Democracy for Vancouver

What Bush didn’t say in his speech
Thulasi Srikanthan
The president’s ‘new way forward’ is designed to pass the stigma of defeat to his successor
January 11, 2007
David Olive

In the latest of his high crimes and misdemeanours, U.S. President George W. Bush gave false hope last night to Americans and the world that stability can be achieved in Iraq and the Middle East using the same methods that have repeatedly failed in the past.

The “new way forward” Bush unveiled in a nationally televised speech calls for a further escalation of U.S. troops in Iraq, when three previous troop “surges” have made no difference. Bush again is installing new generals, describing their skills in the same glowing terms he used in announcing previous changes of command.

Demanding “patience, sacrifice and resolve” from the American people in the year ahead, Bush vowed the U.S. will rededicate itself to rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure. Similar pledges in the past have been thwarted by an Iraq insurgency a fraction of the size it is today.

And the president will ask for yet another massive appropriation of Iraq-war funding from the U.S. Congress, funds to be administered by the same bureaucracy in Washington and Baghdad that has overseen the squandering of billions of dollars through corruption and mismanagement.

Once again, Bush promised to apply pressure on the Nouri al-Maliki government in Baghdad to take on more of the job of running Iraq, and especially to end the bloodbath of sectarian violence.

That is a fantasy.

Al-Maliki’s own party is a proxy for the Shia leadership in Tehran. When not turning a blind eye to the majority Shiites’ low-grade campaign of ethnic cleansing against the minority Sunnis, al-Maliki has fed that conflict, most recently with his government’s botched execution of Saddam Hussein. One could not ask for a less effective ally in bringing tranquility to Iraq.

More important is what Bush did not say last night.

The president withheld from Americans that the United States is losing the war Bush launched almost four years ago.

And that Iraq has descended from a quagmire to a civil war, in which 132,000 U.S. military personnel are preoccupied with not getting themselves killed in the sectarian crossfire.

And that the Iraqi middle class – the last hope for Iraq to rebuild itself – has long ago departed into self-exile.

That “the hell that is now Iraq” (as Saddam said from the gallows) threatens to spill over Iraq’s borders into a regional conflagration.

That Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Turkey have been warning the White House for months that they are preparing to take up arms to protect their fellow ethnic Sunnis in Iraq, by invading Iraq themselves if necessary.

That Washington think-tanks and Bush’s own administration are girding for a “nightmare scenario” – in which the Saudis try to militarily reinforce their fellow ethnic Sunnis in Iraq to stave off their extermination and Iran steps up its military aid to the Shiites in hopes of setting up a puppet Shia regime in south and central Iraq to gain control of the southern Iraqi oilfields. A strengthened Iran is a scenario the otherwise Sunni-dominated region seeks at all costs to avoid.

Even Turkey, one of America’s most reliable allies in the region, has amassed troops to invade Iraq from the north to squelch the ambitions of Iraqi Kurds seeking to create a “greater Kurdistan” that unites ethnic Kurds in Iraq, southern Turkey and northern Iran, and also to protect Iraq’s Turkmen community.

That is the Pandora’s Box that Bush so unwisely pried open in March 2003.

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