Bush the Empire Slayer

by Bernard Chazelle

If you fancy losing an argument, try shooting down my contention that Mikhail Gorbachev is the leading historical figure of our time. Not one to miss a shooting opportunity, Dick Cheney tried. To my surprise, he won.

Westerners fondly remember Gorbachev for finishing off an ailing Soviet empire left bleeding from its Afghan travails. Defusing half a century of nuclear tension can leave a mark on impressionable minds. On Cheney's—not so much. The former Defense Secretary had a tender spot for the Cold War and never forgave Gorbachev for ending it with not even a kind word for defense contractors. Cheney is the quintessential warrior, with plenty of dead quails and birdshot-peppered lawyers to prove it. He is the gallant hussar—one day greenlighting “Shock and Awe” to give Guernica a second chance; the next day apprising US Senator Pat Leahy of his favorite sexual technique: “Fuck yourself ! ” (1) Quite the martial wag, the man Maureen Dowd calls Big-Time Dick saluted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by persuading his boss to invade Panama (for reasons no one seems able to remember). And today it is anybody's guess which Caribbean island the United States will invade to celebrate its victory in Iraq.

Dick Cheney is a man of war, and a man on a mission: a crusader who won't rest until the name Bush Jr is etched in the history books—not lost in the microscopic print of the endnotes section, mind you, as is destined to be Senior's fate, but glowing in the radiant typeface of a chapter heading. That mission, for once, is all but accomplished. In January of 2001, George W. Bush took—er, grabbed—the reins of an American Empire at its zenith. He will soon hand back a smoldering wreckage of broken lives, enduring hatred, and vanished influence. Michael Ignatieff has called Pax Americana Empire Lite. (2) A better phrase would be Empire Short-Lived, or, if you're William F. Buckley Jr and the vernacular ruffles your literary feathers, Imperium Brevissimum. At a recent ceremony for his son Jeb, George H. W. Bush was caught on national television sobbing uncontrollably. Pity the man who stands one short letter away from the worst president in US history. The letter is H, as in H for hubris.

“We're winning! ” exulted Bush last October. (3) Well... actually, “We're not winning,” he clarified a few weeks later, but “We're not losing” either. (4) So “We're wosing,” quipped the Guardian's cartoonist Steve Bell. Indeed, we are; and for you, Mr President, I shall count the wosing ways.


“ You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go. ”
— Siegfried Sassoon

Somewhere, deep in the cold, worm-infested soil that a mother will keep watered by tears, lies one of 3,000 young Americans. (5) Dispersed across the land, thousands more will forever carry the scars of war in their battered bodies and hollowed souls, mutants battling hellish shadows and silent phantoms. And the Iraqis, yes those, Mr President, see them spiral into Dante's lower rings of hell, as they join the fastest-growing sect in the land: the dead—hundreds of thousands strong. (6) Watch the White Man's Burden devolve into an orgy of torture and mayhem. (Has it ever devolved into anything else?)

The words Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, detainee bill, and extraordinary rendition are seared in the world's consciousness as the badges of shame of a democracy gone mad. According to Pew's most recent “Global Opinion” survey, “anti-Americanism is deeper and broader now than at any time in modern history.” (7) The war effort's claim on the US treasury will soon exceed $600 billion: more than Vietnam; (4) more than all the money ever spent on cancer research; (8) more than enough to “race for the cure” all the way to Alpha Centauri. We're wosing big, Mr President.

Historians will ponder how one gangly caveman and nineteen scrawny associates turned America into the land of the kind-of-free (53rd freest press in the world, tied with Botswana (9)) and the home of the petrified. The sons and daughters of the nation that stood up to Hitler and Tojo now file through airport security barefoot, much as they would walk, shoeless, into a mosque—a mosque, they pray, empty of Muslims.

Cravenness is bigotry's favorite nourishment, and cynics might expect the political class to gorge on it by blaming our imperial agony on the natives. In America, today, cynics rarely go wrong; and the air, indeed, is thick with talk of fainthearted hordes of Mesopotamian ingrates, who quail at the latest bombing and wail at the moon in exotic garb.

