We’ve heard from the vaunted Iraq Study Group, headed by primo G.O.P. fixer James Baker and every Republican’s favorite Democrat (short of Joe Lieberman) Lee Hamilton, and they’ve delivered what appears to be an elaborate face-saving scheme for an administration and a congress that has driven us into the deepest foreign policy ditch in a generation. Military 
and diplomatic experts of every stripe are hitting the airwaves talking about “phased redeployment” and “force protection”, but, perhaps most remarkably, there is now a broad acknowledgement that a) this war is a disaster growing worse by the day, and b) we are losing. Like the 9-11 commission, though, this group was tasked with focusing on the “what the hell do we do now?” more than the “wha’ hoppen?” of Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. There is no accountability assessment in this charge, and with good reason. Many of the people who cooked up this splendid little war are still in office and are unwilling to play the “blame game”… especially since they are, well, to blame.
Seems to me, though, that blame should be the first order of business, since it doesn’t involve any complex logistical considerations and might actually even save us from future catastrophes. The finger should be pointed in a very serious way at the architects of this war, and I mean everybody, from Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to congressional hawks of both parties and their pundit-class cheerleaders. These people should be driven as far from the levers of power as possible; they should be politically marginalized so that they will never again participate in any major decisions affecting the nation’s welfare. I mean, why the hell should we pretend as if this were an authorless crime, like some kind of natural disaster, when the perpetrators are standing around, tongue in cheek, planning the next war? Why the hell should we perpetuate this “good intentions gone bad” fantasy that was so liberally deployed when Vietnam was generally acknowledged to be unwinnable? These people destroyed a country, killed probably more than half a million people, sent thousands of our own troops to their deaths, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars we haven’t even earned yet… all on the basis of false claims about WMD’s that were deliberately exaggerated to scare us into war. Where’s the good intention in that?
Now Baker, Hamilton, Joe Frank, and Reynolds (whoops — wrong group) have submitted a recommendation to begin what looks like a pullout but is actually a relatively long-term commitment to leave behind thousands of U.S. troops as military trainers and special strike forces in a country where they are almost universally despised. This is basically “Vietnamization” — getting Iraqis to do our hopeless fighting for us, while we work on salvaging some part of the actual American project in Iraq — that of establishing a permanent U.S. presence in the heart of the world’s most productive oil-producing region. Not quite the same as “stealing their oil” (though we’re happy to help favored firms do that via privatization of Iraqi oil fields), this has been a central goal of U.S. planners since our expulsion from Iran. Saudi Arabia is too sensitive to support a large-scale U.S. military presence, and though we’ve got staging areas in Kuwait and Qatar, the plan is to secure Iraq as a political-military client state — crucially, one that possesses massive oil reserves relied upon by our major economic competitors in Europe and the Far East. So I guess the message to our troops is, “Sorry, folks — it wouldn’t be a rapture if someone didn’t get left behind.”
Diallo redux. Sean Bell’s funeral was held in Queens last week, victim of something NYC police call “contagious shooting.” Though officers are highly susceptible, this rare ailment only seems to kill young, unarmed black men. Must be related to “contagious anal rape with a billy club,” from which Abner Louima suffered some years back (a.k.a. Giuliani’s disease).
luv u,
jp
