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Longer than WWII: Another Miserable Milestone for Bush's War |
Current rating: 0 |
by Rupert Cornwell
(No verified email address) |
28 Aug 2006
|
US Rep. Tim Johnson is running for re-election this November after having given Bush, along with most of the rest of Congress, a blank check for the Iraq War. Bush's own responsibility for the lies and failures of this war are clear, but it is just as clear that bad judgment in reliquishing Congress's constitutional oversight responsibilities before and after the start of the war is an indictment of those who wrote that blank check, including Johnson.
As Cornwell observes, "If you start a war that lasts as long as the Second World War, you'd better have something to show for it. George Bush does not." Neither does Johnson. |
A miserable milestone was passed the other day. America's (and Britain's) disastrous war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the US involvement in the Second World War. Yes, this conflict has outlasted a war that ended with total victory over Nazi Germany. Hitler declared war on the US on 11 December 1941. Exactly 1,244 days later, on 7 May 1945, Germany surrendered. The US invaded Iraq on 19 March 2003, and this weekend it is 1,267 days later, with no end in sight.
Sticklers among you will have noted that the interval between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender on 2 September, 1945 was 1,364 days. But even that record will tumble at the start of December. And if you do measure Iraq against the longer American war with Japan, the contrast is even starker. Victory in the Pacific was even more conclusive than in Europe. It produced no post-war entanglement with the Soviets and no Berlin airlift. The Iraq war unfolded the other way round: Baghdad fell barely three weeks after the invasion. Since then, however, it's been downhill all the way.
Yes, US casualties have been lighter, some 2,620 dead at the latest count, and four times as many seriously wounded. Adjust for respective populations, and Israel's loss of around 116 soldiers in the Lebanon war translates into 5,800 US dead in barely a month. As for Iraqi civilians, more of them are getting killed per month than all the American troops lost since the very start of the war.
But forget the statistics,the endless terror alerts, the war in Lebanon and the looming showdown with Iran. Iraq is the issue that America keeps returning to. It haunts George Bush and - barring Democratic screw-ups - it will probably send his Republican party to defeat in the mid-term elections this November.
Joe Lieberman's loss in the Connecticut Senate primary this month was just one straw in the wind. One of the seemingly most impregnable Democrats in the land could not even retain his own party's support. He was beaten because of his support for the war by a businessman with a simple campaign mantra: "Bring the Boys Home."
Republicans, of course, pretended to love it. They raised the shade of George McGovern, the anti-Vietnam war candidate thrashed by Nixon in 1972. Once again, they said, the Democrats had turned into a party of left-wing pacifists who could no more be trusted to fight the terrorists than to "see the job through" in Iraq.
Sadly, this argument that worked so well in 2002 and 2004 works no longer. Even the wilfully blind can see that Iraq is a disaster. Bush, who yields to no one in that category, lambasted the Democrats for pusillanimity. But even he could not bring himself to use the word "progress" apropos of events in the country that he once claimed would be a beacon of peace and democracy for the entire Middle East.
Nor does the terror card have the force it once did. True, the President's ratings went up slightly after the foiled UK airliner bomb plot (but they could hardly have sunk much lower). Far more revealing, Chris Shays, a Connecticut Republican who had supported the war, last week broke ranks with the White House and called for a firm timetable for withdrawal. If you're seeking re-election to the House in November, there's really no choice.
Bush's problem is that two-thirds of Americans - according to a recent poll - no longer buy his argument that Iraq has become "the central front in the war on terror". Iraq, they now realise, had nothing to do with 9/11, and the foreign fighters who are now in Iraq went there only after the 2003 invasion. They believe the Mesopotamian adventure has made them less safe. Put another way: if you start a war that lasts as long as the Second World War, you'd better have something to show for it. George Bush does not.
Β© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Bush 'Palace' Shielded from Iraqi Storm |
by Paul McGeough
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
28 Aug 2006
|
The plans are a state secret, so just where the Starbucks and Krispy Kreme stores will be is a mystery. But as the concrete hulks of a huge 21-building complex rise from the ashes of Saddam's Baghdad, Washington is sending a clear message to Iraqis: "We're here to stay."
It's being built in the Middle East, but George W's palace, as the locals have dubbed the new US embassy, is designed as a suburb of Washington.
An army of more than 3500 diplomatic and support staff will have their own sports centre, beauty parlour and swimming pool. Each of the six residential blocks will contain more than 600 apartments.
The prime 25-hectare site was a steal β it was a gift from the Iraqi Government. And if the five-metre-thick perimeter walls don't keep the locals at bay, then the built-in surface-to-air missile station should.
Guarded by a dozen gangly cranes, the site in the heart of the Green Zone is floodlit by night and is so removed from Iraqi reality that its entire construction force is foreign.
After almost four years, the Americans still can't turn on the lights for the Iraqis, but that won't be a problem for the embassy staffers. The same with the toilets β they will always flush on command. All services for the biggest embassy in the world will operate independently from the rattletrap utilities of the Iraqi capital.
