| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"James Hall" |
| Date: |
03 Sep 2003 09:29:28 AM |
| Object: |
Naa, It Ain't A Quagmire, It Is Simply A Big Lump Of Bushshit |
Reposted by JHall.
URL: http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_aug24.html
August 24, 2003
U.S. mired in a mess of its own making
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
SCHONRIED, Switzerland -- Misled and misread. That pretty well sums up
America's growing disaster in Iraq.
First, President George W. Bush, VP ***** Cheney and a coterie of
neo-conservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle misled Americans
into an unprovoked, unnecessary war by claiming Iraq was about to attack the
U.S. with nuclear and biowarfare weapons. This was a grotesque lie that
anyone with knowledge of strategic weapons knew was arrant nonsense, but few
had the courage or honesty to refute.
Next, the White House gravely misread the strategic situation by swallowing
neo-con assurances the "liberation" of Iraq would be a cakewalk and oil
bonanza. Last week, Iraqis responded to Bush's foolish challenge, "Bring 'em
on," by blowing up UN headquarters in Baghdad and inflicting serious
sabotage on Iraq's oil infrastructure.
These attacks show the U.S. has got itself into a truly awesome mess in
Iraq. Far from easily plundering Iraq's oil wealth, U.S. occupation troops -
almost half the U.S. Army's combat forces - are now under siege, at a cost
of $1 billion US weekly.
Bush has literally stuck his head in a hornet's nest in Iraq and is now
getting royally stung. He, his scandalously inept national security
advisers, and the media's so-called "Iraqi experts" failed to comprehend
that a U.S. occupation would be a frightful, expensive, bloody mess - a
disaster that was totally predictable.
Worse, the U.S. occupation is clearly creating the kind of violence and car
bomb terrorism that Bush used as an excuse to invade Iraq. Call this a
terrorism perpetual motion machine. Iraqis who resist U.S. occupation are
branded "terrorists" and lumped into Bush's crusade against Islamic
militancy.
Blame the neighbours
When the U.S. finds itself unable to crush Iraqi resistance, it will blame
neighbouring Iran and Syria for "fueling terrorism," and may attack them.
Tehran and Damascus thus have every reason to stir the pot in Iraq to tie
down American forces and make it less likely the U.S. will next invade them,
as neo-cons are urging.
Just a score of Syrian or Iranian-supplied snipers, for example, could
inflict punishing losses on the U.S. garrison in Iraq. A few truck bombs
causing heavy U.S. casualties might well convince hitherto trusting
Americans that Bush's Iraq adventure is a bloody fiasco.
This writer, who covered the Afghan struggle against Soviet occupation in
the 1980s, sees many of the same elements developing in Iraq: tribal and
ethnic divisions, a foreign-supported puppet regime with a useless army, an
intractable guerrilla war and a great power with overreaching imperial
ambition.
Worse for the U.S., Iraq may be emerging - like Afghanistan - as a new,
pan-national cause for the Muslim world. Thousands of jihadi volunteers are
reportedly slipping into Iraq to battle U.S. troops. They range from
youthful idealists to battle-hardened jihadis from other wars and a handful
of suicide bombers. Just as the Afghan jihad electrified the Muslim world
and helped assuage its feelings of weakness and inferiority, for a new
generation Iraq may come to be a passionate struggle against another foreign
invader.
President Bush has conveniently provided anti-American militants and
fanatics across the Mideast with an ideal target: the U.S. army in Iraq.
Ironically, the American neo-conservatives who played a primary role in
engineering this war have stuck the U.S. in much the same morass that their
hero and ally, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, found himself in after
he engineered the invasion of Lebanon.
Each passing day makes Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq increasingly
resemble Lebanon's ugly civil war in the 1980s. Sharon, then Israel's
defence minister, ordered his army to invade war-torn Lebanon in 1982 under
the pretext of fighting terrorism. In fact, Sharon's real goal, which he hid
from Israel's prime minister and cabinet, was to crush the Palestine
Liberation Organization, turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate and make
himself prime minister.
A calamity
The result was a calamity for Israel, as its intelligence agency, Mossad,
had warned. Like recent CIA warnings over Iraq, Mossad was ignored. At
first, Israeli troops were welcomed by many Lebanese, but, they soon ended
up in a bloody guerrilla war. Israel's Lebanese Christian allies, many
neo-fascists, turned out to be as inept, conniving and treacherous as
America's Iraqi yes-men.
Israel was eventually car-bombed and blasted out of Lebanon by Hezbollah
guerrillas who, like today's Iraqi resistance forces, were branded
"terrorists." The war cost Israel heavy casualties and billions of dollars.
Syria emerged as the real winner, and overlord of Lebanon. Israel suffered
its first-ever military defeat. Sharon was convicted of indirect
responsibility for the massacres of thousands of Palestinian civilians at
the Shatilla and Sabra refugee camps.
The U.S. finds itself in a disturbing analogue of the long Lebanese civil
war, with confused American troops, like Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, not
knowing why they are there or who is the enemy and venting their frustration
on civilians. Protracted guerrilla warfare eventually turns even the
best-disciplined troops into brutes, and corrupts entire armies.
The very neo-cons who fathered this disaster are now calling for more
American troops to be sent to Iraq.
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