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The perverse logic of Bush's war
By Gareth Porter
The Asia Times

President George W Bush's plan to escalate US military involvement in Iraq, to be announced on Wednesday night (Washington, DC, time), reflects a perverse political logic that prevents US administrations from being able to reverse imperial military adventures once they have begun.

The iron law governing the politics of these imperial debacles seems to be that the leaders who commit the country to war realize at some point that they have seriously miscalculated and
that the war cannot be won, but by then they figure it is already too late; they must act as though they are aiming at victory, because of the fear of admitting the truth.

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If the plan to add as many as 20,000 more troops to US military presence in Iraq does go into effect in the coming weeks, it will be without any sense that the military or national-security bureaucracy believes in it. It is now clear that Bush had to replace the commanders he had in place in Iraq in order to push through an escalation of US troops presence, because General George Casey and General John Abizaid recognized that adding more US troops in Iraq would make matters worse, not better.

And even some high officials of the Bush administration have been privately saying it is a big mistake. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that "senior military and administration officials privately admit their deep concerns that the troop increase will backfire - and leave the United States with no options left in six to eight months".

The biggest backfire of such a policy would come as a result of a major political and military confrontation with militant Shi'ites in Baghdad and in southern Iraq. Lieutenant-General Ray Odierno told reporters he expects US troops to go into the massive Baghdad district known as Sadr City, because it is populated by working-class Shi'ites loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

If the United States does provoke a battle with Muqtada's Mehdi Army, there will undoubtedly be a major spike in battle deaths and in civilian casualties. The fighting also might well unhinge the highly tenuous arrangements that keep the Iraqi government from collapsing.

Even if the Democrats do not derail the Bush escalation, it is also certain to backfire politically at home. The Democratic leadership of Congress can now use their power to hold hearings, investigate and attach policy-related conditions to money bills to harass and pressure a mortally weakened administration over its intensely unpopular war.

Despite all these extremely serious risks, Bush has deliberately rejected any compromise such as was offered by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) for de-escalating US involvement in Iraq. Instead, he has signaled that he is prepared to fight everyone - Democrats and Republicans in Congress, both Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq - in pursuit of "victory".

That stubbornness has been noted and analyzed by Washington observers for many months now, and the most popular explanation for it has been Bush's "faith-based" approach to policymaking, which eschews intelligence and expertise in favor of ideological or religious belief.

But last week the New York Times revealed a Bush statement to the ISG that provides a crucial piece of the puzzle of the president's stubbornness on Iraq. In an article on how the Bush administration's strategy unraveled during 2006, the Times reported that Bush explained to the ISG at a meeting in the White House in November why he continued to use the term "victory" in regard to Iraq. "It's a word the American people understand," Bush told them, "and if I start to change, it will look like I'm beginning to change my policy."

The implication of that statement was clearly that Bush had to continue to appear to be pursuing victory, even if he understands that the term has been rendered irrelevant by the brutal facts on the ground in Iraq. To do otherwise, it suggested, would be politically suicidal.

In admitting, in effect, that he is compelled to keep up the appearance of the pursuit of victory, Bush was echoing an eerily similar statement by the Lyndon Johnson administration official who became associated in the public mind with the Vietnam War: secretary of defense Robert McNamara.

On June 29, 1965, just days before McNamara and other administration policymakers began a process of approving an open-ended escalation in South Vietnam, McNamara told British foreign secretary Gordon Walker that "none of us at the center of things talk about winning a victory", but that they could not tell the American people that the war could not be won.

Within 18 months, McNamara had left the administration, having given up any hope of winning in Vietnam, but the war continued for six more years.

The primacy for the Bush White House of maintaining the fiction that it is still aiming at victory in Iraq further implies that Bush is
concerned mainly with being able to hand off the occupation to the next president in 2009.

This interpretation of Bush's escalation maneuver was given further credence on Sunday when the general Bush hand-picked to become the new commander of US combat forces in Iraq, Odierno, told reporters that it might take another "two or three

years" for US and Iraqi forces to make progress, or as the Times report put it, to "gain the upper hand in the war".

Two or three years, of course, would conveniently carry the policy into the next administration. The Times did not connect the dots, but few readers could have been unaware of the political significance of the time frame adopted by Bush's newly minted military team in Iraq.

It does not appear to be merely coincidental that the most influential outside adviser to Bush and his national-security team in the weeks before the Bush policy was leaked to the press was former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. McClatchy Newspaper reporters Warren P Strobel and Jonathan S Landay wrote in mid-December that Kissinger had met with Bush frequently and with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a half-dozen times in late 2006.

The sudden emergence of Kissinger as a key figure in Bush's Iraq policy deserves closer examination. Although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi'ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the US position in the war is actually weak and unstable. One of Kissinger's accomplishments was to sell the news media on the Nixon administration's propaganda line that the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi had so unnerved the North Vietnamese that it had allowed president Richard Nixon and Kissinger to achieve a diplomatic victory over the communists in the Paris Agreement. That line was a gross distortion of what actually happened before and after the bombing.

But Bush may be equally interested in Kissinger's experience in shifting the blame for defeat to the Democrats. That is exactly what he tried to do in spring 1975 when the South Vietnamese military regime fell apart under the pressure of the North Vietnamese offensive. Even though Kissinger had privately admitted at the time of the Paris Agreement that the regime of president Nguyen Van Thieu was unlikely to survive, he insisted that Nixon's successor, president Gerald Ford, go through the motions of asking for an additional US$722 million in military aid on April 11, less than three weeks before the final collapse.

In his account of the period, Without Honor, journalist Arnold Isaacs recalls how Kissinger wrote Ford's speech so that the blame for the defeat in Saigon was clearly placed on Congress and his own role in Vietnam policy was vindicated.

So when Kissinger, in an interview with CNN last December 14, said that "a surge capability would play a role [in Iraq], if only because it would show that the United States is not just running out", we can see the outlines of yet another Kissinger-inspired political strategy for an administration facing likely defeat.

Last week Senator Joseph Biden, Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he had "reached the tentative conclusion" that much of the administration, perhaps including perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, already "believes Iraq is lost". He described the Bush administration strategy as one of simply trying to "keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy".

The Democratic leadership in Congress is now in a position to force an end to the US occupation, and both they and Bush know it. Kissinger's stab-in-the-back thesis was allowed to linger for decades without a decisive response from the Democrats.

But the political circumstances surrounding the current administration's Iraq debacle are far more difficult for Bush than the 1975 circumstances were for Kissinger. That ought to give the current Democratic leadership a clear shot at quashing Bush's effort to play cynical politics with the bloody mess in Iraq.

Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His latest book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.