack in the middle of the civil war between Shiites and Muslims that both Bush and Pace deny is occurring. A recent Marine Corps intelligence assessment said that the battle for al-Anbar is unwinnable without a major infusion of more troops in the region. You'd think that Pace, a Marine himself, might pay heed to that report, and might suggest that rather than take troops out of Anbar to reinforce Baghdad, we should take troops out of Baghdad to reinforce Anbar.

But no. That makes way too much sense for the Pentagon to suggest it, and our Pumpkin Eater JCS chairman isn't about to recommend something to our Commander in Chief that he doesn't want to hear.

Because, you see, if we were to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq, well, then we wouldn't have an excuse to stick around in Iraq to try and put down a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites. At the same time, if we don't make it look like the Shiites are the bad guys, or at least some of them, because then we can't blame Iran for being behind all the sectarian violence. Because the Iranians are Shiites, see, and they're the main instigators in all this.

Yeah, Maliki is a Shiite too, but he's our kind of Shiite, the kind that wants us to stick around in Iraq so those al-Qaeda sympathizing Sunnis don't try to take Iraq over from those Iran sympathizing Shiites, who are those Shiites other than Maliki. Except that Maliki is talking to the Iranians, but that makes no never mind, because the Iranian Shiites are Persians, see, and the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs, and Arabs and Persians don't like each other even if they're both Shiites.

And besides, the Iranians are friends with al-Qaeda even though the Iranians are Persians and Shiites and al-Qaeda is an Arab Sunni outfit.

Does everybody get the picture now?

Anybody's Guess

Alas America. We had so much potential, after the fall of the Soviet Union, to lead the world into an unprecedented age of peace and prosperity, and look what happened. Our political leaders are ideological mouth breathers and our military leaders are moral cowards content to let their troops get chewed up in a senseless war for which there is no military solution.

Don't expect any recommendations of the Baker Commission to make a tinker's dam worth of difference in the Middle East Bush-mania, and if you think the newly elected Democratic Congress will be able to rein Bush in, guess again.

The only way we can turn this pathetic situation around is to impeach both Bush and that Thing/King Pin/Penguin looking bastard Dick Cheney, and ash can every careerist four-star military officer who went bottoms-up for them.

If you think that's going to happen in the next two years, guess again.

Watch for more "official leaks" that encourage us to support spreading the Gulf region lunacy into Iran and Syria. And guess who will be behind them. (Hint: he's already been mentioned in this article, and is an old neocon buddy of Dan Quayle.)

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

15 comments:

  1. Anonymous2:08 PM

    As stated earlier, its good to hear rational voices still exists in the US. Watching the current state of your nation is frightening, the way you seem to be slipping into fascism without really noticing it seems surreal.

    The one realistic solution to the current Iraqi problem seems to me to be to turn the whole mess over to the chinese. Pay them half of what you are spending now and get them to put two million boots on the ground. Its actually more doable than "winning" using your current strategy.

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  2. Yes, let the Chinese bleed national treasure into that cesspool.

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  3. ...beat them at their own game.

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  4. Anonymous4:26 PM

    Hire them to do it, its the only way I can see that the US can get out of this. You should give em supervision of both Israel and Palestine too for five-ten years, the Chinese dont care about jews or arabs, to them theyre all foreign devils.

    With the wonderful vision of hindsight, what you *should* have done is trained a couple of foreign-legion batallions of arab-speaking troops and pre-trained them in reconstruction, so that you could have had two engineering-units available who could interact with the natives.

    The sucess of the roman legion rested on their ability of both maintaining their coreunits AND utilizing auxilliary forces. Thats one lesson (of many, many, many, many) the US army could learn from the british. Im not an expert, but having seen american ground-troops "securing" in Kosova has given me some impression on how they proably react in real hostile territory. Very insensitive, very brutal, bad cop macho b&%lshit, if youll excuse my language. Some arab-speaking locally knowledgable crack-troops sure would have helped, I think. From what I hear from Afghanistan, the Europeans are really pissed off having their hearts-n-minds operations continually blown up by US cowboys.

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  5. Anonymous5:26 PM

    The worst part is, I´m halfway serious. Sorry for the rant, but:

    Someone has got to save your asses in your ongoing war/crusade against the Islamic world. Its not going very well. So why not turn to the chinese? They own you anyway, its time for them to put up or loose a lot of stability. I mean: Who has the worlds largest army? The chinese. Who are the meanest communist-capitalist bastards of the universe right now? The Chinese. Who owns Sudan? The Chinese. Who has Taoism and Confucianism wich are both largely administrative religions all can agree with? Hmmmmmm.

