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2 One last thrust in
Iraq By Robert Dreyfuss
Like some neo-conservative Wizard of Oz,
in building expectations for the 2007 version of
his "Strategy for Victory" in Iraq, US President
George W Bush is promising far more than he can
deliver. It is now nearly two months since he
fired secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld,
installing Robert Gates in his place, and the
White House revealed that a full-scale review of
America's failed policy in Iraq was under way.
Last week, having spent months - if, in
fact, the New York Times is correct that the
review began late in the summer - consulting
with
generals, politicians, State Department and
Central Intelligence Agency bureaucrats, and
Pentagon planners, Bush emerged from yet another
powwow to tell waiting reporters: "We've got more
consultation to do until I talk to the country
about the plan."
As John Lennon sang in
"Revolution": "We'd all love to see the plan."
Unfortunately for Bush, most of the US
public may have already checked out. By and large,
Americans have given up on the war in Iraq. The
November election, largely a referendum on the
war, was a repudiation of the entire effort, and
the vote itself was a marker along a continuing
path of rapidly declining approval ratings both
for Bush personally and for his handling of the
war.
It's entirely possible that when Bush
does present us with "the plan" next week, few
will be listening. Until he makes it clear that he
has returned from Planet Neo-Con by announcing
concrete steps to end the war in Iraq, it's
unlikely that American voters will tune in. As of
January 1, every American could find at least
3,000 reasons not to believe that Bush had
suddenly found a way to put Humpty Dumpty back
together again.
What's astonishing about
the debate over Iraq is that the US president - or
anyone else, for that matter, including the media
- is paying the slightest attention to the
neo-conservative strategists who got the US into
this mess in the first place. Having been
egregiously wrong about every single Iraqi thing
for five consecutive years, by all rights the
neo-cons ought to be consigned to some dusty
basement exhibit hall in the American Museum of
Natural History, where, like so many triceratops,
their reassembled bones would stand mutely by to
send a chill of fear through touring
schoolchildren. Indeed, the neo-cons are the dodos
of Washington, simply too dumb to know when they
are extinct.
Yet here is Tom Donnelly, an
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) neo-con, a
co-chairman of the Project for a New American
Century, telling a reporter sagely that the surge
is in. "I think the debate is really coming down
to: surge large. Surge small. Surge short. Surge
longer. I think the smart money would say that the
range of options is fairly narrow." (Donnelly, of
course, forgot: surge out.) His colleague,
Frederick Kagan of AEI, the chief architect of the
surge theory for Iraq, has made it clear that the
only kind of surge that would work is a big, fat
one.
Nearly pornographic in his fondling
of the surge, Kagan, another of the neo-con crew
of armchair strategists and militarists, makes it
clear that size does matter. "Of all the 'surge'
options out there, short ones are the most
dangerous," he wrote in the Washington Post last
week, adding lasciviously, "The size of the surge
matters as much as the length ... The only 'surge'
option that makes sense is both long and large."
Ooh - that is, indeed, a manly surge. For
Kagan, a man-sized surge must involve at least
30,000 more troops funneled into the killing
grounds of Baghdad and al-Anbar province for at
least 18 months.
Bush, perhaps dizzy from
the oedipal frenzy created by the emergence of
Daddy's best friend James Baker and his Iraq Study
Group, seems all too willing to prove his manhood
by the size of the surge. According to a stunning
front-page piece in the New York Times last
Tuesday, Bush has all but dismissed the advice of
his generals, including Centcom Commander John
Abizaid, and George Casey, the top US general in
Iraq, because they are "more fixated on withdrawal
than victory".
At a recent Pentagon
session, according to General James T Conway, the
commandant of the US Marine Corps, Bush told the
assembled brass: "What I want to hear from you now
is how we are going to win, not how we are going
to leave." As a result, Abizaid and Casey are, it
appears, getting the same hurry-up-and-retire
treatment that swept away other generals who
questioned the wisdom on Iraq transmitted from
Planet Neo-Con.
That's scary, if it means
that Bush - presumably on the advice of the
neo-con-in-chief, Vice President Dick Cheney - has
decided to launch a major push, Kagan-style, for
victory in Iraq. Not that such an escalation has a
chance of working, but there's no question that,
in addition to bankrupting the United States,
breaking the army and the marines, and unleashing
all-out political warfare at home, it would kill
perhaps tens of thousands more Iraqis.
Personally, I'm not convinced that Bush
could get away with it politically. Not only is
the public dead set against escalating the
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