Bush’s Policy of Escalation May Extend Beyond Iraq

By Rachelle Marshall

An Iraqi man holds his mother, who fainted after her son was questioned and nearly detained by U.S. Army soldiers from the 5-20 Infantry Division during the launch of Operation Arrowhead Strike Six in Baghdad’s northern Shaab neighborhood, Feb. 6, 2007 (AFP Photo/David Furst).

No major American leader doubts that America must remain the locomotive of the world.—Columnist David Brooks, New York Times, Feb. 1.

No one loves armed missionaries.—Robespierre, to the French National Assembly, 1791.

A RECENT COVER of the Economist magazine pictured George Bush as a demented cavalry officer waving a sword and shouting “Charge!” to the troops behind him as he rides his horse over a cliff. It is an apt illustration of current U.S. policy in the Middle East, where the Bush administration is escalating military action in two wars and threatening to launch a third.

Harvard historian Stanley Hoffman warned in a November 2001 article for The New York Review of Books that a war directed against the Taliban would be the wrong response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Such an action, he wrote, “risks sending us into an Afghan quagmire of disastrous proportions, causing a huge new exodus of miserably poor people, and creating revulsion and perhaps revolt among the Pakistanis, or at least some faction of them.”

Nearly six years later, victory in Afghanistan is further away than ever. Attacks on U.S. and NATO forces have tripled; the number of U.S. troops in the country has increased from 9,500 to 26,000; and in mid-February Bush called on NATO allies to provide a larger force in preparation for ”fierce fighting” this spring.

A resurgent Taliban has bases among tribes in western Pakistan and again controls large portions of the country, but American and NATO troops also face resistance from warlord militias and Afghan villagers who have traditionally fought against invading armies. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Claudio Franco trekked for nine hours into the mountains to interview a Taliban commander, and concluded, “the sons of anti-Soviet fighters...are prepared to outwait any occupation force.”

There is no basis for Bush’s belief that the United States will be able to impose its will on a country where the Persians, the British, the Russians, and the Soviets with 100,000 troops have failed. Equally irrational is his promise of victory in Iraq. An operation that began with lies is now kept going with fantasies. The “new way forward,” Bush announced last January, which called for sending 21,000 more troops to fight an unwinnable war, is only his latest fantasy.

Bush was convinced he could force change in the Middle East, despite warnings by Middle East scholars, State Department analysts, and even the CIA that Iraq was likely to disintegrate into chaos if the United States tried to oust Saddam Hussain. The consequences of Bush’s hubris have been played out in tragedy over the last four years, as the invasion and its aftermath destroyed the Iraqi state and left a vacuum that was filled by sectarian violence.

Sending more soldiers into this cauldron will do nothing but ensure that more Americans and Iraqis will die. Combat soldiers are not trained to make peace or bring about stabilization. Nor will the additional troops make Iraqis more secure. When soldiers on patrol believe they are in danger they call in air strikes that too often kill anyone within range. In early February Iraqi troops in Najaf called for help when they spotted a number of strangers moving across the landscape. The warplanes that responded killed 263 people who were later found to be members of a religious tribe on their way to a shrine. A few days later American soldiers mistook the headquarters of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani for the hideout of an al-Qaeda bomb-making cell, and killed nine Kurdish guards.

Bush’s “new strategy for victory” requires Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki to deploy more Iraqi troops in Baghdad, disband the militias, and achieve reconciliation between Shi’i and Sunnis, but Al-Maliki’s government has been paralyzed for months. Most of the time the parliament can’t raise a quorum because more than half the members have left the country for their own safety or are boycotting the sessions. The death squads that have carried out the the most brutal atrocities are linked to the Interior Ministry, and the most powerful militia, the Mahdi army, is controlled by the Shi’i cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who provides Al-Maliki with his largest base of support. Other militias are deeply embedded in neighborhoods where they provide services such as garbage collection as well as security.

With the start of the new offensive on Feb. 7, additional checkpoints, blast walls and barbed wire barriers quickly appeared throughout Baghdad, bringing traffic to a halt, while low-flying helicopters and fighter jets roared overhead. An Iraqi officer, Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar, announced he had taken over the Defense and Interior ministries and that the government intended to open mail, monitor phone calls, and evict thousands of squatters.

