"Surge" sounds like much "more of the same"

Sunday, January 21, 2007

“A NEW WAY FORWARD IN IRAQ” SOUNDS LIKE MERELY “MORE OF THE SAME”

President Bush’s “new strategy in Iraq” officially called “A New Way Forward”, but most commonly called the “Surge”, is designed to replace the old strategy of “Stay the Course”. Stay the Course, we all know, has not worked to achieve “Victory”, but has worked very well in to create chaos, civil war, death, and, most probably, thousands more terrorists than have been killed in the operation so far.

President Bush, no doubt, will review this new strategy for us in his State of the Union speech this Tuesday, while attempting to divert our focus from Iraq to domestic proposals such a health care for the uninsured, etc. We already know about the “Surge”, 21,500 more American soldiers in Baghdad, and a “democratic and unified” Iraqi government which will add thousands of Iraqi troops to be the main forces to “clear, hold, and build” Baghdad neighborhoods, and eventually take full control so that our troops “can start coming home”. Of course, he will say nothing of the permanent U.S. bases being constructed there which are designed to maintain our forces for decades to come, or that the necessity for a “unified” Iraq is to ratify and enforce the Iraqi laws that open Iraqi petroleum production to British and American oil corporations and the general economy to multinational corporations.

Will the “Surge” work? Not likely. As a number of American generals who have served in Iraq have already said, more American soldiers are more targets for the insurgents. The Iraqi forces are already involved in the sectarian violence (civil war) and, since 80% of the new forces are to be from the Kurdish “Peshmerga” forces, a new ethnic group will be inserted into the conflicting mix in the Iraqi forces, one that does not even speak the language of the others. Furthermore, Maqtada Sadr’s anti-American political allies in the Iraqi legislature have just announced that they are ending their 2 month boycott of the Iraqi legislature, joining other members of the Shia alliance. At the news conference, parliamentary speaker Mahmoud al-Mashadani said, "This is a new beginning,"…."We want to say to the world that an Iraqi solution for Iraqi problems is the key, and others must support these solutions." Does that sound like the Iraq government and President Bush’s new policy are on the same track?

I will listen to President Bush, of course, but right now I am much more interested in hearing the Democratic response of Sen. Jim Webb, D. Virginia. As reported by Francis X. Clines, “For the senator, the way out of Iraq is “from the outside in” — the full-scale regional diplomacy eschewed by the administration — rather than from inside Washington’s misplaced sense of being the center of all solutions.” (Italics mine). I am hoping that Senator Webb will clearly enunciate a much more realistic “new way forward” for the entire Middle East which can become the Democratic alternative and ensure that our troops can really come home at last.