Bush & the Iraq war

George Bush has been acting optimistic about Iraq these days. Who is he fooling? For three days in a row, he has faced public audiences and the press corps. Probably for the first time in the three years since the invasion of Iraq, he has had to answer a few hard questions.

And he has managed, at least for the three days, to stick to the same litany of lies the administration used to justify the war in the first place: Saddam Hussein had to be removed, he was a danger to the U.S. population, he was friendly to al-Qaeda and to terrorism, and he had dangerous weapons. All lies, all blared out so many times in the media that Bush thinks a significant part of the population might believe them, and acts as if he believes them himself.

Bush’s problem is not just that he tells lies. In that he is little different from other U.S. presidents. His problem is that as he tells the lies to the media and the U.S. public, the Iraqi resistance answers them on the ground.

It was hard to believe Bush’s most recent statement that the U.S. is winning in Iraq. Soon afterward, 200 Iraqi resistance fighters answered with an attack on a prison, freeing 30 prisoners, including a few dozen considered fighters, killed 18 guards and took one casualty while burning down the jail. The next day resistance fighters attacked a paramilitary force’s headquarters, killing a high officer of the Third Public Order Brigade. (New York Times, March 22) So much for a U.S. victory.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela hit the nail on the head when he lambasted Bush and exposed the weak U.S. position: “The U.S. empire is defeated in Iraq. They just don’t want to admit it,” Chávez said on March 21.

Even Saddam Hussein, who spends most of his time in one of the infamous prisons the U.S. has set up in Iraq, came out looking better than Bush as the third anniversary of the criminal U.S. aggression approached. The Iraqi president, facing charges in a puppet court, used the opportunity to issue an urgent and compelling call to his compatriots to stop fighting among themselves and join together to drive out the U.S. occupiers.

Bush could only promise more years of hard fighting, bringing suffering to Iraqis, to U.S. troops, and to people at home deprived of the vast sums of public money wasted on the war. But victory itself—that lies with the Iraqi people who are fighting to drive the U.S. occupiers out.