An Iraqi tribal leader predicted that if the additional U.S. troops “only use force, like before, they will make many more problems”—but such concerns did not register with an American military spokesman, who said the incoming forces would carry out “targeted killings and large-force operations.” The assassinations of several high-level militia commanders by the army have already angered many Iraqis, who see such actions as an infringement on Iraq’s sovereignty. In “large-force operations” soldiers sweep through neighborhoods searching homes and rounding up all males old enough to carry a gun. It is clear why at least 78 percent of Baghdad residents say they would feel safer if the Americans left.

Bush claims the war in Iraq is “a decisive ideological struggle,” in which “the security of our nation is in the balance,” but the actual enemies in Iraq are either the participants in Iraq’s domestic civil war or Iraqis who want our troops out of their country. When American and Iraqi forces recently conducted a joint operation in Baghdad they encountered fierce resistance but couldn’t tell who was shooting at them. The sergeant in charge said it could have been Sunni insurgents, Shi’i militia fighters or the Iraqi soldiers who had disappeared into the alleys during the battle.

Occupation authorities apparently also regard some Iraqi political parties as the enemy. In early January U.S. troops destroyed the headquarters of the National Dialogue Front, a secular party that has 11 seats in parliament, and seized its files. Two bodyguards of party leader Saleh al-Mutlak were killed. The army claimed the building was a safe house for al-Qaeda, but Al-Mutlak and his followers said they were actually trying to organize a coalition with Sunni, Shi’i and secular groups that would replace Al-Maliki with a more effective Iraqi government and force an American withdrawal. They called the attack on their headquarters an attempt by U.S. officials to block this effort.

The fact that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the Army to leave their country makes no difference to Bush. In calling for a military escalation, he has also ignored American public opinion, defied Congress, rejected the advice of his top generals, and brushed off the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. Bush may be playing for time, hoping the Democrats who replace him can be blamed for the inevitable defeat. He may also be planning a more dangerous gamble.

A More Dangerous Gamble


In Gaza City, women watch a funeral procession for a Palestinian killed in factional fighting (Photo: Mohammed Omer).

Bush issued an unmistakable warning to Iran when he promised in his State of the Union speech to “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” Vice President Dick Cheney warned on Fox News in January that “The threat that Iran represents is growing. It’s multidimensional.” Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte echoed Cheney’s warning a week later when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Iran could do serious harm to U.S. interests in the region. “We don’t believe their behavior, such as supporting Shi’i extremists in Iraq, should go unchallenged,” he said.

On Feb. 11 three Pentagon officials who insisted on remaining anonymous showed reporters a pile of explosive devices that contained markings indicating they were made in Iran. The event reportedly had been planned and orchestrated for months by top-level Bush administration officials in order to make their charges against Iran seem credible. At his press conference on Feb. 14 Bush said, “I can say with certainty that the Quds Force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated IEDs that have harmed our troops.” When the United States found who was responsible, he added, “we will deal with them.”

Last November the senior commander in the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said that ending the conflict required political and diplomatic action, and he urged the administration to reach out to Syria and Iran for help in stabilizing Iraq. Abizaid, who has a graduate degree in Middle East Studies, was soon out of a job. He was replaced by Admiral William J. Fallon, who at his Senate confirmation hearings in January accused Iran of “attempt[ing] to deny us the abilty to operate in this vicinity.” Fallon assured senators that the United States could hit back at Iran by hampering its oil shipments in the Persian Gulf.

Placing an admiral in charge of all American forces in the Middle East made sense in view of Bush’s decision to send two more aircraft carriers and a large support fleet to the Gulf. The carriers are equipped with cruise missiles capable of reaching targets in Iran. Washington also is stationing more anti-missile batteries off Iran’s coast and has pressured international banks and businesses to cut off all dealings with the Islamic republic.