    With a UN mandate, China along with a specially hired russian veteran brigade, could be the backbone of a UN force guided by Europeans, financed by the US and Saudi. But then you can´t spend all the money on corruption, like you did in Afghanistan, then you have to actually mean it and let the specialist do all their "ecological" bullshit and try & save the planet. (The combination of chinese dicipline and western technology is one of the few hpes I have for staving off the ecological disaster wich is coming these next 10-20 years.)

    But that requires the US military cartel to grow up & face the fact that the emerging situation is one of real enthropy, and not just a macho showdown of "wills to win" and such Ayn Randian drivel.The mafia mind-set of the current holders of power seem to be at most 1 year ahead, if that.

    As said earlier, sorry for the rant, its just so weird to see our leaders running the whole idea of humanism down the communal toilet. The US should just stop trying to be an imperialist power, and do what it does best, corrupting the hearts and minds of the youth through Britney Spears ;-))

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  6. Anonymous11:14 AM

    As martin rightly states, the best weapon the US has is not our JDAMS and whatnot, but our pop superstars. American culture is a drug that seems almost irresistable, and it alone can conquer nations if allowed to work over time.

    So long as Bush&Cheney are in the WH, no troops will be moved from Iraq. I don't know why people think otherwise. The next president will probably move them out in the first half of his term, so expect them to be in Iraq for another 3-5 years.

    I like the Chinese idea. Never thought of that. Don't think they'll fall for it though. ;)

    BTW, while the US has surely become a proto-fascist state, one can easily say the same thing about the UK.

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  7. Anonymous11:27 AM

    "Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is "the right guy for Iraq"" The Dubya can sure pick em. Reminds me of Harriet what's her name he nominated to the Supreme Court. Guess he gets a bit addled when there's so much foment'n going on!

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  8. Mandt,

    Dealing with foment is hard work! ;-)

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  9. The meme "It's all about the oil" is perhaps the most feared of the Bush League criticisms.
    I'm not so sure though. Seems to me that Junior is such a cock-up in the brain that Cheney's "All power to the Chief" is more important ; dysfunctional foreign adventuring a mere distraction from domestic power grab.
    bluegalinaredstate.blogspot.com for one has some marvelous rants about the destruction of American civil liberties under the pretext of "fighting terrorism". Yeah. Right.
    Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog at Washington Monthly Dec 1 harks back to Texas' 2000 Republican program. Scary stuff.

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  10. Anonymous2:17 PM

    Sorry for another rant, but: The REALLY sad part is that the US in both Iraq and Afghanistan had a window of opportunity in the first six months of the invasions, but blew them through corruption, violence and cultural insensitivity. You cant claim that the Islamofascists beat you, or that the wily arab mind is just not capable of loving freedom but has to hate it. You fucked this up yourself.

    There seems to be a very cruel and sadistick streak in the US jock-mentality that your administration represents, a tendency to want to humiliate and denegrate your enemies, instead of treating them with honour. Just look at the way that you treat Saddam or the Gitmo-people, not to mention Abu Ghraib/Bagram.

    Wich is what this administration has chosen as its public image. The defacto reinstitution of torture into Western military doctrine stands for me as the heart and mind of your administration, the whole centerpoint of your "public presentation". "We are america. We kill people. We torture people. All in the name of Jesus and capitalism." You called the invasion a crusade. You give your weapon programs religious names. You give your citizens legal immunity in the countries you invade. You kill civilians without blinking. You run the first modern gulag-camps at secret locations where people are boiled alive and buried in unmarked graves, and you cant even be bothered to hide it very well. AND YOU STILL CLAIM MORAL HIGH GROUND. All in the name of Jesus. Its just amazing.

    If the US was a person, it would be locked up as a violent manic religious psychopath with delusions of grandeur. I'm not even kidding, youre totally rogue and violent. Sorry.

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  11. What do you mean "us," Kimosabe?

    If you haven't noticed, a lot of "us" don't like what "they" are doing. ;-)

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  12. Anonymous3:02 PM

    I know, and I apologize for generalizing. I am perfectly aware that much of the US population are decent honest people.

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  13. Anonymous4:17 PM

    The torture-law is still ratling around in my head. I cant believe youve legalized torture and killed habeas corpus. Its like a bad dream.

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  14. It's a very bad dream. It's a nightmare on K Street.

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