"Whenever there’s a big war coming on, you should rope off a big field. And on the big day, you should take all the kings and their cabinets and their generals, put ‘em in the center dressed in their underpants and let them fight it out with clubs. The best country wins." --Maxwell Anderson
With one sweeping declaration this past week, presidential hopeful Barack Obama brought truth and reality to the Iraq debate and stripped bare the blundering excuses and lies of the Bush administration and their lackey-in-waiting, John McCain, and left them to wallow in their own inanity and ignorance.
"As should have been apparent to President Bush and Senator McCain," Sen. Obama
declared, "the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was. That's why the second goal of my new strategy will be taking the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan." he said.
"This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize. This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe."
As Sen. Obama has done, Democrats and others opposed to the Iraq occupation who continue to acknowledge Bush's 'terror war' should oblige him and aggressively tie it to the quagmire in Iraq and his wallowing failures elsewhere in the world. Bush 'cut-and-ran' from the hunt for bin-Laden in Afghanistan to invade and occupy Iraq. As critics have repeatedly pointed out, Bush has far more military and other resources in Iraq than he does in Afghanistan where al-Qaeda was based.
And, if Iraq has been the center of their 'terror war', than Bush and McCain should know that effort has been hopelessly bogged down in the bloody civil war that surrounds the troops hunkered down in the U.S. Green Zone. The administration has worked to conflate legitimate concerns about the occupation and the brutality and oppression surrounding our country's involvement there with al-Qaeda in an attempt to paint opposition to their bloody imperialism as akin to terrorism and terrorists.
Bush spent most of the last presidential and congressional election seasons flying around the country, with his cohort Dick close behind playing the War president to Cheney's messianic campaign of fear and smear. This election will be no different, except in the substitution of his own ambition to continue his bloody quagmire with the political zealotry of John McCain in his opportunistic bid to be the one to continue to commit our men and women in uniform to deadly sacrifices in Iraq.
The Bush regime, backed by all of his republicans, 'cut and ran' from Afghanistan and let bin-Laden and his accomplices get away. That's why our nation is still at risk; not from 'terrorists' in Iraq, but from an al-Qaeda organization and network which was emboldened by bin-Laden's escape, and is further encouraged to act against the US, our allies, and our interests by Bush's failure to catch them years after he promised to apprehend them, "dead or alive."
The Bush regime has told their embattled, unpopular Iraqi junta that they will accept "alternatives to democracy" in Iraq. That's a far stretch from the rhetoric that Bush used to get us into this occupation and will keep us there while he looks for some 'victory.' If our troops are now going to be fighting and dying to protect and defend anything less than democracy there, that's yet another definition of proper use of the defensive forces of our nation's military by this dissembling administration.
It was a huge admission that they were willing to compromise on the most basic of principles that our defensive forces operate under. It's one thing to muckrake with our military under the guise of a threat to our nation's security, but that excuse went out the window years ago. The most salient excuse Bush has used is the defense of Iraq's 'democracy'. Now, it seems, they have abandoned this last lie as Iraqis continue to throw off any product of Bush's imperialism he repeatedly claimed was in the Iraqi's interest.
By his own declaration, Bush has framed the continuing failure in Iraq as a referendum on his handling of issues of national security and foreign affairs. And, despite his devastating failures, he and McCain are still demanding more time to fit the square peg of terrorism into the circular hell-hole in Iraq. Nobody 'stays the course' in the face of failure as consistently as Bush does. But, John McCain is making a bid to better Bush on that score.
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 earlier this year, Bush took pains to explain the reasons for his obstinacy which centered almost exclusively on Iraqi concerns instead of any American interest. 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.
There are glaring, anti-democratic 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 and McCain insist that their "top priority is to help the Iraqi leaders," who, they say, "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 to oppose the U.S. enabled regime; 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.
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.
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 -- and his would-be republican successor holds the same opportunistic reticence. After his veto of the last Iraq withdrawal legislation passed by Congress, Bush took pains to explain the reasons for his obstinacy which centered almost exclusively on Iraqi concerns instead of any overriding American interest. Apparently, the political success of the regime installed and maintained behind the sacrifices of our soldiers is more important to Bush and McCain than anything the American people are telling them with their votes last November, and more important than their response to almost every poll they've answered insisting that he bring our troops home.
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 and his partners have so recklessly elevated. That's exactly what the American people and the legislators they elected to office have been warning against. Those are precisely the warnings that Bush and his republican cohort, John McCain are determined to ignore as they push our troops even further toward provoking Iraqis and others into even more attacks on our troops; on our allies,and our interests at home and abroad as he picks a fight against a world of 'enemies' who would resist these republican militarists swaggering advance and their bloody expansionism waged behind the sacrifices of our nation's defenders.
by, Ron Fullwood
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Barack-Obama-Redefines-the-by-Ron-Fullwood-080719-968.html
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