Not long ago, the achingly earnest Nicholas D. Kristof, a New York Times columnist whose only sin is to be more virtuous than you—and keep you informed of this in each and every one of his bromidic columns—reassured his readers that the trouble is not with the Muslims but with the Arabs. They are too violent and they give Islam a bad name. (10) Well, that settles that. Funny, though, that in the last twenty years Americans have outkilled Arabs in a ratio in excess of one hundred to one. But there I go again, nitpicking, while Saint Kristof is back in Cambodia, rescuing teenage prostitutes one Pulitzer prize at a time.

Not to be undone, The Times' resident flat-earther, Thomas L. Friedman, never tires of recycling Golda Meir's racist rant about hateful Arabs. He writes:

“We can't keep asking Americans to sacrifice their children for people who hate each other more than they love their own children.” (11)

The hate-lovers never asked for anybody's sacrifice, Mr Friedman. To steal a thought from the heroic Robert Fisk, all they ever craved was the one freedom you've always refused to grant them: freedom from you! The Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a man who's never met a heap of moral compost he did not want to climb, wrote recently that “the prudent use of violence [against Muslims] could be therapeutic.” (12) Being a kind soul, I'll assume that Cohen is unaware of the ideological pedigree of that phrase and that he doesn't read what he writes—apparently, a skill highly prized in American punditry.

“ Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child. ”
— Rudyard Kipling

To talk the neocolonial talk from the plush comfort of the imperial capital is easy. To walk the walk is not. US military expenditures exceed those of all nations on earth combined. And yet battling a ragtag band of lightly armed insurgents was more than the world's mightiest army could take. It is “about broken,” laments Colin Powell—and, by the way, “We are losing.” (13)

A recent Marine Corps memo concedes that Coalition Forces “are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar. ” (14) Last summer's stabilization push in Baghdad, Operation Together Forward II, proved a dismal failure: the violence actually rose by 43 percent! (15)

The US military has been fighting in Iraq longer than it did in World War II. What does it have to show for it? Not much. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq is a country-wide killing field, one giant Sniper Alley where sporting the Stars and Stripes can get you killed any time, anywhere. Not a square inch of Iraqi soil is safe for the Americans outside the high walls of their fortresses. To borrow from Cheney's vast repertoire of bons mots, the US counterinsurgency is in its last throes; hence the “surge” and kindred shows of desperation. Israel's finest military historian, Martin van Creveld, does not mince words: “The American military have proved totally incompetent.” (16) In Iraq, the world's sole superpower has been the world's serial superbungler. (I've always wondered if the trope of the “sole superpower” serves any purpose other than teaching us how thin the line is between the sublime and the farcical.)

Whose fault? (The wrong question for a moral perspective—starting the war was the sin, not losing it—but the right one here.) Breathtaking as they were, the majestic vistas of Rumsfeld's ineptitude were little more than a convenient excuse for war advocates with egg on their faces. The grand whining parade has already begun, and mealy-mouthed apologists are being wheeled in on bloated floats to proffer lame excuses about inadequate troop levels, insufficient 4GW training, political fecklessness, etc. Eventually, the chest beating will die down as it always does, with the blame for the debacle pinned on the dirty antiwar hippies.

But hippies don't fight wars. The Pentagon does. It did, and it lost. One reason—not even the most important—is the military's endemic inability to win hearts and minds. Early in the war, the Guardian sounded the alarm:

“Senior British military officers on the ground are making it clear they are dismayed by the failure of US troops to try to fight the battle for hearts and minds. They also made plain they are appalled by reports over the weekend that US marines killed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, as they seized bridges outside Nassiriya in southern Iraq.” (17)
The emphasis on force protection is a far cry from past imperial practices. The Romans, Spaniards, British, French, and conquerors of yore seldom agonized over their own casualties. To their credit, Americans do. But this comes at a moral cost: US soldiers are brave but the casualty-averse military doctrine of their commanders is cowardly. That, in essence, is what Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy, and Bill Maher said—right before the lynching began. (18—20) In a similar show of disgust diplomatically stripped of the C-word, this British officer echoed the sentiment:

