May 2, 2007
"You have many enemies, that know not
Why they are so, but, like to village curs,
Bark when their fellows do."It should be clear to most everyone by now that Bush has absolutely no intention of doing anything the American people have demanded of him. After his veto of the Iraq withdrawal legislation Tuesday, Bush took pains to explain the reasons for his obstinacy which centered almost exclusively on Iraqi concerns. Apparently, the political success of the regime installed and maintained behind the sacrifices of our soldiers is more important to Bush than anything the American people are telling him with their votes in November, and more important than their response to almost every poll they've answered insisting that he bring our troops home.
Bush insisted, anyway, in a speech Wednesday, that his escalation of his occupation is a 'new strategy', rather than just a ramping up of the old one which has resulted in over 3400 U.S. troops' lives lost in Iraq; 104 killed last month, as Bush admits, as a direct result of his new escalation.
"The most important fact about our new strategy," Bush told the Association of General Contractors, "it is fundamentally different from the previous strategy. The previous strategy wasn't working the way we wanted it to work," he said.
"It's interesting, they run polls -- and I accept that -- and it said, you know, we don't approve of what's happening in Iraq. That was what the poll said last fall and winter, you know. And had they polled me, I'd have said the same thing. (Laughter.) I didn't approve of what was happening in Iraq. And so we put a new strategy in that was fundamentally different."
There are some "new" aspects of his escalation of the occupation of Baghdad - like the decision to construct a 'wall' isolating the Sunni community from whatever amenities and opportunities the residents there would expect to be entitled to avail themselves of from a "free and democratic" Iraq. The building of walls meshes perfectly with the apparent decision of the Bush regime to throw their support behind the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and to cast all of the Sunnis as "enemies" akin to those in their community who took on the moniker of Bush's nemesis, al-Qaeda, in their resistance to the new regime.
All talk of reconciliation between the warring sects in Iraq has given way to a notion that some amount of legislative maneuvering by the Maliki regime and his fractured parliament will satisfy for the democracy which was promised Iraqis who were privileged to vote in the elections held under the increased U.S. military occupation of the sovereign nation. Talk of the Shiite majority reconciling with the Sunnis who were driven from power and opportunity by the U.S. invasion has been replaced with the generic goal of passing legislation reversing the de-Batthification of the military and the government which was zealously ordered after the initial invasion by Bush and Rumsfeld.
Still, Bush insisted Wednesday that his "top priority is to help the Iraqi leaders," who, he says, "were elected by nearly 12 million of their citizens -- secure their population." And that the "young democracy needed some time to make important political decisions to help reconcile the country."
It's a no-brainer for most Americans, steeped in the broad history and tradition of our own democracy, that one election held years ago under the supervision of the U.S. military -- which invaded and overthrew the existing regime -- is no substitute for the checks and balances an accountable government provides by enabling a continuing process where average citizens can actually participate and influence their rulers and their elevated edicts.
There is no democratic process of accountability of the new regime to the Iraqis they intend to govern. Indeed, there has been a sustained effort to intimidate and stifle the influence of those communities who have actively opposed the imposition of the Maliki authority and the new regime's support for the U.S. invaders. Along with their U.S. benefactors, the Maliki regime has directed their new army to assist the U.S. military in re-occupying these opposition communities to intimidate them from their active opposition of the new government's political initiatives and actions.
It's ludicrous -- for most Americans and most Iraqis -- that there's an expectation that the Iraqi regime would engineer some legislative machinations behind the intimidating influence of our occupying army and call it democracy. Yet, that's what Bush and the supporters of his bloody occupation are telling us they expect to achieve from this deadly escalation; a political victory in Iraq's compromised legislature.
It's no matter to Bush and his cabal that the Sadr coalition, who enabled the new regime to power with their support for the Maliki regime -- walked away from their positions within the new parliament; they'll just appoint more compliant ones. It's of no consequence to those who are zealously packing our soldiers into the middle of Iraq's civil war that there is no reliable effort from the new regime to bend to the will of the Iraqis they lord over in the majority's insistence that our forces leave their country.
