Bush and Miscalculations in Iraq

[Doug]

Bush's Failed Policy of Kill, Kill, Kill
By Robert Parry
Consortium News

Friday 06 October 2006

from here.

On March 30, 2003 – 3 ½ years ago and only 10 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq – I solicited assessments from a few trusted military analysts and wrote that “whatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has ‘lost’ the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world.”

...Our March 30, 2003, article said, “Without doubt, the Bush administration misjudged the biggest question of the war: ‘Would the Iraqis fight?’ Happy visions of rose petals and cheers have given way to a grim reality of ambushes and suicide bombs...”

“Instead of recognizing their initial errors and rethinking their war strategy, Bush and his team are pressing forward confidently into what looks like a dreamscape of their own propaganda,” refusing to turn back “no matter how bloody or ghastly their future course might be.”

...But the enduring tragedy of Bush’s “mother of all presidential miscalculations” is that his underlying theory for addressing the problem of Islamic militancy hasn’t changed. It is still a strategy of “kill, kill, kill” – get revenge for 9/11 even against Muslims who had nothing to do it – and that is likely to continue, if not expand, after the Nov. 7 elections.

And, just as the Iraq War debacle was predictable 10 days into the fighting, so too is the end result of Bush’s vision of waging “World War III” against Islamic militants amid the one billion Muslims spread around the globe.

...America will bleed itself dry of available troops; it will spend itself into bankruptcy; it will transform itself into a grotesque caricature of what the United States once was. It will strip its citizens of their constitutional rights; it will imprison suspected “terrorists” and “sympathizers” without trial; it will spread death and destruction around the globe.

Yet even after sacrificing the very freedoms and respect for human rights that Bush claims are despised by al-Qaeda terrorists, the deformed United States will still lose the war. Bush’s strategy of “kill, kill, kill” will even accelerate the process, much as the Iraq War ignited more Islamic militancy...

Bin Laden’s Helper

Looking back over the past five years, it may seem strange to some, but President Bush often has served as al-Qaeda’s most important strategic ally.

Not only did he fail to finish off bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders in the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, but Bush’s decision to shift the American focus to the secular government of Iraq allowed al-Qaeda to regroup, recover and reorganize.

The invasion of Iraq then served as a major recruiting tool for Islamic radicals, what the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate called the “cause celebre” for spreading militancy throughout the Muslim world.

There is even evidence that bin Laden took an extraordinary personal risk, breaking nearly a year of silence in late October 2004 to release a videotape that superficially denounced Bush but was interpreted by CIA analysts as a backdoor way of helping Bush win a second term.

After the videotape appeared, senior CIA analysts concluded that ensuring a second term for Bush was precisely what bin Laden wanted.

“Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President,” said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret “strategic analysis” after the videotape had dominated the day’s news, according to Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.

Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years “parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. … Today’s conclusion: bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.”

...In a pro-Bush book entitled Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats and Confounding the Mainstream Media, right-wing journalist Bill Sammon devoted several pages to bin Laden’s videotape, portraying it as an attempt by the terrorist leader to persuade Americans to vote for Kerry.

“Bin Laden stopped short of overtly endorsing Kerry,” Sammon wrote, “but the terrorist offered a polemic against reelecting Bush.”

Sammon and other right-wing pundits didn’t weigh the obvious possibility that the crafty bin Laden might have understood that his “endorsement” of Kerry would achieve the opposite effect with the American people.

Bush himself recognized this fact. “I thought it was going to help,” Bush said in a post-election interview with Sammon about bin Laden’s videotape. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the President, something must be right with Bush.”

In Strategery, Sammon also quotes Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman as agreeing that bin Laden’s videotape helped Bush. “It reminded people of the stakes,” Mehlman said. “It reinforced an issue on which Bush had a big lead over Kerry.”

But bin Laden, a student of American politics, surely understood that, too.

Wider War

Now, two years later, Bush seems determined to expand the war in the Middle East to other countries. Last summer, he quietly backed the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon and reportedly urged Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to attack Syria.

...So, Bush has set the United States on course to battle not only the stateless terrorists of al-Qaeda and the stubborn insurgents in Iraq but Islamic political leaders who have broad popular support among the Muslim masses.

Bush’s virtual declaration of war on the Islamic world ranks as possibly the most ambitious military plan in American history – and without doubt the most reckless. This so-called “long war,” which Bush’s followers hail as “World War III,” would mean fighting large portions of a religious movement that has the allegiance of about one-sixth of the planet’s population.

...Since 9/11, Bush also has used the terrorist threat to discredit political opponents in the eyes of many Americans. In 2002 and 2004, Bush challenged the anti-terror credentials of Democrats, paving the way to Republican victories.

With Election 2006 a month away, Bush has fired up the terror rhetoric again, saying Democratic criticism of the Iraq War has proved that “the party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.”

But Bush has offered no coherent strategy for winning what amounts to a global counterinsurgency war against Islamic militants. Beyond vowing to stay on “the offensive” in Iraq and elsewhere, Bush has promulgated a dubious theory that widespread anti-Americanism can be overcome by imposing “democracy,” through force if needed.

...Yet, even a “kill, kill, kill” strategy along the lines of the Iraq War is certain to fail. As the U.S. intelligence community has recognized, the Iraq War has become a case study in how not to conduct counterinsurgency warfare – as well as an example of how wishful thinking and incompetent military strategies can make a bad situation worse.

The widening circles of violence will provoke more attacks on Western targets and then more retaliatory strikes by the United States against a multiplying Islamic enemy. This future of endless war and expanding repression represents Bush’s grim vision.

...Given Bush’s personality, however, it seems unthinkable that he would ever admit that he had made a mistake invading Iraq or that he would withdraw the troops. Nor is he likely to cooperate with peace initiatives by other nations that involve real compromise.

The only real hope for stopping Bush would have to come from an electoral intervention by the American people. They would have to vote in a way that puts the brakes on Bush’s “kill, kill, kill” strategy and starts looking for a pathway toward a more peaceful future.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

If Bush wants a fascists America (a dictatorship would be great, as long as I am the dictator), he hasn't made any mistakes. He's progressing nicely towards his goals. If Bush wants Armageddon so he can be raptured out of here, he hasn't made any mistakes. He's progressing nicely towards his goals.

Only if you keep trying to make Bush into a patriotic American, doing his best to uphold his oath (promises made, promises kept) to preserve and defend the Constitution, can you even vaguely consider Bush to have made mistakes.