From Quagmire to MaelstromI spent a couple of hours this morning scouring the major online papers and, as expected, they were all mainly focused on the new Bush strategy for Iraq. With extremely rare exception, the editorial responses are highly negative, doubting the plan's wisdom and its prospects for success.
One of the most forceful editorials came from The New York Times:
"President Bush told Americans last night that failure in Iraq would be a disaster. The disaster is Mr. Bush’s war, and he has already failed. Last night was his chance to stop offering more fog and be honest with the nation, and he did not take it.
"Americans needed to hear a clear plan to extricate United States troops from the disaster that Mr. Bush created. What they got was more gauzy talk of victory in the war on terrorism and of creating a “young democracy” in Iraq. In other words, a way for this president to run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one."
"...Mr. Bush said yet again that he wanted the Iraqi government to step up to the task of providing its security, and that Iraq needed a law on the fair distribution of oil money. Iraq’s government needs to do a lot more than that, starting with disarming the sectarian militias that are feeding the civil war and purging the police forces that too often are really death squads. It needs to offer amnesty to insurgents and militia fighters willing to put down their weapons. It needs to do those things immediately.
"Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government has heard this list before. But so long as Mr. Bush is willing to back that failed government indefinitely — enabling is the psychological term — Iraq’s leaders will have no reason to move against the militias and more fairly share power with the Sunni minority."
"We have argued that the United States has a moral obligation to stay in Iraq as long as there is a chance to mitigate the damage that a quick withdrawal might cause. We have called for an effort to secure Baghdad, but as part of the sort of comprehensive political solution utterly lacking in Mr. Bush’s speech. This war has reached the point that merely prolonging it could make a bad ending even worse. Without a real plan to bring it to a close, there is no point in talking about jobs programs and military offensives. There is nothing ahead but even greater disaster in Iraq."
Columnist David Olive was no kinder to Bush in the Toronto Star:
"To his record of lies, torture, illicit spying on and detention of innocent Americans, and his debauching of the U.S. Constitution he is sworn to uphold, Bush now means to add a needless prolongation of an unwinnable war. And to do so against the will of Congress, the recommendations of Congress's Iraq Study Group report last month, and the 70 per cent of Americans who disapprove of Bush's performance in office.
"Why? In order that his successor as president – and not Bush – wears the stigma of defeat in Iraq."
The Los Angeles Times gave Bush a scolding but wasn't ready to call the plan a failure - yet:
"PRESIDENT BUSH'S latest plan for Iraq has the feel of an overdue high school book report. It looks nice, reads well and is persuasive in parts. If only he had handed it in on time.
"The 'new way forward' outlined by the president in a prime-time address Wednesday makes too many obvious points (Iraqis must have more of a stake in their nation's success) and includes too many tired tropes (the war in Iraq is a central front in the war against terrorism). But the core of Bush's speech — the reason to maintain at least some flicker of hope — was an absolute-final-we're-really-serious-this-time ultimatum to the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki."
"...It is unlikely that the additional troops will be enough to make a difference, or that Maliki will honor his latest pledge. But America, and Iraq, will know in a matter of months whether U.S. troops can operate freely and whether Maliki's government is worth defending.
"It would have been nice to have this answer months ago, and Bush deserves the blame for not demanding it sooner. At least he is finally making that demand. For his sake, and for the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and millions of Iraqis, we hope it's not too late."
Writing in the Washington Post, Thomas Ricks and Ann Scott Tyson note that the Bush plan commits the US Army to what they feared most during the 2003 invasion:
"The prospect of a more intense battle in the Iraqi capital could put U.S. military commanders in exactly the sort of tough urban fight that war planners strove to avoid during the spring 2003 invasion of the country. The plan to partner U.S. and Iraqi units may compel American soldiers to rely on questionable Iraqi army and police forces as never before. And while the president insisted there is no timetable associated with the troop increase, military officials said sustaining it for more than a few months would place a major new strain on U.S. forces that already are feeling burdened by an unexpectedly long and difficult war."
