Does Anyone Know What We Are Doing in Iraq?

Paul Craig Roberts
August 28, 2005, 9:00 am

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President Bush is out of touch with the American people,
the US military, and international political reality.

With every poll showing smaller and smaller minorities
approving of Bush and his war in Iraq, with top US
generals sending signals that they want to reduce US
troops in Iraq, and with the world at large viewing Bush
as a fanatic who cannot acknowledge his blunders and
mistakes, Bush

announced in his

weekly radio address that "our efforts in Iraq
and the broader Middle East will require more time, more
sacrifice and continued resolve."

Does Bush think he is a dictator?

The polls show that it is the American people`s resolve
that Bush bring his Iraq venture to an end, an orderly
end if possible, but to an end. Every explanation Bush
has given for his invasion of Iraq has proved to be
false. Yet, Bush still speaks of "our noble cause,"
while taking great care to avoid Cindy Sheehan and her
question,

"What is the noble cause?"

Perhaps Bush supplied the answer in his reference in his
weekly radio address to "our efforts in . . . the
broader Middle East."

What are our efforts "in the broader Middle East"?

The only American efforts "in the broader Middle
East" that have been defined are in the policy
writings of Bush`s neoconservative advisers who cooked
up the invasion of Iraq. For the neocons, our efforts
are in behalf of Israel`s security.

The neocons` belief that Israel is made more secure by
US military aggression in the Middle East is delusional.
How is Israel made secure by an invasion that turns the
Muslim world against America as all polls show and Iraq
into a training ground for al Qaeda, as the CIA says has
happened?

The US has been defeated in Iraq, both militarily by a
limited insurgency drawn from only 20 percent of the
population and politically by Iraqi divisions as the
"constitutional process" demonstrates.

As Knight Ridder

reported on August 25:

"Insurgents in Anbar province, the center of
guerrilla resistance in Iraq, have fought the US
military to a stalemate. After repeated major combat
offensives in Fallujah and Ramadi, and after losing
hundreds of soldiers and Marines in Anbar during the
past two years–including 75 since June 1–many American
officers and enlisted men assigned to Anbar have stopped
talking about winning a military victory in Iraq`s Sunni
heartland."

"I don`t think of this in terms of winning," said
Col. Stephen Davis, who commands a task force of about
5,000 Marines . . . The frustrating part for the (home)
audience, if you will, is they want finality. They want
a fight for the town and in the end the guy with the
white hat wins."

That`s unlikely in Anbar, Col. Davis said.

Frustrated by a determined insurgency, Bush
administration officials predict that improvements will
follow the Iraq constitution. However, the constitution
may be leading to civil war.

Sunnis say they will reject the constitution because it
leaves them out of the oil wealth, which goes to the
Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south, and
because it is punitive toward the old ruling party, that
is, toward Sunnis.

Perhaps it is the neocon plan for Shiites and Kurds to
join the US military in a war to the death against
Sunnis.

But what comes next? How would Turkey regard a largely
autonomous oil rich Kurdistan on the border of its own
Kurdish province?

And how would a war in Iraq between Shiites and Sunnis
play out in the Middle East divided along those lines?
Does the US want to wed itself to Iranian Shiites
against Saudi Sunnis?

It sounds like a lot of long term instability. Perhaps
the old Islamic divisions are what the US government is
relying on to enable it to continue to rule the Middle
East. Muslims might consume themselves in their internal
hatreds while the US builds its bases to control the
oil.

That`s been the tried and true practice of Western
colonialists since the fall of the Turkish empire after
World War I.

Can it work this time? US ambitions are too much of a
threat to other countries which are well positioned to
cause us grief. Will the world be able to resist the
opportunities to undermine an over-extended and
self-righteous United States?

Sooner or later, too, Shiite and Sunni leaders will
realize that they are pawns in American hands bleeding
themselves in behalf of American power. Sooner or later
Muslim humiliation at the hands of the US and Israel
will permit an Osama bin Laden to reunify the Muslim
world.

These are, of course, speculations. But history has few
events without unintended and unrecognized consequences.

Dr.
Roberts, [email
him] a former Associate Editor of the
Wall Street Journal and a
former Contributing Editor of National Review,
was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the
Reagan administration. He is
the author of

The Supply-Side Revolution
and, with Lawrence M. Stratton, of