Bush steps into the abyss

President George W. Bush’s decision to expand the criminal war on Iraq and the U.S. military will leave its mark on U.S. history as indelibly as Lyndon Johnson’s troop escalation in Vietnam in 1964.

Bush has once more announced a plan for “victory.” He is adding more than 21,000 troops to the U.S. contingent, even while admitting casualties will rise. Some 16,000 will go to Baghdad, to add to its agony. Another 4,000 are headed to Anbar province, where the Iraqi resistance has effective control. Some will come from the regular U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Most will be recycled from the Army Reserves and National Guard.

Bush’s generals in charge—John Abizaid and George Casey—saw an escalation as hopeless, so the president replaced them with Adm. William Fallon and Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. These officers will be willing to shed even more Iraqi and U.S. blood.

Iraqis, whose lives are hell and who have lost hundreds of thousands of loved ones to Washington’s aggression, will be left with few choices. One of the few remaining satisfactions will be to strike a blow at the hated invader, and to fight on until all invaders are driven out. All prior evidence has shown that this is exactly what the Iraqis will continue to do.

This escalation of the Iraq war is accompanied by a plan, announced by the new “defense” secretary, former CIA head Robert Gates, to add 92,000 troops to the U.S. military over the next five years—another ominous sign of what lies ahead.

The Iraq Study Group made it clear that a significant sector, perhaps a majority, of ruling-class politicians, media pundits and military figures in the U.S. realize that the Bush gang’s plan to take over Iraq has already collapsed. But they don’t know what to do. They’re not willing to give up one cent of the super-profits garnered from abroad that make their class the richest in the world. So Bush, sensing their indecision, has chosen to ignore their warning and their advice to organize a controlled withdrawal. Instead, he is betting double or nothing on a “victory” that many in his own class see as delusional.

All indications are that no capitalist politicians or officials, Democratic or Republican, will stop the Bush gang. The Democrats have so far promised only “symbolic” votes in Congress spiced with a lot of criticism of Bush’s tactics—but not of his imperial designs. Zbigniew Brzezinski, of all people, came closest to it when he said on the McNeil-Lehrer Report on Jan. 11 that the war in Iraq is a “colonial war” that cannot be won in a post-colonial era—a startling admission from the architect of the U.S.-orchestrated war on Afghanistan during the Carter administration.

None of the politicians from either party have shown the will to take responsibility for organizing a retreat from the oil-rich Middle East.

Bush’s speech raises even greater dangers for the world, as he openly threatened attacks on Iran—a country three times the size of Iraq—and on Syria. He did this while the U.S. was opening a new war front in Somalia in Africa and the Pentagon had ordered another aircraft carrier group to the Gulf region, in striking distance of both Iran and the Horn of Africa. At the same time, U.S. troops in Iraq attacked an Iranian consulate and dragged out consular officials—a direct provocation and assault on Iran’s sovereignty.

Even Republicans in the Senate are comparing the present situation to 1970, when Nixon tried to rescue the failing war against Vietnam by invading Cambodia.

For the hundreds of thousands here who have actively opposed the war, this leaves only one option: mobilize the anti-war sentiment of the mass of the people into real active resistance. The latest polls show only 12 percent of the U.S. population supporting Bush’s latest escalation. Almost 60 percent say it was a mistake to go into Iraq in the first place.

It is a moment of truth for the anti-war movement. In this context, we salute the latest call by the Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC), which recognizes that Bush has shown “once again that he doesn’t care that the majority of us want the war and occupation to end immediately; he’s going to continue the war until the people literally rise up in mass rebellion in the streets to end it.”

TONC points out: “When Congress gets President Bush’s request for $100 billion more to fund the war, it must say ‘no’ to the entire amount.” The coalition calls on people to support the planned Jan. 27 and March 17 protests in Washington and adds, “[T]o ensure that Congress does not approve another dollar for the war, on March 17 (the fourth anniversary of the war), when we march on Washington against the war, instead of getting back on our buses and heading home we must be prepared to stay in Washington to make sure that Congress votes no.”