Defeating Bush’s Troop Surge for Iraq
by James Buchanan
Despite an overwhelming defeat of the neocons in the 2006 election, George Bush has apparently decided to ignore the will of the American people and INCREASE the number of troops in Iraq. Will Bush back off this lunatic new idea? Will the Democrats have the backbone to start bringing our troops home?
After a long delay, opposition to the troop surge is finally building. One news article reports “Days from announcing an overhaul of (his) Iraq strategy, President Bush on Friday encountered a wall of criticism of the U.S. troop escalation that is expected to be the centerpiece of his new war plan… ‘We are well past the point of more troops for Iraq,’ new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wrote in a letter to Bush a day after their party took the reins on Capitol Hill. Instead, Pelosi and Reid urged Bush to begin pulling troops out in four to six months. The criticism underscored that Bush, preparing his new policy for an increasingly unpopular and costly war, will face a Congress that is not only controlled by Democrats who could challenge him at any turn but also populated with Republicans looking toward the congressional and presidential elections of 2008.”
At one point in the Vietnam War, one general admitted that once he thought the war could be won with 100,000 troops. Later he thought 250,000 might do it. Still later 500,000 troops were necessary. Finally he realized that no amount of troops would ever crush the resistance. American troops were seen as yet another occupying foreign army attempting to colonize their land and nothing would change that.
Our only chance to convince the Iraqi people that we were overthrowing the Saddam government for them would have been to let them have elections within weeks of liberation and then pull out our entire military immediately afterwards. At least this plan would have had a clear exit strategy. Even this plan would have some serious problems namely: (1).We would have no guarantee that the Iraqi people would not elect a religious mullah or re-elect Saddam. (If we arrested Saddam and took his name off the ballot or if we executed him, we would be interfering in their electoral process.) And (2).There would be no guarantee that the Iraqi army would respect a civilian president and not overthrow him two months after the election.
This of course ignores a multitude of things including the fact that our government has no authority to carry out “regime change” around the world. Bush and the neocons had to lie about weapons of mass destruction to get us into the war. After failing to find WMDs, Bush has changed the subject trying to convince us that his real mission was to bring democracy to Iraq. Almost four years after the invasion, we have seen the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, a formidable insurgency arise and a civil war break out. All three of these developments are signs of failure and good reasons to get out immediately before things get worse.
It’s not clear if Bush’s ego is driving him to try to salvage something out of the Iraq fiasco or if the Israeli Lobby is demanding that we stay or if Halliburton wants us in Iraq until they’ve stolen the last drop of oil. The important thing is that after a resounding electoral defeat, George Bush is attempting to escalate the number of troops in Iraq. According to Bush the escalation is a “temporary” measure. An additional 20 to 40 thousand troops will magically crush the insurgency, end the civil war and create a pro-West government in Iraq according to a man, who has been wrong about everything to this point.
Adding more US troops will only give the rebels more targets to shoot at. Even worse, this action will be 100 percent against the will of the American people, who voted the neocons out of Congress in 2006.
Bush has brought up a variety of hair-brained ideas over the years. Two of the worst include the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination and the idea to give the Arab nation of Dubai control of five of our ports. The important thing to remember is that Bush backed down on those two ideas after the American public expressed its overwhelming opposition. The Troop Surge for Iraq is a third fantastically bad idea, which the American people can shoot down by e-mailing their Congressmen and telling them what they think.