Despite the Pentagon’s exhibit of Iranian-made explosive devices, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was not convinced that the Iranian government was providing them. In fact, logic points the other way. The Iranians do not want a country in turmoil on their borders and have cooperated with Iraqi officials in measures to calm the situation. Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, announced in late January that Iran was planning to open a national bank in Iraq and was working with the Iraqi government on reconstruction plans. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish Iraqi member of parliament, declared bluntly, “The Iraqi government doesn’t think Iran is the enemy.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, revealed on the BBC in January that in 2003 Tehran had proposed to the Bush administration that it would help stabilize Iraq, end military support for Hezbollah, and provide more transparency regarding its nuclear activities if Washington lifted sanctions against Iran and dismantled Iranian opposition forces based in Iraq. Dick Cheney vetoed the deal. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser at the time, referred to Iran’s offer on National Public Radio last June. “What the Iranians wanted,” she said, “was to be one-on-one with the United States so that this could be about the United States and Iran.”

What the Iranians actually want was described by Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, in a Feb. 8 New York Times op-ed column. Zarif called for regionwide cooperation to contain the current crisis in Iraq and prevent future ones, and stressed the need to “reverse the dangerous trend of confrontation, exclusion and rivalry.” Resolving Iraq’s problems, he wrote, “requires prudence, dialogue, and a genuine search for solution.”

Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq’s most influential Shi’i leaders, has said that talks between Iran and Washington were of utmost importance both to Iraq and to the entire region. Yet the Bush administration has ignored all such pleas. In refusing all official contacts with Iran and Syria, the United States stands alone with Israel in shunning two countries the rest of the world recognizes as legitimate negotiating partners whose concerns must be taken into account in any Middle East peace agreement.

Washington’s boycott of the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine is an equally serious obstacle to peace. Rice’s much heralded peace summit in Jerusalem on Feb. 19 became no more than a charade when she and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refused to meet with Hamas leaders. Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed only that they would meet again. America’s close ally, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, made the futility of Israeli and U.S. policy embarrassingly clear in early February, when he invited Abbas, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah, and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal to Mecca for the purpose of forming a new Palestinian government. The meeting was aimed at ending weeks of fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Abbas’ Fateh supporters in which more than 60 Palestinians were killed.

Washington made sure the fighting would continue by providing military aid and training to Abbas’ Presidential Guard. For its part, Israel released $100 million in Palestinian tax revenues to Abbas on condition that none of it go to pay government workers. One of the deadliest battles took place when Hamas security police in Gaza intercepted trucks delivering weapons from Israel to the pro-Abbas fighters.

With Jordan’s King Abdullah presiding, Abbas and Haniyah agreed to form a unity government in which six Fatah members will hold cabinet posts and a Fatah member will serve as deputy prime minister. The agreement may have ended the factional violence for the time being but it brought no relief for the Palestinians, who continue to live as prisoners. The United States and Israel insist that the Palestinian Authority recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence, and accept past agreements before they will resume aid. Meanwhile Israel is considering rerouting the separation barrier to enclose two more settlements, leaving an additional 20,000 Palestinians trapped on the Israeli side.

Hamas leaders said they would “respect” past peace agreements, but will not recognize Israel or renounce violence. Seldom if ever has a government been required to renounce violence before it could be considered legitimate. Hamas has indicated since at least 1995 that it would accept an indefinite truce with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to its 1967 borders. The reform program Haniyah presented to the Palestinian legislature in March 2006 included support for political freedom, minority rights, and the principle of “two states for two peoples.”

Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad appealed to the Europeans to open talks with the unity government, saying, “This is the only way to have stability in the region.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov agreed, and called on Israel to lift the blockade of Palestinian territories. Javier Solana, policy director for the European Union, also supported an end to the boycott. “We need to enter the conflict-resolution stage,” he said, “and try to end the occupation of 1967.”

But such discussions cannot take place until the United States adopts a Middle East policy based on achieving cooperative solutions rather than on asserting American power and promoting Israel’s interests. As long as the American Army is based on Iran’s borders, and our navy is massed off its shores, there is danger of a new war in the region.

It is a fantasy to pretend that Iraq is a sovereign state while 140,000 foreign troops are occupying that country. It is a more dangerous fantasy to believe that America has the right to dominate the Middle East.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.