“US troops have the attitude of shoot first and ask questions later. They simply won't take any risk... Unfortunately, when we explained our rules of engagement which are based around the principle of minimum force, the US troops just laughed.” (21)

Lebanon and Somalia notwithstanding, the United States rarely cuts and runs. It did not in Vietnam. It fought to the death—of the other guy—and then cut and walked when victory proved elusive. Iraq is too central to US hegemonic fantasies to allow a speedy retreat: it'll be done cut-and-crawl style, with enough pit stops to admire the fireworks over Iran. Bush's playbook: (1) run out the clock; (2) anoint successor as “the dope who snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory and handed Iran the victor's crown”; (3) let the etching in the history books begin.

Could the invasion have succeeded? Not a chance. All the grousing about incompetent planning is the age-old excuse-making prattle of losers. Leave aside the not-so-trifling fact that the United States never had the proper DNA for empire (lite or otherwise). It is the incontrovertible reality of the 21st century that the time for the White Man's Burden has passed. Not only is the era of empire gone, but the days of the so-called liberal hegemonic order are numbered. Even before 9/11, the cumulative impact of European integration, the rise of Asian powers, and the resurgence of Muslim identity sounded the death knell for American hegemony. To hasten the burial will be one of Bush's legacies. Alas, incalculable misery in the Middle East, enduring anti-American hatred, and future terrorist attacks in London, Paris, and Seattle will be another one.

The same Madeleine Albright who called the United States “the indispensable nation”—presumably to avoid confusion with the dispensable ones—taunted Colin Powell with the wickedest double-entendre since Mae West: “What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it? ” (22) To paraphrase an old line, it is better for a big country to keep its superb army idle and let the world think it's not much of a superpower than to use it and remove all doubt.

Bush's neoconservative doctrine seeks to apply Straussian philosophy to the unfettered pursuit of US energy interests. Its unspoken motto: “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” The rough idea—and the idea is, indeed, rough—is to play this century's Great Game (first prize: control of Mideast oil supply) under the banner of national security. Until we whacked them on the head, Iraqis had never expressed much desire to attack us. To the lesser minds, therefore, the idea of fighting them there so we wouldn't have to fight them here always teetered on the edge of insanity. To the neocons' delight, 9/11 came to cleanse the public discourse of the yelpings of lesser minds.

And so, today, we gather to honor the superior minds, all of these men (they are mostly men) who so decisively turned out the lights on the American empire. Heading the roll call is none other than the Decider himself. If you're among the wise who chose to sit out the Bush years at the bottom of a well, you need to know only two things about the man: the first is that he is President of the United States; the second is that he said:

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” (23)

To connect it to the war for terror would indeed be easier. A self-declared uniter, Bush is beginning to unite the country around the belief that he is the worst president in US history. (24) Whether his reelection, ipso facto, makes the electorate the dumbest ever is a logical inference that a political culture drunk with self-admiration will have trouble getting its woozy head around.

To call Team Bush a thundering herd of galloping loons is to be unnecessarily kind. For rarely has daftness been elevated to such a lofty plane of power and influence. The early days of the Iraq adventure set the tone. A year after Defense strategist Ken Adelman infamously called the coming liberation of Iraq a “cakewalk,” Paul Wolfowitz, then Rumsfeld's deputy, used the occasion of an interview with NPR's Melissa Block to stamp the prediction with the Pentagon's gold seal.

“We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate them from the tyranny of the Soviet Union. I think you're going to see even more of that sentiment in Iraq. There's not going to be the hostility that you described Saturday. There simply won't be.” (25)

Hostility? What an idea! On the eve of the war, in a vice presidential reprise of Tom Cruise's couch-hopping antics, Cheney stepped on the set of NBC's “Meet The Press” to share the love: “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” (26) For a mere $44 billion a year,(27) all we got from US intelligence was a silly update of an old movie script:

Renault: And what in Heaven's name brought you to Baghdad?
Bush: The sweets and the flowers. I came to Baghdad for love.
Renault: Love! What love? We're in the Middle East.
Bush: I was misinformed.

