The Sun News

President Bush again addressed the nation on primetime television earlier this month. For at least the ninth time he explained to America why we will not be ending the war in Iraq…now or ever. It turns out that General Petraeus claims we are winning it; who would’ve known? But, even so, we won’t be bringing our troops home anytime soon. No, Bush’s intention is to keep the fighting going until long after his successor is sworn in. Our official policy is apparently to fight on and on and on, pointlessly, endlessly. Our leader has refused to define “victory”, so how will we recognize when it happens? Worse, the President has now come up with yet another in his constantly-evolving series of answers to the question of “why are we at war there?” This one is a real doozie, but so were the others and one can scarcely contain oneself with squirmy anticipation over his next (and future) answers to that perplexing question.

I’ve probably forgotten a few, but we all remember, among others used earlier, some of these responses from the President and his staff:

“Sadaam has weapons of mass destruction; we have to attack him before the mushroom cloud rises over the Middle East.”

“Remember 9/11! Al Qaeda (and Iraq) must pay for what happened in New York City!”

“Iraq is part of the global Axis of Evil and must be destroyed if peace is to have a chance anywhere in the world.”

“Sadaam Hussein is a mass murderer who deserves to be forcibly removed from power because of what he did to so many of his own people.”

“Our mission is to bring about regime change (or alternatively, Democracy) in Iraq to show all Middle Eastern nations how much better off they would be under that system.”

“This is a Crusade against Islamic Fundamentalism—the most dangerous enemy facing our nation today. Better to fight them in Iraq than in Peoria.”

“Iraq deserves the chance to fully use its vast petroleum reserves to create a showplace for capitalism and the Free Market, a beacon for other Arab states.”

“America’s vital interest in the region is to have Iraq as an independent, strong ally of ours, one serving to counter the Russian and Iranian influences among the former Soviet republics and the Moslem world and one willing to permit us to maintain US military bases within its boundaries.”

Not bad; eight rationales (at least) in four long years of the American Occupation. One every six months or so. But go ahead and scratch them out; ashcan them all. Now, if the September, 2007 Dubya is to be believed, we have a very different reason for continuing to station the 170,000 US troops (and don’t forget the 200,000 private contractors who support them) currently in Iraq: we were asked to help!

You and I might have missed it, but President Bush certainly didn’t: however faint it was, he definitely heard a plaintive call for assistance from Iraq. Certainly we can’t abandon a long-time ally who needs our help in resisting efforts to violently overtake it. That’s why we can’t leave. That’s why our guys and gals are fighting over there. Some enemy is trying to overthrow the Iraqi government…and we can’t leave until they have been eliminated and Iraq made safe. No matter how long that takes.

The raw hypocrisy of our President is breath-taking. To listen to the man, there is no civil war raging in that tormented country which we have thrown into a state of complete chaos with our ham-fisted tactics and our corruption and our blundering. No, it is not thousand year-old sectarian divisiveness that we are witnessing; not deep ethnic and cultural antagonisms once held in check by Sadaam’s strong-arm policies (and now loosed by our toppling of the dictator); not ancient nationalistic and anti-colonial forces struggling for control in a situation where the Central Government exists only on paper and in the American Ambassador’s reveries—it is none of that complicated stuff.

George W. Bush makes it all simple for us: a noble people, friends of America, are under threat and they have asked us to help. Of course we can do nothing but rush to their aid. We will help them in their fight against al Qaeda…which had never been in Iraq until we drew them there. It bothers him not in the least that one day we are shooting at Shiia militia and the next at Sunni. We prop up a Shiia-led government in Iraq even as we warn the world of the dangers posed by a Shiia-led government in Iran. We enter pacts with warlords in one province…and send in gunships to blast them out of the next. We proudly count bodies of “enemy” dead in a theater where “civilians”, “allies” and “enemies” are usually indistinguishable and in a culture that demands revenge whenever a loved-one is killed. We are already in well-over our heads in a situation where we seem intent on digging faster and faster. We are naifs in a complex, quicksand world of never-ending vengeance and we won’t let ourselves leave.

Bush will turn this disaster over to the next President in January, 2009 and then go back to Crawford to start working on his memoirs (working title: “Mission Accomplished; How I Managed to Do What Daddy Never Could”). But it is we, the sap US citizenry, who will get left holding the bag. We will be no closer to extricating ourselves from occupying Iraq than we are right now. The level of chaos and unrest will be at least as high. The toll in US soldiers’ deaths will be over 5,000 by then, with another 30,000 or more so severely wounded that they will require daily attention for the rest of their lives. Many times that number of Iraqi lives will have been taken.

Hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps as much as a trillion, will have been wasted on this horrific mistake, an economic hemorrhage which saddles our grandchildren and future generations with paying for our sins long after we pass from the scene. Schools, health care, housing, solutions to social problems and environmental repair will all have to be postponed because we are busily engaged in the thankless task of destroying Iraq (and with it our own reputation as a freedom-loving people). All this will come to pass…unless the Democrats in Congress are made to understand just how angry, how determined, the American people are. They aren’t convinced of it yet. That’s our challenge. Forget Dubya. Let Congress know they have to get the troops out…now, not in 2009 when the next President starts. No more fuzziness; just get the troops the hell out.