Bush Looking To Pass The Buck On Iraq

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By Ron Fullwood (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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Whether you take the studied words of Gates about maintaining an "enduring presence" in Iraq; or the White House's refusal to predict how long it will take to force a stable democracy out of the state of anarchy they've deliberately fostered there, it's clear that Bush intends for a significant contingent of our military to remain in Iraq - not only "for as long as he's president," but for generations to follow - to either maintain his imagined legacy as a 'defender of freedom' or to "pass the buck" and muddle the record of his failure with their own misfortune and missteps.

Truman cast his military expansion into Korea as a "limited war" to stop what he saw as the advance of Chinese-sponsored "Communist aggression." Bush would have us believe that the influence of the original band of 9-11 thugs he's let run free for five years, and the sporadic violence of the one faction of Iraqi resistance calling themselves 'al-Qaeda' poses the same kind of threat that we faced in the '50's as the U.S. squared off its nuclear power against the military ambitions of China and the Soviet Union in the surrogate conflicts that were staged in Europe and in Asia.

There will be no armistice generated by skirmishing with whoever identifies themselves as al-Qaeda in Iraq. Eliminating the threat of al-Qaeda in Iraq won't generate any 'ideological' rejection of the underlying appeal of those Bush has allowed escape into the mountains of Afghanistan as they have been able to influence others for over five years since the initial attack on our nation to violent resistance against U.S. militarism in the Mideast and elsewhere.

It is the refusal of Bush and his cabal to recognize the folly of our very destabilizing military presence in Iraq which has fostered the conditions for increasing violent resistance aimed at the U.S., our agents, and our allies there. All Bush's military escalation in Iraq has done is increase that threat and inspired an unending line of resistance to the American targets he's busy piling in-between the warring factions.

Truman would probably not have unilaterally extended a battle against an al-Qaeda 'ideology' to expand past Afghanistan into Iraq. He fired MacArthur because the general wanted to take the fight to China. "I believe that we must try to limit the war to Korea for these vital reasons, Truman said as he explained the firing, "to make sure that the precious lives of our fighting men are not wasted; to see that the security of our country and the free world is not needlessly jeopardized; and to prevent a third world war."

Bush and his minions have no intention of drawing any Truman-esque line against their opportunistic al-Qaeda specter in Iraq, which should have been drawn in the hunt for the original terror suspects in Afghanistan. Bush has not succeeded in his 'ideological struggle' against the terror suspects he's allowed to escape. Rather, he's been intent on fostering surrogate battles; casting the resistance to his swaggering military advance across sovereign borders as an enemy to freedom; and inviting them to align with his fugitive nemesis so he can cast them as mortal enemies of the U.S., poised to 'follow our troops home' if we relent in our military domination of Iraq.

If Bush is intent on building a 'Korean model' defense of the Iraqi regime he says represents democracy, he'll need more than the straight-line 'security barrier' he's erecting in Baghdad between his Sunni scapegoats and his Shiite-dominated regime. He'll need a circular maze of walls in Iraq to surround and defend any propped-up regime if he expects to hold back the growing violent resistance to the very forces he expects to create and maintain peace.

If Bush truly wants a 'Korean model' for Iraq, he should leave the sovereign nation to it's own defense and go back to Afghanistan to hunt down and eliminate the very specter of ideology he says we should all fear. All he wants, though, is a legacy like Truman's in Korea in which his complicity can be assuaged by time and the fortunes of future presidencies as they grapple with the passed-buck of his blundering invasion and occupation.

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Ron Fullwood, is an activist from Columbia, Md. and the author of the book 'Power of Mischief' : Military Industry Executives are Making Bush Policy and the Country is Paying the Price

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