Scheduled for completion next June, this is the only US reconstruction project in Iraq that is on track. Costing more than $US600 million ($A787 million), the fortress is bigger than the Vatican. It dwarfs the edifices of Saddam's wildest dreams and irritates the hell out of ordinary Iraqis.
On a recent visit to the real Baghdad β outside the Green Zone β a deepening sectarian separation was evident. Abu Zaman, a Shiite trucker who often updates The Age on life in the capital, had some personal news: "My daughter is upset because I blocked her wedding plans," he said. "He was a nice boy β rich and a good job β but he was a Sunni."
Making fake identity papers is a thriving business as Shiites and Sunnis attempt to blur their allegiances in a city where a name can be a death sentence. Men called Ali, Jaafar and Haider are almost certainly Shiites. Omar, Marwan and Khalid are Sunni names.
Shiite taxi driver Salwan al-Robian was unlucky. Earlier this month he used false papers to get through a Sunni checkpoint south of Baghdad. His companions told The Age that he gave himself away by invoking the name of Imam Ali, the Shiite saint, when he exclaimed his good fortune in surviving the roadblock. The Sunni gunman heard him and he was dragged off. His family recovered his body from the Tigris River a few days later
Sunni graffiti artists daub city walls with slogans such as "Shiite families out" and "Shiite dogs". Meanwhile, Shiite men roar with laughter at DVDs of comics mocking Sunnis.
In Baghdad, all roads lead to the morgue. This building to the north of the city comes from the pages of Dante.
It reveals the unvarnished truth about this deepening conflict. The body count rises steadily: more than 1800 mutilated corpses were trucked in from across the capital in July, a significant increase on the June toll of almost 1600. Across the country, almost 3200 Iraqis died violent deaths in June.
Coping with this flood of suicide-bombing and mass-murder victims is an impossible task for morgue staff. In the stifling summer, the police try to get out before sunrise to gather corpses from the killers' favourite dumping spots before the broiling heat of the day.
At the morgue, the bodies are divided along sectarian lines. The viciousness of the killings is sickening. Sunni victims of Shiite violence usually have holes drilled in their heads and joints and are found near the Shiite slums of Sadr City. Shiite victims of Sunni violence are often shot in the head or decapitated and usually they are dragged from the tepid waters of the Tigris.
Up to 200 bodies are delivered to the morgue each day. Sometimes there is the dignity of a body bag, but often body parts are delivered in banana boxes discarded at city bazaars. The Iraqi Government threatens the morgue staff with reprisals if they reveal information to reporters because the statistics are such devastating indicators of the Government's β and the United States' β failure. But one of the doctors agreed to talk to The Age as long as his name was not published. "It just gets worse, especially in this heat," he said.
"The bodies have been in the sun for so long that they fall apart in our hands, just like that. It's a nightmare. At home I can't say anything about it to my family. And how can we believe it'll get any better? We don't have enough doctors to do the autopsies and we're getting more and more bodies every day."
After almost four years of trying to build Washington's democracy beachhead in the Middle East, US defence officials now concede that the violence in Iraq is at its worst β in terms of body count, public support and the ease with which Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias exploit gaps in the American forces.
At most critical points the Americans have misread the social, tribal, political and military landscape and they have wrong-footed themselves by denying evolving realities that were all too apparent.
Distrust of Washington in all of the Iraqi factions has robbed the US of what it believed was an easily won regional trump card: control of Baghdad. Iraq is a democracy in name only. The elected Parliament doesn't function and, even though they mouth support for the niceties of the democratic process, it is hard not to conclude that Iraqi leaders have more faith in achieving their goals by letting the violence run than by taking part in any US-managed national dialogue.
The dynamic has changed. Sunnis who campaigned for US forces to leave Iraq now insist they remain here to protect the Sunnis because the Shiite majority has a taste for blood.
Shiites who welcomed the Americans now declare the US to be an enemy bent on robbing them of their long-held dream of controlling the country.
It's remarkable that George Bush has reportedly waited until now to vent his frustration at the failure of the Iraqis "to appreciate the sacrifice the US has made in Iraq". Ironically, about the same time as the August 14 White House meeting at which the President wondered aloud about the ability of yet another Iraqi government to turn the tide of violence, a Baghdad factory owner was mimicking the American leader for the benefit of The Age: "We give them Pepsi, the internet and mobile phones and they're still not happy. What more do they want?"
The combined forces of the US and the Iraqi Government number more than 400,000, but the country remains a lawless jungle. The Americans say they kill or capture more than 500 insurgents a week and they are defusing twice as many roadside bombs now as they were in January. But Iraqi and other agencies estimate that the death toll since the March 2003 invasion stands at 50,000 or more β the proportional equivalent of about 570,000 Americans.
In a country trying to rebuild itself, there is another disturbing development: more than 40 per cent of its professional classes have fled since the invasion. That includes an estimated 12,000 doctors.
The US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants estimates that close to 900,000 Iraqis have fled since 2003. Iraqi Airways has more than doubled flights to Damascus, bus services on the treacherous desert route to Jordan have gone from two to 50 a day, and taxi fares to Amman have increased from $US200 to $US750.
