Coming GOP War—Over The War!

"I believe this is a recipe that will lead to our
defeat … in Iraq," said

John McCain. He has a point.

For what does the Iraq Study Group say?

We are not winning this war. Our situation is

"grave and deteriorating." Yet we may succeed if
only we will withdraw all U.S. combat brigades in 15
months and bring Syria and Iran to the table to resolve
the political crisis. This is simply not credible.

Nowhere in this report are there any
"disincentives" to cause al-Qaida, the Sunni
insurgents, the militias, the Mahdi Army or sectarian
death squads to call off their campaigns to inflict a
historic defeat on the United States and expel us from

Mesopotamia.

The closer one studies the report, the more the truth
emerges. These "realists" think Iraq is a lost
cause, that Americans will not pay the price in blood,
treasure and years to win it. And in this conviction the

Baker Commission, too, may be right.

This deepening fissure in the GOP presages a civil
war inside the party by 2008, over whether to stay in
Iraq—or, if the war has ended in a debacle or defeat,
over "Who Lost Iraq?"

In urging intensified training of the Iraqi army and
an expedited withdrawal, the Baker Commission is laying
down the predicate for the case that America did not
lose this war, Iraqis lost their own war.

This ISG report is less about saving Iraq than about
saving the U.S. establishment from being held
responsible for the worst strategic blunder in U.S.
history. It is about giving Bush and Congress a

"decent interval" before Iraq goes down and a
Saigon ending ensues.

The neocons are also preparing their defense before
the bar of history. Realizing the Baker Commission
recommendations point to slow-motion defeat, they are
savaging Baker and calling for tens of thousands more
U.S. troops to be sent to Baghdad and a new strategy of
victory, no matter how much it costs or how long it
takes.

If Bush fails to follow their counsel, they will then
say: "It was not our fault. It was Bush`s
rejection of our advice that lost the war."

Neoconservative Ken Adelman, on Sunday`s "Meet the
Press," was calling for 20,000 to 30,000 more U.S.
troops, saying

Iraq had been a wise and winnable war, but the
administration mucked up what should have been a
"cakewalk."

The Democratic establishment, which gave Bush a blank
check to take us to war,

"to get the issue out of the way" before the
midterms in 2002, is also preparing its defense of the
role it played in plunging us into Mesopotamia, the
"if-only-we-had-known" defense.

"If only we had known
then what we know now—that there was no hard evidence of
WMD, no hard evidence of al-Qaida ties to Saddam
Hussein—we would never have voted for the war."
"If only we had known how incompetent Rumsfeld`s
Pentagon would be in managing the war, we would never
have given Bush a green light."

This Kerry-Edwards defense is a version of the

1967 defense advanced by Michigan Gov. George Romney
to

explain his earlier support of Vietnam. Said Romney,
"I was brainwashed" during a trip to Vietnam,
prompting the cruel retort of Sen.

Eugene McCarthy, "In Romney`s case, a light rinse
would have sufficed."  

The Democrats` defense begs these questions: Why
didn`t you know? Why didn`t you find out? Why didn`t you
do your constitutional duty and refuse the president the
power to go to war until he had convinced you that only
war could spare the republic worse horrors?

What the Baker Commission is ultimately all about is
providing political cover for a

bipartisan retreat from Iraq.

For what was the one issue the Iraq Study Group would
not and will not address? The crucial question: Was the
Iraq war a blunder to begin with? The commission seeks
at all costs to avoid the judgment of the nation that
today`s establishment that took us into Iraq

served America as badly as the Best and Brightest
who marched an earlier generation into

Vietnam, then

cut and ran and called it "Nixon`s War."

 The media are celebrating the ISG for its
"bipartisanship" and the "consensus"
achieved. But was it not a bipartisan consensus that
produced the war: a Democratic Senate failing in its
duty to ascertain the necessity of a war to be launched
by a Republican president, because Democrats feared that
telling a popular president "no" would reinforce
the

party`s reputation as being soft on national
security?

The people who were right about Iraq were those who
rejected bipartisanship to warn that invading Iraq was
an

unnecessary, unwise and, yes, even an unjust war
that would inflame the Arab and Islamic world against
us. Unsurprisingly, this group had no representative on
the Baker-Hamilton Commission.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs


no introduction to VDARE.COM
readers; his book

State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America,

can be ordered from
Amazon.com.