In fact, the Bush administration's support for the continuation of the manufactured authority of the Maliki regime -- in the face of the continuing resistance and opposition to Bush's continued occupation -- is a direct reflection with the president's spurring of the will of the majority of Americans that he end the fiasco and exit.
The most pernicious ignorance of the will of those Bush seeks to dominate with his manufactured authority here at home and in Iraq has to be his continuing insistence that the 'Iraqi al-Qaeda' he's motivated with his diversion from the hunt for the original perpetrators in Afghanistan, threaten more than his pathetic attempts to consolidate power in Iraq. The notion that they'd 'follow us home' is nothing more than Bush's own paranoid fear of the backlash of his own indiscriminate aggression against innocent Iraqis.
"I don't need to remind you who al Qaeda is," Bush told the contractors. "Al Qaeda is the group that plot and planned and trained killers to come and kill people on our soil. The same bunch that is causing havoc in Iraq were the ones who came and murdered our citizens. I've got to tell you, that day deeply affected my decision-making. And I vowed that I would do anything that I possibly could within the law to protect the American citizens against further attack by these ideologues, by these murderers," he said.
Bush's 'Iraqi al-Qaeda' are becoming as important and elevated as the original 9-11 orchestrators have been as a result of his rhetoric raising the combatants to a level of importance reserved for nation-states which actually threaten our defenses with substantial armies and weaponry. While the original al-Qaeda continue to influence recruits and supporters by the mere fact of their Bush-enabled freedom from prosecution, Bush is satisfied to regard the 2% or so Iraqis our intelligence agencies identify as al-Qaeda sympathizers as the most important threat our country faces which deserves the bulk of our nation's defenses and the continuing and escalated sacrifice of our nation's defenders in Iraq.
"The same bunch that is causing havoc in Iraq were the ones who came and murdered our citizens," Bush said, in an amazing display of the hubris which has marked all of his justifications for his militarism in Iraq, from the invasion, to the occupation, to the escalation.
No matter to Bush that his own 90-page classified National Intelligence Estimate leaked in February stated that violence in Iraq from 'al-Qaeda' had been surpassed by Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence as the primary source of conflict and the most immediate threat to U.S. goals."
Disputing Bush's claims in his speech that, "For America, the decision we face in Iraq is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it's whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11," the 90-page NIE concluded that, "even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation."
Also that, "Decades of subordination to Sunni political, social, and economic domination have made the Shia deeply insecure about their hold on power. This insecurity leads the Shia to mistrust US efforts to reconcile Iraqi sects and reinforces their unwillingness to engage with the Sunnis on a variety of issues, including adjusting the structure of Iraq’s federal system, reining in Shia militias, and easing de-Bathification."
So, once again, Bush is diverting us from stepping out of the middle of what most Americans (and Bush's own intelligence agencies) have properly concluded is an Iraqi struggle for power -- aggravated by this administration's insistence on fighting their battle against the original 9-11 al-Qaeda they allowed 'safe harbor' in Afghanistan -- by staging coerced raids against their imitators in Iraq.
While the real al-Qaeda 'threat' to America still looms somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan - emboldened and empowered by their freedom from prosecution resulting from the attention Bush is giving to the Iraqi pretenders -- the president is satisfied with creating and posturing against even more "enemies," over there, in Iraq, that he says would threaten us here at home.
We're not far at all from having to address a world of 'al-Qaeda' wannabes assuming they'll be as successful in antagonizing America as the 9-11 specters Bush has so eloquently and loquaciously elevated. That's exactly what the American people and the legislators they elected to office have been warning against. That's precisely what Bush is determined to ignore as he pushes our troops even further toward provoking Iraqis and others into even more attacks on our troops, our allies, and our interests at home and abroad as he picks a fight against a world of 'enemies' who would resist his swaggering advance and his bloody expansionism.
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