As statistics cry failure on so many fronts, Washington's stated plan for US forces in Iraq to "stand down as the new Iraqi forces stand up" is being shredded daily, along with the lives of innocent civilians. Much of the terror on the streets of Baghdad is organised by private militias that have infiltrated the Iraqi security forces.
These militias are operated by the key parties in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's administration β his government would fall without the political support of one of the worst offenders, the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army.
In Basra, deep in the south, there is little Sunni insurgency activity. But there is much violence as Shiite militias and local warlords fight for turf and British and American officers accuse neighbouring Iran (Shiite) and Saudi Arabia (Sunni) of arming the factions.
The country's second-biggest city becomes more Islamicised by the day β music and liquor shops have been bombed out of business, women are made to wear headscarves and board games are being outlawed.
Whatever the Americans have done in Iraq has usually been too little too late.
The June death in a US bombing raid of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunni insurgency leader and al-Qaeda point man in Iraq, was a victory β but his absence from the battlefield has failed to staunch the blood.
Zarqawi's stated objective was to foment unstoppable sectarian war.
In a sense, his work was done with the February bombing of a Shiite shrine at Samarra, north of Baghdad.
Unlike Mr Bush, Zarqawi could go to his grave rightly claiming: "Mission accomplished."
The two sides are dug in for the long haul. On one side, Sunni insurgency cells that now show great unity and common purpose have defeated a determined US counterinsurgency push to divide them.
On the other side, the Shiites use the resources of the US-trained and funded Iraqi security forces. A senior figure in Sadr's Mahdi Army told The Age: "We can get anything we need. We are a professional force β¦ and after the victory for Hezbollah in Lebanon we feel stronger and more powerful because we have seen what a Shiite force can achieve.
"We will fight the Sunni till they have a clean heart towards Shiites. But we have to fight the American too, because they are with the Sunni against us."
Copyright Β© 2006. The Age Company Ltd.
http://www.theage.com.au/ |
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Vast Majority of Us Now Officially 'Bitter and Angry' |
by Beth Quinn
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
29 Aug 2006
|
Who are these 35 percent of Americans who still approve of Bush's job performance?
And why do they accuse us Bush critics of being "bitter and angry," as though our lack of complacency is some sort of character flaw?
Their implication is that being bitter and angry is just so "Β¦ so "Β¦ unladylike. Do they imagine we're all at some 19th-century lawn party? That perhaps we're throwing an unseemly fit because a croquet ball went off in the wrong direction?
Of course we're bitter and angry. The majority of Americans are. And if you're not, I can only ask, what planet are you living on?
In fact, if you aren't bitter and angry at this dumb, smug president who's wrecking the country "Β¦ well, then you're just not paying attention.
Republicans should be bitter and angry because Bush has subverted all that's good in the Republican Party β fiscal responsibility and smaller government.
Those who want to crush the terrorists should be bitter and angry because Bush's disastrous war in Iraq has diverted attention, manpower and money from the real fight. Where, exactly, is Osama?
Drivers should be bitter and angry every time they fill up at the gas pump. And if they're not bitter and angry now, just wait another couple of months when it's time to turn the furnace on.
New Yorkers should be bitter and angry because β lo and behold! β it turns out we have no landmarks in town. No Homeland Security funds for us! That money's going to Indiana and all the other godforsaken states populated by Bush's Family Values Droids.
Those with soldiers in Iraq should be bitter and angry because Support Our Troops is just a meaningless slogan created by Bush propagandists. As linguist Noam Chomsky points out, no one knows what it means because it doesn't mean anything.
Meanwhile, Bush keeps sending soldiers into a war already lost so that those who already died haven't died in vain. What kind of stupid logic is that?
Here's a bitter and angry slogan for you: A Slogan Can't Hide a Coffin.
Parents and educators should be bitter and angry because Bush's No Child Left Behind is just another slogan that doesn't mean anything β as vapid and empty as saying Freedom is on the March.
So here's another bitter and angry slogan for you: No Slogan Left Behind.
Anyone with a loved one who has diabetes, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's should be bitter and angry at Bush for thwarting stem-cell research.
Senior citizens should be bitter and angry because they've been sold a bill of goods with his useless Medicare prescription plan.
Low-income college students should be bitter and angry because they can no longer qualify for government grants if they major in evolutionary biology. Goodbye, Age of Enlightenment!
Those who love this beautiful planet should be bitter and angry because the White House is the only place on Earth where global warming doesn't exist. Goodbye, Venice. And oops! Goodbye, Florida, too. Venice, at least, will be missed.
Those who value democracy should be bitter and angry as the government takes our freedoms from us, politically correct piece by politically correct piece in the name of another slogan β The Patriot Act. No terrorist can take what some Americans so willingly give away as they accept this president's spying and lying and religious ideology as "the price we pay for democracy." Giving up democracy for the sake of democracy? That's lunacy.
So, you bet I'm bitter and angry. And I can only ask, what would it take to make the bitterness and anger unanimous? I can't imagine, really, because what on earth is left for Bush to screw up?
There are 870 days 'til Jan. 20, 2009. Hang in there, America.
Β© 2006 The Times Herald-Record
http://www.recordonline.com/ |
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