Bush and top generals in open rift

From Iraq to the Gulf Coast, the Bush administration is on the defensive and is being attacked from all sides. The relentless Iraqi resistance to the occupation has caused an open rift between Bush and his top military commanders.

“The U.S. generals running the war in Iraq,” wrote the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 1, “presented a new assessment of the military situation in public comments and sworn testimony this week: The 149,000 troops in Iraq are increasingly part of the problem.”

During a trip to Washington, “the generals said the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops” and “energizing” anti-U.S. forces, which they dubbed as “terrorists across the Middle East.”

Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have refused to contemplate U.S. troop reductions. Bush has been repeating over and over in his speeches and press conferences that the U.S. will “stand down” when the Iraqi forces stand up. As a defense of his policies he has been promoting the idea that Iraqi puppet forces are getting more highly trained and battle ready. The Bush-Rumsfeld position is that U.S. troops will leave when they win.

Rift with Bush out in the open

But there was an open rift on both issues at the Sept. 29 hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Gen. John Abizaid, head of the Central Command in charge of all forces in the Persian Gulf, and Gen. George Casey, head of U.S. forces, testified that the number of so-called “level one” Iraqi battalions “at the highest level of battle readiness” had dropped from three to one since June—one battalion out of 110.

In addition, Casey testified that U.S. troop reductions were required to “take away one of the elements that fuels the insurgency, that of the coalition forces as an occupying force.” These sentiments were echoed by Abizaid.

The Wall Street Journal of Oct. 5 carried a lengthy analysis of the views of the military command, citing similar sentiments among the top U.S. generals in Iraq. Noting that Abizaid is “a fluent speaker of Arabic,” it said he told Congress that “we must reduce our military footprint” in the region.

The crisis is illustrated by the words of one general who wants more troops. “One Marine general,” wrote the Journal, “speak ing privately, compares his plight to that of the ‘little Dutch boy trying to plug up holes in the dike.’ He would shift Marines to one city of the al Anbar pro vince only to see the militants flee and take refuge in another area of the province where there was less of a U.S. presence.”

In other words, the U.S. military commanders are telling Bush out in the open that they have been sent on a Mission Impossible—to subjugate the Iraqi people and force them back into a colonial relationship.

The generals have spent almost $300 billion. They have carried out merciless offensives, killed over 100,000 Iraqis, destroyed cities, towns, and villages and imprisoned tens of thousands of Iraqis. And the result has been to widen and deepen the resistance.

In the course of this bloody occupation, almost 2,000 U.S. troops have been killed and 15,000 wounded, by official statistics. The resistance has forced the occupiers to openly concede the obvious—that the occupation is the problem, and an insoluble one for U.S. imperialism at that. Now a section of the high command is looking for a way out.

Bush answers the generals

Bush answered his commanders on Oct. 6 in a lengthy speech before the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front created by Congress. In the talk, available on the White House web site, he declared the war in Iraq to be central to his phony “war on terrorism.” He declared that “no concession, no bribe, or act of appeasement” would be acceptable. “We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory,” he concluded.

The speech ranted and raved with vicious, racist rhetoric about an imagined “radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” It was billed by the White House as a major policy statement.

The remarks “suggested a renewed effort by the administration to regain favor in the wake of criticism over its handling of Hurricane Katrina and were intended in part as a response to the antiwar movement…. Bush, in his remarks, appeared to counter recent statements by military commanders in Iraq, including two generals who told lawmakers last week that the presence of U.S. troops was fueling the insurgency in Iraq….” (Los Angeles Times, Oct. 7)

When the two top generals in charge of the occupation/war in Iraq openly challenge Bush and Rumsfeld, it must reflect a growing disillusionment among significant sections of the ruling class with the deepening quagmire. All the Bush policy makers are holding their breath and crossing their fingers, hoping the Oct. 15 vote in Iraq on a U.S-designed constitution will give them a lift.

‘Federalism’ means divide
and conquer

They have resorted to devising a so-called “federalist” constitution. They hope to make up for their inability to defeat the resistance with this divide-and-conquer strategy—using different puppet groupings in the Iraqi ruling class to divide the Iraqi people against each other. They promise spoils in oil revenue and territory to different factions of their Iraqi clients—falsely dubbed the “Shiites” or the “Kurds” or the “Sunnis.”

However, these quislings, who want to climb to power behind the guns of the occu pation, are not to be mistaken for the Iraqi people or for any religious or national sector.

That is why everyone who can see the real situation—who knows the difference between the factions that negotiate with the occupiers in the Green Zone and the masses in the resistance, from al Anbar to Baghdad to Basra—knows that the constitution will solve nothing for Washington.

Indeed, the commanders on the ground did not wait until after the constitutional vote to make their dismal prognosis. No one—with the possible exception of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld—believes that the situation of the U.S. colonial occupation forces will be improved by any constitutional vote. As the commanders have said, it is the occupation that fuels the resistance.

Ruling class disillusionment

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a reactionary, anti-communist strategist of U.S. imperialism who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, expressed publicly what many in the ruling class political establishment must be starting to think.

In a scathing column entitled “Ameri can Debacle,” Brzezinski wrote of the Iraq adventure:

“That war, advocated by a narrow circle of decision-makers for motives still not fully exposed, propagated publicly by rhetoric reliant on false assertions, has turned out to be much more costly in blood and money than anticipated. It has precipitated worldwide criticism. In the Middle East it has stamped the United States as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs. ... [T]hat perception has become widespread throughout the world of Islam.” (Los Angeles Times, Oct. 9)

This was written by a Cold Warrior who in 1979 originated the counter-revolutionary war in Afghanistan, the largest CIA operation in history, and funded many of the fundamentalist forces that have now turned against Washington.

This type of ruling class bitterness over the debacle in Iraq and the growing dismay over the ineptitude and disorganization by the Bush administration during the Hurricane Katrina crisis go a long way to explain why Bush is under such fire from all sides.

It helps explain why Bush adviser Karl Rove is being called to testify before the grand jury again; why Tom DeLay, Bush’s strongest right-wing ally in the House of Representatives, has a double indictment; why Bush’s former chief of procurement in the Office of Management and Budget, David Safavian, was arrested on charges of covering up a crooked land deal.

It explains why the Senate voted overwhelmingly to defy Bush and pass a bill sponsored by his Republican arch-rival, Sen. John McCain, outlawing torture in U.S. military prisons. Bush has threatened to veto the bill. It explains why his nominee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, who has been his personal staff assistant, is under attack from all sides.

For a variety of reasons, the Bush presidency is being discredited.

But these conflicts are within the ruling class and their representatives. The contending groupings and factions are all part of the imperialist establishment. Neither Brzezinski nor McCain nor any leading Democratic Party politician is calling for the U.S. troops to get out now.

For all their disgust with the losing war effort, they are all trying to find a way to save the situation for U.S. imperialism. The fact is that none of them has a viable proposal that can pull the Pentagon’s irons out of the fire.

But the anti-war movement has no interest in trying to save the situation for U.S. imperialism. It has no interest in devising any “timetable” for troop reduction or withdrawal or any other face-saving formula.

In the spirit of international solidarity with the Iraqi people, who are fighting for self-determination and national independence, the demand should be the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces. Whatever internal problems exist in Iraq can only be settled by the Iraqis themselves.