Christmas 2003 came early in Iraq and WMD-stuffed stockings were spotted everywhere by late March. Or so Rumsfeld told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos: “We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” (28) East, west, south and nowhere somewhat. In September of that year, the part-time AEI scholar, full-time slimeball Richard Perle got all his neurons firing at once to produce this marvel of crystal gazing:

“And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.” (29)

Or perhaps some grand morgue? Which naturally leads us to the 600-billion dollar question: where did they find these people? The answer: in that dank rodent house known as the American Enterprise Institute. Often found gnawing on the chicken wire, the rabid ferret Michael Ledeen needs no cage rattling to work himself into a froth of hysteria:

“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” (30)
In their knockoff of Mein Kampf, retitled An End to Evil, Richard Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum give voice to their full-blown dementia by recommending all-out attacks on anybody ever so slightly Muslim. Why? Because “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” (31) Salon's Gary Kamiya calls the Perle-Frum worldview “a strange combination of Hobbes and Popeye.” (32) Harsh on Popeye. Me, I have no patience for moral midgets who've seen their Napoleonic hour arrive. Like Alexander in Gordium, I head straight for the deliciously obvious: to end evil, end Perle and Frum.

The American Enterprise Institute serves to mitigate the most glaring defects of our democracy. Take the current escalation in Iraq, for example. President Bush alone grasps the full cosmic immensity of its wisdom, even calling the idea a “surge” to convey its irresistibility. Alas, the Forces of Darkness, aka the Pentagon, the Congress, and the American public, will have none of it. Enter the AEI and its paunchy, double-chinned warmonger, Frederick W. Kagan. Faster than a chickenhawk can flap its wings, Kagan demothballs his fave retired general, Jack Keane, and whips up The Surge. Voilà. Rasputin would be proud.

It would be unfair to let Team Bush steal all the credit for the imperial collapse without a tip of the hat to the White House Dictation Office, also known as the mainstream media (MSM). Skipping right over the miniskirted hyena Ann Coulter (a risky stunt but I've got my spiked pogo shoes on), the oafish junkie Rush Limbaugh, and the assortment of one-trick performing fleas hopping mad on the AM dial, I shall ascend Mount Olympus to gaze at the brainy stars of the MSM.

Few shine more brightly than Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, the supernova of the Murdoch empire—unless red dwarf is a tighter cosmic fit for someone known to his friends and pet hamster as “Dan Quayle's brain.” The day after the 9/11 attacks, the surrogate brain seized the moment and began pounding the war drums: “There's a fair amount of evidence that Iraq had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past.” (33) There was not a shred of evidence. A year later, Kristol nuzzled up to The New Republic's Lawrence F. Kaplan to break into a cakewalk jig on the National Review dance floor: “Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower.” (34) Brilliance of this magnitude is Kristol's trademark. Time magazine took longer than most to realize that and only this month got around to adding Kristol to its roster of columnists.

Two influential Canadians with a nasty case of empire envy, Mark Steyn and Michael Ignatieff pulpiteered the good news—one from his stool at the Chicago Sun-Times, the other from his booster seat at the Harvard Kennedy School. From Steyn we learned that “Imperialism is the answer” (35) and from Ignatieff that “The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.” (2) (I don't know about you, but the dazzling acumen of the expert never fails to give me goosebumps!) Former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan, another heavy smoker of the imperialist's hookah pipe, found his knees wobbly after 9/11 and his left flank badly exposed: “The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.” (36)

Of course, no account of MSM malfeasance would be fitting without at least a passing glance at the yapping chihuahuas. Newsweek's Howard Fineman woofed a few choice words of his own: “We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back.” (37) Well said, Howard. His colleague Chris Matthews yaks at such vertiginous speeds that his brain emits exotic particles of synchrotronic quirkiness. One month into the war, he blurted out, “We're all neocons now.” A few weeks later, Matthews highlighted a side of war that too often gets short shrift: what great, clean fun it is! “Check it out. The women like this war! I think we like having a hero as our president.” (37) Must a TV show be pornographic just because it's called “Hardball”?

