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Just Stay the Curse

As soon as President Bush was handed the Iraq Study Group Report [PDF], he began rushing around asking for more advice, any advice, or so it seems. He's listening, but apparently nobody is telling him what he wants to hear. So far he's talked to Gen John Abizaid and Gen George Casey, other top military commanders in the Pentagon, some State Department officials, Tariq al-Hashemi (Iraq's Sunni vice president), Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim (a Shiite leader in Iraq's parliament), Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (a Kurd), Massoud Barzani (president of the Kurdish region), and of course British Prime Minister Tony Blair. We can add to this his own administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates.¹ In spite of it all, he said today that he would not stray from his goal of turning Iraq into a stable democracy. After all of the so-called listening he's done, the best he could do was: "I've heard some ideas that would lead to defeat. And I reject those ideas, ideas such as leaving before the job is done; ideas such as not helping this government take the necessary and hard steps to be able to do its job.² I think that's the equivalent of "stay the course," surely a herald of the decider's new decision about how to fix the unstoppable mess in Iraq. He won't reveal his new plan until some time in early January.

My concern is that his delay is deliberate. I worry that he wants the violence in Baghdad to remain steady. If he waits long enough, if enough fighters and civilians in this horrific civil war are killed, that would mean much less the US military will have to do when the Busheviks finally unveil their plan to send in more troops for what might end up as a general slaughter in every major city in Iraq. No more Whac-A-Mole: attack simultaneously. I fear that the second battle of Fallujah will be the model for this—destroy everything. That would certainly solve the current problem in Baghdad, for then the only things left will be the Emerald City (Green Zone) and the humongous US Embassy being built nearby on the Tigris riverside.³

1.  What's notable here is that Mr Bush said one reason for his delay in announcing a new Iraq strategy was so that Robert Gates would have an opportunity to provide input. He hasn't been doing that? There's no urgency? Weren't the two of them together today in a news conference? Hey, wait a minute—Gates was also a member of the Iraq Study Group!
2.  "Bush defends Iraq strategy delay," BBC News, December 13, 2006.
3.  "In the chaos of Iraq, one project is on target: a giant US embassy," The Times (UK), May 3, 2006. As an Associated Press report described it: "The embassy complex—21 buildings on 104 acres, according to a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee report—is taking shape on riverside parkland in the fortified "Green Zone," just east of al-Samoud, a former palace of Saddam Hussein's, and across the road from the building where the ex-dictator is now on trial." See Common Dreams News Center, April 15, 2006.