On the Lip of the Vortex: Surging to Disaster

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

My investigative-reporter hero from the 1950s and '60s, I.F. Stone, told me decades later that he delighted in finding news nuggets not in front-page articles but buried deep inside, sometimes in the closing paragraphs, of mass-media stories.

This observation has served me well in doing political analysis over the years. It has helped me figure out how best to read articles, and has reinforced my theory of news reporting as too often being sleight-of-hand entertainment: distracting your eyes and mind while the real object for scrutiny is secreted elsewhere.

Indeed, one could carry the argument even further: Politics isdistraction, often a weapon of mass-distraction. Usually, government officials and their P.R. toadies want you to look one place while they carry out their dirty deeds somewhere else.

What made me think about all this was the little-talked-about subject generally missing from, or on occasion hidden deep inside, stories about Bush's military "surge" into Iraq.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

The government's (and mass-media's) short version is that Bush's "surge" probably won't work, but as a last-ditch effort it's worth trying.

The missing piece: Even if by some stroke of luck, Bush's escalation of the war started tamping down the sectarian violence in Baghdad, there is no concomitant political plan in place, not even in the idea stages. It's all ad hoc illusioning, a faith-based initiative hoping that somehow, some stability will emerge in Iraq out of the war-magician's hat.

Other than hoping and praying that the Sunnis and Shias and Kurds will put down their arms and forget their many generations and centuries of distrust and hatred -- and their greed for the oil-money and reconstruction cash-cow -- there is no new initiative on the political front in Iraq.

There is indeed a "political plan" of sorts associated with the war's escalation -- but it has nothing to do with what's happening on the ground in Iraq. Rather, the "surge" is designed to save Bush and Cheney and Gates and Rice and the rest of the crew down there in the White House Bunker from acute embarrassment, and from political/legal liability as the situation gets more and more disastrous in Iraq. Their hope is to stalemate the war and somehow stagger their way past the 2008 election.

FAILING ON BOTH FRONTS

So, let's summarize. It seems clear that Bush's "surge" probably isn't going to work militarily -- even Defense Secretary Gates has told Congress that he's already started planning for that possibility in Iraq's bloody civil war. (There is reasoned speculation in D.C. that the Administration is even considering dividing Iraq into three ethnic/religious federated states, an idea that was anathema to them previously.)

And why should one even hope for success in this new escalation? The CheneyRumsfeldBush war administration blew all chances of a "victory" in Iraq years ago with the way they took the U.S. into war based on lies and deceit, and with no-postwar planning, and then through their thoroughly corrupt and incompetent Occupation policies, complete with widespread torture.

And, as many have noted, the escalation of the war -- not just in Iraq, but likely expanding also to Iran -- is destined to fail also because the Bush Administration is placing virtually all its chips on the use of military force. Scant, if any, attention has been paid to the political and diplomatic options that are out there: encouraging a regional approach to a solution, engaging United Nations' peacekeeping forces, negotiating with the insurgent groups about the modalities of a safe U.S. withdrawal, etc.

DEALING WITH WORLD-CLASS BULLIES

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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (more...)

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