The Iraq War is Political Plutonium The End Begins By STAN GOFF

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/


This is the way the world ends,
not with a bang but a whimper.

-T. S. Eliot

So President of the United States George W. Bush "diverted" a flight to Australia to a desert base in Anbar Province, Iraq (Sure he did.). Anbar Province is now being effectively run not by US occupation forces, but by the armed Iraqi nationalist forces that fought the US to a standstill there -- with the cooperation of the same US forces. This is being spun as a successful "counter-insurgency" campaign.

Many who opposed the war in Iraq, and the many more who just disliked the Bush administration, certainly had different expectations of what forms the end of that war might take. And this is certainly the beginning of some kind of end. That is not a call to complacency. Fight against this warlike lives depend on it. They still do. I just feel compelled to counter-spin it.

With El Presidente on this "surprise" trip, as it happened, were the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. Meeting them on this remote base between Baghdad and the Syrian border was none other than Bagwan Petraeus, the current Vivekananda of counter-insurgency doctrine and the latest in a long line of Generals who will be dragged into historical ignominy by this Commander-in-Chief.

The Ba'athists of Anbar seem to bear no grudges, even for the genocidal revenge that was visted on Fallujah. This bespeaks a political sophistication (or Realpolitik, choose your term) that is miles ahead of the power curve in Washington DC. Only lately, it seems, as the mad mandarins of The Project for a New American Century chirp with bellicosity at Persia, has it occurred to the administration that the raison d'etre of US policy in the region since 1979 -- containing the surprise independence of Iran -- has been judo-flipped into an Iranian Era, in the same moment that the privatized Islamist militias of the Afghanistan operation (also cranked up courtesy of the CIA circa 1979) have metastasized into a popular movement that threatens the US-obedient rulers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Pakistan.

The generalissimos of the New Crusade didn't consult enough scripture.

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell -- and great was its fall.

--Matthew 7:26-27

Now the whole US National Command Authority is sitting together with former enemies surrounded by the sands of Anbar.

Someone is cutting deals.

[bemildred]

1. Boy, that is a lot of shit-eating grins. nt

[enough]

2. Another snip from the article, concerning Iran:

snip>

In those quiet enclosed spaces where they dare speak the truth, there is one truth that none of the Generals can withhold. An attack against Iran would spark a general uprising in Iraq that would extend from Baghdad to Basra; and the US would find its already tenuous position in Iraq untenable. The only thing that might be worse than an American attack on Ian would be one launched by the Israelis, who are rightly identified by Iraqis as an American forward base in the region.

The outcome would not be the destruction of Iranian influence. In the wake of a certain and final US defeat in Iraq, such an attack would be the guarantor of Iranian ascendancy in the context of a catastrophic standoff with China and Russia, the former of which has the capacity to shatter the US economy by selling down Dollars and the latter of which can absorb that sell-down in conversion to rubles in the growing fossil energy economy of Russia.

How this war will end has never been a decision that can or would be made by the leadership of either American political party, any more than the defeat in Vietnam was the result of politicians and protesters. The occupied people made the decision. It was not revoked in Vietnam. It will not be revoked in Iraq.

snip>