Keane/Kagan Plan Means More Bloodshed
by Paul Craig Roberts
On Jan. 2, the BBC reported a leak from a “senior administration source” that President George W. Bush is going to give a speech, whose “central theme will be sacrifice,” announcing an increase in U.S. troops in Iraq for security purposes. Speculation abounds whether the leak is designed to block Bush’s insane policy with protests or to soften its controversial edge when announced. The BBC reports that “already one senior Republican senator has called it Alice in Wonderland.”
Bush’s proposal, if he makes it, is the work of retired army general Jack Keane and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. AEI is the second most important Israeli lobby in Washington after AIPAC.
Keane and Kagan profess to believe that 30,000 more U.S. troops can bring security to Iraq. Keane and Kagan argue that more U.S. troops would permit the U.S. military to retain control of an area after they had cleared it of insurgents. They ignore that Iraq has progressed from insurgency into civil war. There can be no Iraqi army independent of the sectarian conflict. The military problem for the Americans is no longer a small insurgency drawn from a minority of the population, but sectarian strife involving all of Iraq. Today the only choice for U.S. forces is to ally with one side or the other in the civil war or to depart Iraq. (more…)