"...An Army officer who recently commanded a battalion in Baghdad predicted last night that the plan would fail because Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government "will do things to maintain protection" of Sadr's forces. He also dismissed as "happy talk" the president's notion that the predominantly Shiite Iraqi army and police could reassure pro-insurgent Sunni neighborhoods by conducting foot patrols through them."
The Guardian succinctly described the Bush plan as "Defiance and Delusion" and warned that both leaders, Bush and Blair, are in a state of hopeless denial:
"George Bush's announcement last night that he is going to pour more troops into Iraq was the last throw of the dice in a misconceived enterprise that has dragged his country, this country and the Middle East into a nightmare."
"...The claim [by Tony Blair that] peace is returning to Basra is as unreal as Mr Bush's hope that order can be brought to Baghdad. Surrounded by the wreckage of the disaster they created, both men still hope, against all reality, that somehow the pieces can be put back together again. But their project is dead. A few more troops, or a few more months, will not restore it. Both men are on their way out. By stringing the war along without admitting defeat, it will become the business of another British prime minister and another American president to end it."
Al Jazeera reports that al Maliki intends to use A Kurdish unit of the Iraq Army in any action against Sadr and his enclave:
"An Iraqi general, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a unit of the Iraqi army, composed mainly of Kurds, would be sent into Sadr City.
"The general said Kurds, who are Sunni but not Arab, would make up the unit because soldiers from other Iraqi units were likely to refuse to fight fellow Shia."
Writing in The Independent, Middle East reporter Robert Fisk chose to remind us of the warning words of, brace yourself, Pat Buchanan:
"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.'"
"...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.'"
The final word comes from The Asia Times and an editorial entitled "Surging toward the Holy Oil Grail":
"The Iraqi media have been wildly speculating that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki could be the victim of a US-engineered white coup, the likely replacement candidates being two certified Washington puppets, current Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an enthusiast of a proposed new Iraqi oil law, and former interim prime minister, former Ba'athist and "butcher of Fallujah", Iyad Allawi.
"But just when Washington and the Green Zone in Baghdad were abuzz with talk of regime change, Bush told Republican senators this week that his escalation and "new way forward" policies were basically designed by none other than Maliki, widely condemned for his support of Shi'ite death squads. It is astonishing that Maliki might actually have managed to convince Bush that he will frontally take on the militias of his ally Muqtada."
"...Washington's successive divide-and-rule tactics - facilitating a possible genocide of Sunnis, contemplating a mass slaughter of Shi'ites, betting on a regional Sunni/Shi'ite war - never for a second lose sight of the riches of Iraqi. For Big Business, an Iraq eaten alive by Balkanization is the ideal environment for the triumph of Anglo-American petrocracy.
"A new Iraqi oil law will most likely be voted on in Parliament in the next few weeks, before the arrival of Bush's 21,500 men, and it should be in effect in March. The law is Anglo-American Big Oil's holy grail: the draft has been carefully scrutinized by Washington, Big Oil and the International Monetary Fund, but not by Iraqi politicians. The profit-sharing agreements enshrined by the law are immensely profitable for Big Oil. And crucially, the law prevents any Iraqi government from nationalizing the oil industry - as the majority of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member states did. In essence, it's a game of "if you nationalize, we invade you - again". So the law fulfills the early-2003 neo-con boast of "we are the new OPEC".
"Iraq's petrodollars will turn to mush - or rather, as with Saudi Arabia, be recycled back to US banks. Security company Blackwater will make a killing "protecting" Iraqi pipelines. Bechtel and Halliburton will get myriad fat contracts to rebuild everything the US has bombarded since 1991.
"But what's the use of an oil law in a 100-cadavers-a-day hellhole? Enter the escalation as a way of providing "stability". Whichever way the coming surge goes - ethnic cleansing of Sunnis, the battle of Sadr City - what matters is not the piling up of Arab Muslim (or American) bodies, but how much less cumbersome is the path toward the holy oil grail. Big Business will make a deal with anyone that facilitates the passing of the oil law, be it Maliki's Da'wa Party, the SCIRI, or - in a wildest-dream version - the Sadrists or al-Qaeda in Iraq."
And there you have it.
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