The war has given the American mainstream media a brilliant opportunity to prove its essential worthlessness. It has shown itself to be little more than a circus of entertainers and cheerleaders for whom every season is the silly season. Tragically, the media has failed in its sacred duty to keep a vigilant, skeptical, critical eye on the centers of power. Who is the American Robert Fisk, Gideon Levy, or Amira Hass? Whoever they are (and Sy Hersh proves they exist), why are their writings not filling the op-ed pages of the great American newspapers? How can the nation that produces the bulk of Nobel prize winners be stuck with such a sullen bunch of journalistic mediocrities? The sycophantic enablers of the Fourth Estate have blood on their hands.

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq had a single cause: the reassertion of US hegemony after 9/11. Its trigger was a rare astral alignment. Big Oil, the neocons, the Christian fundamentalists, the liberal hawks, AIPAC, the MSM, and 9/11 all formed cosmic dots in the sky that only one power could—and did—successfully align: the president of the United States. No American leader has so much owned a war.

And none has so little owned up to it. Victors are never war criminals. That's because they get to write the history books. Bush won't have that chance. The die has been cast and the hour is too late for him or anyone to alter the unforgiving judgment of posterity. Therein, paradoxically, lies our quandary. For, if freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, then Bush is a free man—free to pursue the most malignant policies, heedless of the consequences to his unworsenable presidential standing. Beware the desperation of a cornered man.

The apostle of imperial dominance, Bush slew the “last empire.” The towering figure of our time, he is a piteously small man. The self-anointed emissary of a “higher father,” he is servant to no power but himself. The captain of the sinking ship has laid his command upon his fellow Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for me.” No sacrifice of life shall be too great, no damage to civil liberties too high, no expenses too vast for a vainglorious man deluded by fantastic dreams of redemption by force.

But who besides the bereaved will mourn? Who besides the orphan will whimper? Who besides the humiliated will stare back? Who besides the thugs and the craven will lead? Patriotism is a lovely thing. In its name, some go dying by the side of an Iraqi road in twitching agony; others go shopping in oversized automobiles festooned with yellow ribbons. We all play our part—and nobody else's.

Yeats bemoaned an era when the best lacked all conviction, while the worst were full of passionate intensity. Today, Kristol blusters and hectors, Cheney scolds and forebodes, Bush struts and smirks. Meanwhile, the giant, timid chorus listens politely to the deafening silence of the outraged—and the mad march of war goes on.


[1] Cheney Dismisses Critic With Obscenity, by Helen Dewar and Dana Milbank, Washington Post, June 25, 2004.

[2] America's Empire Is an Empire Lite, by Michael Ignatieff, The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2003.

[3] Press Conference by the President, The White House, Oct. 25, 2006.

[4] U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time, by Peter Baker, The Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2006.

[5] War in Iraq, CNN, 2006.

[6] The Human Cost of the War in Iraq, by G. Burnham, S. Doocy, E. Dzeng, R. Lafta, L. Roberts, Lancet, 2006.

[7] Global Opinion: The Spread of Anti-Americanism, Pew Global Attitudes Project, Jan. 24, 2005.

[8] Cancer Research Funding, National Cancer Institute, May 19, 2006.

[9] Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2006, Reporters Without Borders, 2006.

[10] The Muslim Stereotype, by Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times (firewalled original), Dec. 10, 2006.

[11] Insurgency Out, Anarchy In, by Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times (firewalled original), June 2, 2006.

[12] The Lingo Of Vietnam, by Richard Cohen, The Washington Post, Nov. 21, 2006.

[13] Powell Says U.S. Losing in Iraq, Calls for Drawdown by Mid-2007, by Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post, Dec. 18, 2006.

[14] Anbar Picture Grows Clearer, and Bleaker, by Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks, The Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2006.

[15] The Iraq Study Group Report, by James A. Baker, III and Lee H. Hamilton, Co-Chairs, United States Institute of Peace, 2006.

