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Cut and RunBy Stanley Heller Organizing Committee Member CT United for Peace (submitted to several CT newspapers) Now that General Petraeus and the Admnistration have issued their latest spin on their Iraq disaster perhaps the public may be interested in a view from a voice in the peace movement. After all we had it right about Iraq from the start. The question of whether the "surge" is working, of course, depends on your definition of "working". If it means that the insurgents have pulled back in Baghdad due to the big show of force then there has been success. But that was predictable. Any guerrilla force responds to a surge with a retreat. If on the other hand the question is whether Iraq is settling down and its government is fostering order and progress then the surge is revealed as a gold-plated scam. The Iraqi government, a collection of collaborators, opportunists and religious zealots, is absolutely irrelevant to the country. It does nothing for the country and is ignored by it. Actually Iraq doesn't exist. The land formerly known as Iraq is a collection of city-states, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk, Irbil, Baghdad, etc., occupied by a number of militias of which the US army is just the most powerful. Yes, the number of US soldiers killed in the last two months is down compared to the spring, but it's no less than it was last year. Has the number of Iraqis killed gone up or down? Who knows? How can we possibly accept any figures from the Bush Administration? The best estimate of Iraqis killed by violence in our "war of liberation" was done a year ago by Johns Hopkins researchers and published in the British Journal, "The Lancet". It said the war had led to some 650,000 deaths. Former British PM Tony Blair's chief science advisers had to admit the Hopkins estimate techniques were "best practice". Yet when our President deigns to mention Iraqi casualties he says 30,000 dead. One thing that is certain is that the flood of refugees has not abated one bit. Nearly three million have fled the country and a similar number have been ethnically cleansed and forced to move within Iraq. Then there was that bit of news at the start of August that there had been no water in Baghdad for 24 hours, no water because the electric grid cannot provide sufficient power to run water purification and pumping stations, no water while the temperature was 117 degrees. Four years of "reconstruction" and people in the capital city can't even get a drink of water. The war is lost. Our soldiers and the Iraqis have died in vain. Yet the Republican and Democratic politicians won't stop the bleeding. They can't admit that they twisted the facts for over a decade about Iraq and absurdly proclaimed that their one time ally Saddam was really a new Hitler and a "threat to the world". So they continue to cover their political behinds by cynically crying "Support the Troops" while they prepare to expand the war exponentially into Iran. On September 2 the Times of London said the US was making plans to "annihilate" the Iranian military with 1,200 attacks on every sizeable Iranian military target in three days. This blitzkrieg is supposedly deserved because our generals claim the Iranians are supplying Iraqis with roadside bombs and because Iran might have a secret nuclear weapons program that might one day make nuclear bombs (even though the CIA and International Atomic Energy Agency say they have no evidence at all of this program). Our Senator Lieberman dreams up a sense of the Senate resolution accusing Iran of "murder" and it sails through the Senate 97 to 0. Then he gets a $75 million added to the Foreign Operations Act to support gangs of Iranian dissidents (read thugs) in low intensity warfare against their government. That "Shock and Awe 2" against Iran would lead to a general uprising of Iraqi Shia against our troops in Iraq hasn't occurred to anyone. That an unprovoked attack on Iran would be the supreme war crime of "aggression" isn't bothering anyone. That the evisceration of another Muslim country would be a spectacular recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda is below everyones' radar. Cut and run! Cut the Iraq/Iran war budget to zero and run the lobby-fattened, war-junkie, chicken-hawk politicians out of town. |
