What Mr. Bush Won’t Announce Tonight

According to the White House, President George “LBJ” Bush will announce his new plan for winning the war in Iraq-Nam at 9 pm eastern time on TV. Given the leaks over the last few days, it is clear he’ll escalate the war, relying on a “surge” of troops to snuff out the insurrection in the country. It won’t work, and thousands more will die. Instead, the president should announce that the US has had enough, and that it’s up to the Iraqis to fix their own country.

While Iraq-Nam is foundering, America’s commitments elsewhere are being undermined by the Mesopotamian deployment of personnel and equipment. Therefore, the president should announce that there will be no new troops sent to Iraq at all. That’s it. There will be an immediate withdrawal of any member of the US military serving in Iraq under a stop-loss order; stop-loss orders are to be discontinued immediately. All reserve and guard units are to come home as soon as they can pack and get transportation. The troops who remain are not going to stay in Iraq beyond the end of their already announced deployment.

This creates a window of a few months before US troops leave Iraq entirely. It is now up to the Green Zone government to prove it has the backing of the people. If there is a political solution to the Iraq problem, the withdrawal of American troops should focus the minds of the negotiators nicely. If there isn’t, then there is no purpose to an American deployment of troops in any case. One fully expects various militias to start fighting one another. Let the new policy be, “As America stands down, Iraq-Nam can stand up or not.” It is their country. And if Iran and Syria intervene, they are welcome to the quagmire.

This frees US troops up for duty in Afghanistan if it isn’t too late to fix that benighted mess. If America were to deploy 10,000 there with one single mission, kill Usama bin Laden, Mr. Bush might yet succeed in “smoking out the evil doers.” No nation building, no propping up any government. Merely a man-hunt, and when he’s dead (please, let’s not pretend he’s getting a trial like Saddam Hussein’s), the troops leave. Mission accomplished.

The neo-con lie that Iraq had anything to do with the war against Fascislam has brought American foreign policy to its worst moment in 230 years. Delivering bourgeois liberal democracy with a free market economy at gunpoint made about as much sense as forcing the Arab world to play baseball on pain of death – culturally alien at best. And let no one forget, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The only thing for the Americans and their allies to do now is leave. Staying on cannot make things better. “Support the troops” can now only be done by bringing them home.

Mr. Bush will not do that tonight. Instead, he will stubbornly persist in fighting a war that he chose and that he has lost. As a result, he has no chance to redeem his presidency because he will drag this war out until he leaves office. No doubt he and his apologists will go to their graves believing they did the right thing. They did nothing of the sort.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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