[16] Closer to the Abyss, by Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, Dec. 6, 2006.

[17] Coalition divided over battle for hearts and minds, by Richard Norton-Taylor and Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, Apr. 1, 2003.

[18] The Talk of the Town, by Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 2001.

[19] The Most Cowardly War in History, by Arundhati Roy, Global Research, June 28, 2005.

[20] Politically Incorrect, Wikipedia.

[21] Trigger-happy US troops ‘will keep us in Iraq for years’, by Sean Rayment, Telegraph, May 15, 2005.

[22] Madeleine's War, by Walter Isaacson, Time, May 9, 1999.

[23] Bush: ‘We Don't Torture’, CBS News, Sept. 6, 2006.

[24] He's The Worst Ever, by Eric Foner, The Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2006.

[25] United States Department of Defense, by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Feb. 19, 2003.

[26] Upbeat Tone Ended With War, by Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, March 29, 2003.

[27] Official Reveals Budget for U.S. Intelligence, by Scott Shane, The New York Times, Nov. 8, 2006.

[28] United States Department of Defense, by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003.

[29] Turkey at the Crossroads, by Richard Perle, Sept. 22, 2003.

[30] Baghdad Delenda Est, Part Two, by Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, April 23, 2002.

[31] An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, by David Frum and Richard Perle, Random House (excerpt), Dec. 2003.

[32] “An End to Evil” by David Frum and Richard Perle, by Gary Kamiya, Salon, Jan. 30, 2004.

[33] Their War, Too, by Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect, Sept. 1, 2005.

[34] Closing In, by Lawrence Kaplan and Bill Kristol, National Review Online, Feb. 24, 2003.

[35] Imperialism is the Answer, by Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 14, 2001.

[36] A British View of the US Post-September 11, by Andrew Sullivan, The London Times, Oct. 15, 2001.

[37] ‘The Final Word Is Hooray!’, FAIR, March 15, 2006.

Iran: Pieces in Place for Escalation - "The fuel for a fire is in place".

by Colonel Sam Gardiner

Global Research, January 16, 2007
The Left Coaster - 2007-01-14

Editorial Note

The following text by Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Retired) confirms our worst fears. The US is in an advanced state of readiness to wage war on Iran.

To reverse the tide requires a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, schools, universities, municipalities, on the dangers of a US sponsored war, which contemplates the use of nuclear weapons. The message should be loud and clear: It is not Iran which is a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel. Even without the use of nukes, the proposed aerial bombardments could result in escalation, ultimately leading us into a broader war in the Middle East.

Debate and discussion must also take place within the Military and Intelligence community, particularly with regard to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, within the corridors of the US Congress, in municipalities and at all levels of government. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the political and military actors in high office must be challenged.

The corporate media also bears a heavy responsibility for the cover-up of US sponsored war crimes. It must also be forcefully challenged for its biased coverage of the Middle East war.

What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-called "Homeland Security agenda" which has already defined the contours of a police State.

The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity. It is essential to bring the US war project to the forefront of political debate, particularly in North America and Western Europe. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war.


Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 16 January 2006




I do not accept the notion that the first casualty of war is truth. (Col. Sam Gardiner)


The pieces are moving. They’ll be in place by the end of February. The United States will be able to escalate military operations against Iran.

The second carrier strike group leaves the U.S. west coast on Tuesday. It will be joined by naval mine clearing assets from both the United States and the UK. Patriot missile defense systems have also been ordered to deploy to the Gulf.

Maybe as a guard against North Korea seeing operations focused on Iran as a chance to be aggressive, a squadron of F-117 stealth fighters has just been deployed to Korea.

This has to be called escalation. We have to remind ourselves, just as Iran is supporting groups inside Iraq, the United States is supporting groups inside Iran. Just as Iran has special operations troops operating inside Iraq, we’ve read the United States has special operations troops operating inside Iran.

Just as Iran is supporting Hamas, two weeks ago we found out the United States is supporting arms for Abbas. Just as Iran and Syria are supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon we’re now learning the White House has approved a finding to allow the CIA to support opposition groups inside Lebanon. Just as Iran is supporting Syria, we’ve learned recently that the United States is going to fund Syrian opposition groups.

