Playing with Iraq

The Baker-Hamilton study group advised U.S. President George W. Bush to gradually withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and engage its neighbors, especially Iran and Syria, to control the rising violence in the country.

But in his speech on Wednesday night, Bush announced his new strategy to deploy over 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. He also blamed Iran and Syria for stoking the violence in Iraq.

It seems that the Bush administration, in an attempt to escape the consequences of failure in Iraq and also in a passive reaction to the defeat of the Republicans in the recent congressional elections, intends to run toward the heart of the crisis, a crisis that may one day be recorded in U.S. history as a greater debacle than the Vietnam War.

Bush has started playing with the fate of not only the Republicans but also all Americans. Although the Republicans have not responded to Bush’s new strategy, influential senators like Joseph Biden have warned the president about expanding the war to Iraq’s neighbors, especially Iran.

Everyone is certain that the U.S. policy has failed in Iraq. Waging a preemptive war while implementing the Greater Middle East Initiative has been Washington’s major policy in the region since September 11, 2001. But this policy has failed, too. The victory of the Democrats in the congressional elections was a message of disapproval of these failures.

For the same reason, Gordon Brown, who will most likely succeed British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has questioned Blair’s blind obedience to Bush and emphasized that he would never pursue such a policy.

Opinion polls in Western countries also show that Bush has chosen a path that the entire world opposes.

The failure of the Greater Middle East Initiative, Israel’s defeat in the 34-day war against Hezbollah, the failure of Israeli and U.S. plots to topple the government of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, and the inclination of the Iraqi people to form a government that would oppose the occupiers have caused the neocons, who realize that they will definitely lose the next presidential election, to take a major risk, a risk in which Iraq could be the victim.

The abduction of two Iranian diplomats in Baghdad and a raid on an Iranian consulate in Irbil to arrest six diplomats weakened the sovereignty of the Iraqi government for controlling the violence and establishing relations with its neighbors.

In his speech, Bush has pitted the U.S. government and the Iraqi people against Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government, warning that if the Iraqi government does not honor its commitments toward the United States, it will lose the support of the U.S. government and the Iraqi people. It seems that the White House is seeking to topple the elected Iraqi government and install a puppet government in Baghdad. In other words, Bush has said that the Iraqi government will only stand if it counters Iran and Syria.

The ambiguous scenario of Saddam Hussein’s execution should also be taken into account. The fact that the court did not address the crimes Saddam committed in the Iran-Iraq war, the Kuwait occupation, and Halabja and the way video clips of his execution were posted on the Internet showed that since Saddam’s war machine was put into high gear after the U.S. gave the green light, his death should also provide some benefits for the United States’ warmongers.

Washington is trying to incite animosity between the Shias and Sunnis, create a chasm between Iran and the Arabs, and deceive the world about the situation in the Middle East.

Although in his speech Bush acknowledged his strategic failure in Iraq, he proved that his “magic trick” is to expand the crisis and aggression to other regional countries to solve the insecurity problem in Iraq. This is a very dangerous plan that would make Iraq a plaything in Bush’s plots hatched for other neighboring countries.

It is obvious that the U.S. president has decided to run into the heart of serious crises to escape his failures. Bush is a dictator, but he is not brave enough to commit suicide like Hitler, and he is leading all U.S. citizens and the country’s allies to mass suicide.

RS/HG

END

MNA