writings by Celia hart, Edited by Walter Lippmann Published by Socialist £5.50 inc postage cheques payable to Resistance) from PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU Celia Hart
never
Late
ove
ebe in the Baker-Hamilton report was trashed.
President Bush declared it "interesting," and said he'd look at it along with two or three other studies coming out of the Pentagon and State Department.
The right wing set up an instant howl against the "Iraq Surrender Group."
Senator John McCain, preparing his run for the Republican 2008 presidential nomination, came out pandering to the hardline base by calling for a large increase in U.S. military forces in Iraqrequiring additional forces that don't actually exist in the real world.
The ISG report, recognizing that getting out of Iraq requires a political deal with Iran and Syria, recommended diplomatic initiatives toward those two states.
Saudi Arabia's rulers immediately responded: a U.S. withdrawal means turning Iraq over to the Iranianbacked Shias. Saudi Arabia would intervene on the side of the Sunnis.
Further, the Saudis allowed extremist clerics to put out statements calling for "jihad against the Crusaders and Shia" - the coded message being that Saudi Arabia will back al-Qaeda in Iraq if Washington backs down.
The Iraqi president and Kurdish leader Talabani shot down the ISG's recommendation that Iraqi Kurds compromise their autonomy and claim to Mosul.
Even before that, Prime Minister Maliki responded to leaked White House documents, threatened to withdraw U.S. support of his government, by snubbing Bush at a scheduled dinner meeting in Kuwait.
Back in Bush's Washington bunker, even though the neocons who conceived the Iraq adventure are bruised and battered, they have enough
Protest against the US
involvement is gathering
strength in the US as the
death toll of US soldiers tops
3,000, with many more
injured. remaining clout, ganging up with the Israel and evangelical lobbies, to veto the ISG's call for settling the IsraelPalestine crisis as a key to any regional solution.
On every side, the ISG report has been turned into a complete zero, before it was even seriously discussed.
With a virtual paralysis of policy and vacuum of strategy, the Bush gang is preparing to adopt one of the ISG's tactical suggestions, ripped entirely out of the report's overall message of urgent withdrawal: a "short-term surge" of 2030,000 extra troops to "secure Baghdad," the one single option that is most surely destined to fail.
Here, the role of the Democrats as they prepare to take power in Congress becomes most revealing.
Harry Reid, about to become Senate Majority leader, has incredibly endorsed the "troop surge" idea, on the absurd fantasy that it's a step toward getting out sooner while Colin Powell, Bush's first Secretary of State and formerly the general who waged the first Gulf War in 1991, calls it nonsense as the forces are stretched past the breaking point.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who know an army verging on meltdown when they see it, also oppose it.
A handful of Congressional Democrats, led by Dennis Kucinich, are calling for cutting off war funding as the only way to get the troops
They are shunned and repudiated by the Democratic leadership. Meanwhile former president Jimmy Carter has become a pariah in his party for using the absolutely forbidden A-word in the title of his book Palestine Peace not Apartheid.
The only recent success of U.S. Middle East policy, which deserves a separate discussion, appears to be prevailing on Palestinian president Abbas to dissolve the parliament and touch off a Palestinian civil war.
The terrifying crisis spreading west and east from Iraq swallows up peoples and nations from to Afghanistan and from Lebanon to Palestine, even as it threatens to bring down the imperialist empire that produced it. David Finkel is an editor of the U.S. socialist magazine AGAINST THE CURRENT www.solidarity-us.org).