We learned this week the President authorized an attack on the Iranian liaison office in Irbil.

The White House keeps saying there are no plans to attack Iran. Obviously, the facts suggest otherwise. Equally as clear, the Iranians will read what the Administrations is doing not what it is saying.

It is possible the White House strategy is just implementing a strategy to put pressure on Iran on a number of fronts, and this will never amount to anything. On the other hand, if the White House is on a path to strike Iran, we’ll see a few more steps unfold.

First, we know there is a National Security Council staff-led group whose mission is to create outrage in the world against Iran. Just like before Gulf II, this media group will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff.

The Patriot missiles going to the GCC states are only part of the missile defense assets. I would expect to see the deployment of some of the European-based missile defense assets to Israel, just as they were before Gulf II.

I would expect deployment of additional USAF fighters into the bases in Iraq, maybe some into Afghanistan.

I think we will read about the deployment of some of the newly arriving Army brigades going into Iraq being deployed to the border with Iran. Their mission will be to guard against any Iranian movements into Iraq.

As one of the last steps before a strike, we’ll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we’ll only be days away from a strike.

The White House could be telling the truth. Maybe there are no plans to take Iran to the next level. The fuel for a fire is in place, however. All we need is a spark. The danger is that we have created conditions that could lead to a Greater Middle East War.

[emphasis added by Global Research]

Sam Gardiner is a Retired Air Force Colonel. He is an expert in military strategy. He has taught at the National War College. He has also taught at the Air War College, the Naval War College and as visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College. His Truth In These Podia (pdf) explains the propaganda methods used by the Pentagon to "sell the war".

See also the following 2005 Global Research review article on Sam Gardiner's analysis of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence: America's Ministry of Propaganda Exposed, Downing Street Memo is but the Tip of the Iceberg, by Gar Smith


Global Research Articles by Sam Gardiner

Impeach Bush: Olbermann on MSNBC about 911, Iraq and the coming invasion of Iran

The mainstream media is waking up to what conspiracy theories (or better facts) proclaim since 911: One night after Bush's address to the nation, MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann blasted the president's "dangerous, even Messianic certitude." "Only this President could extol the 'thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group,' and then take its most far-sighted recommendation — 'engage Syria and Iran' — and transform it into 'threaten Syria and Iran' — when Al-Qaeda would like nothing better than for us to threaten Syria, and when President Ahmmadinejad would like nothing better than to be threatened by us," Olberman said. The MSNBC anchor added, "This is diplomacy by skimming; it is internationalism by drawing pictures of Superman in the margins of the text books; it is a presidency of Cliff Notes."

BLOOD FOR OIL, it's on the table now. Iraqis will never accept this sellout to the oil corporations

The US-controlled Iraqi government is preparing to remove the country's most precious resource from national control

Kamil Mahdi
Tuesday January 16, 2007
The Guardian

Today Iraq remains under occupation, and the gulf between those who profess to rule and those who are ruled is filled with blood. The government is beholden to the occupation forces that are responsible for a humanitarian catastrophe and a political impasse. While defenceless citizens are killed at will, the government carries on with its business of protecting itself, collecting oil revenues, dispensing favours, justifying the occupation, and presiding over collapsing security, economic wellbeing, essential services and public administration. Above all, the rule of law has all but disappeared, replaced by sectarian demarcations under a parliamentary facade. Sectarianism promoted by the occupation is tearing apart civil society, local communities and public institutions, and it is placing people at the mercy of self appointed communal leaders, without any legal protection.

The Iraqi government is failing to properly discharge its duties and responsibilities. It therefore seems incongruous that the government, with the help of USAid, the World Bank and the UN, is pushing through a comprehensive oil law to be promulgated close to an IMF deadline for the end of last year. Once again, an externally imposed timetable takes precedence over Iraq's interests. Before embarking on controversial measures such as this law favouring foreign oil firms, the Iraqi parliament and government must prove that they are capable of protecting the country's sovereignty and the people's rights and interests. A government that is failing to protect the lives of its citizens must not embark on controversial legislation that ties the hands of future Iraqi leaders, and which threatens to squander the Iraqis' precious, exhaustible resource in an orgy of waste, corruption and theft.

