Bush in Jordan as Iraq regime disintegrates

President George W. Bush is heading for a NATO summit meeting in Riga, Latvia, to be followed by a meeting with puppet Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan. Jordan’s King Abdullah will host the Nov. 29 meeting with al-Maliki. Abdullah had just warned of the possibility of three civil wars in the next year—in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq.

The imperialist occupation of Iraq itself has brought a nightmare of daily existence to the population, including violent deaths of at least 4,000 civilians a month, many of them in the capital.

Bush, who has remained publicly enthusiastic about what is obviously the complete collapse of the U.S. criminal seizure of Iraq, now says the Iraq occupation is entering a “new phase.” As he travels, different groupings in U.S. leading circles are debating U.S. tactics regarding Iraq.

The most important of these debates is going on in the Iraq Study Group, which Congress set up last March to examine alternate policies for limiting damage to U.S. imperialist interests in the Middle East and worldwide.

These debates bring with them a new flow of misleading propaganda from both defenders and detractors of the Bush administration regarding U.S. aims for the region.

The United States did not invade Iraq to bring “freedom” and “democracy” or to destroy weapons of mass destruction. The United States invaded in order to gain control of the supply of oil, for both its strategic importance and direct profit.

The Bush administration almost single-handedly flaunted Pentagon power, riding over the objections of Washington’s usual cronies in Western Europe and Japan, with only the Blair regime in Britain as a serious junior partner.

To justify this aggression, Bush systematically lied to the world, especially to the U.S. population. Bush and Blair linked Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden and 9/11, and they made up entire scenarios about “weapons of mass destruction.”

The U.S.-led invasion and occupation has been responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. As the occupying power, the United States is responsible for the continued slaughter of Iraqis, no matter who directly pulls the trigger or sets the bomb.

The Bush administration is also guilty of sending U.S. troops, under a false pretext, to kill Iraqis and in turn to be targets of a completely justified Iraqi resistance movement.

The Iraq Study Group consists of five Democrats and five Republicans, all of whom have a reputation in Washington of being guardians of U.S. interests. James Baker, a close advisor to President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state from 1989 to 1992, is considered the ISG’s key player.

An article in the Nov. 26 Washington Post described the ISG as “a panel outside the government trying to bail the United States out of a prolonged and messy war.” According to the Post, “the panel was deliberately skewed toward a centrist course for Iraq.”

But “centrist” doesn’t mean the ISG is any closer than Bush to ending the war. On Sept. 18, after hearing the testimony and reports of various “experts,” the ISG took an ad-hoc vote between two positions.

The “Stability First” position really means sending even more U.S. troops to Baghdad. This stance won by a large margin on Sept. 18 and by a much smaller margin during a second vote in October.

The second position, “Redeploy and Contain,” means trying to gradually pull back troop positions while maintaining the occupation.

While the ISG debates expansion of the occupation, the Italian, Polish and even the British government—a co-conspirator for the initial March 2003 invasion—have announced plans to withdraw troops in 2007.

In Baghdad itself, thousands of Iraqi civilians are being killed each month. On Nov. 23, over 200 people died in coordinated car-bombings in Sadr City. Both the Bush administration and its critics in the U.S. establishment describe the fighting in Baghdad as “sectarian violence,” that is, between Sunni and Shiite-led parties or their militias.

Sunni and Shiite Iraqis agree, however, that the U.S. occupation has made everything worse. In a September poll taken by World Public Opinion, some 74 percent of Shiites and 91 percent of Sunnis want the United States out within a year at most. As of last January, some 61 percent of Iraqis in general supported attacks on U.S. forces. (Editor and Publisher, Nov. 21)

Exiled Iraqi Sami Ramadani wrote regarding “sectarian conflict” in Iraq: “The historical reality is that such differences never descended into communal killing and destruction. ... Most Iraqis ... perceive the violence gripping the land as a product of the occupation and think that it could be drastically reduced and brought under control only after the occupying forces depart.” (The Times of London Higher Education Supplement, Nov. 24)

Whatever the results of this next round of diplomacy and debate in U.S. ruling circles, it won’t in and of itself end the war and occupation.