Government officials, including the deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, have announced that the draft oil law is ready to be presented to the cabinet for approval. Salih was an enthusiast for the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the Kurdish militia-led administration he represents has signed illegal oil agreements that it is now seeking to legalise. Given that parliament has not been meeting regularly, it is likely that legislation will be rushed through after a deal brokered under the auspices of the US occupation.

Iraq's oil industry is in a parlous state as a result of sanctions, wars and occupation. The government, through the ministry of oil's inspector general, has issued damning reports of large-scale corruption and theft across the oil sector. Many competent senior technical officials have been sacked or demoted, and the state oil-marketing organisation has had several directors. Ministries and public organisations are increasingly operating as party fiefdoms, and private, sectarian and ethnic perspectives prevail over the national outlook. This state of affairs has negative results for all except those who are corrupt and unscrupulous, and the voracious foreign oil corporations. The official version of the draft law has not been published, but there is no doubt that it will be designed to hand most of the oil resources to foreign corporations under long-term exploration- and production-sharing agreements.

The oil law is likely to open the door to these corporations at a time when Iraq's capacity to regulate and control their activities will be highly circumscribed. It would therefore place the responsibility for protecting the country's vital national interest on the shoulders of a few vulnerable technocrats in an environment where blood and oil flow together in abundance. Common sense, fairness and Iraq's national interest dictate that this draft law must not be allowed to pass during these abnormal times, and that long-term contracts of 10, 15 or 20 years must not be signed before peace and stability return, and before Iraqis can ensure that their interests are protected.

This law has been discussed behind closed doors for much of the past year. Secret drafts have been viewed and commented on by the US government, but have not been released to the Iraqi public - and not even to all members of parliament. If the law is pushed through in these circumstances, the political process will be further discredited even further. Talk of a moderate cross-sectarian front appears designed to ease the passage of the law and the sellout to oil corporations.

The US, the IMF and their allies are using fear to pursue their agenda of privatising and selling off Iraq's oil resources. The effect of this law will be to marginalise Iraq's oil industry and undermine the nationalisation measures undertaken between 1972 and 1975. It is designed as a reversal of Law Number 80 of December 1961 that recovered most of Iraq's oil from a foreign cartel. Iraq paid dearly for that courageous move: the then prime minister, General Qasim, was murdered 13 months later in a Ba'athist-led coup that was supported by many of those who are part of the current ruling alliance - the US included. Nevertheless, the national oil policy was not reversed then, and its reversal under US occupation will never be accepted by Iraqis.

· Kamil Mahdi is an Iraqi academic and senior lecturer in Middle East economics at the University of Exeter
K.A.Mahdi@exeter.ac.uk

Gore Vidal in Havana By SAUL LANDAU

After 9/11, George Bush began firing fear-loaded spitballs at Congress and the media, which reacted by being frightened. Five years and three months later, Gore Vidal in Havana countered W’s discords of panic with chimes of truth.

On December 12, at the University of Havana, Vidal dismissed “our little President” (“presidentcito,” said the interpreter) and mocked him into proper perspective – the worst and most dangerous president in US history: “I’m a wartime president.” The audience of students and professors laughed at Vidal’s imitation.

Three days before, on the evening of December 9, Culture Vice Minister Ismael Gonzalez and Book Institute President Iroel Sanchez greeted met Vidal at the Jose Marti International Airport. His entourage included former South Dakota Senator James Abourezk (D) and former President of the California Senate, John Burton (D) as well as San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, myself and a small group of Gore’s friends and admirers. The Cuban press quickly grabbed him.

“What brings you to Cuba?” a Prensa Latina reporter inquired.

“I came to Cuba with my broken knee to help break 40 years of embargo.” He had not accepted previous invitations because “I lost one of my knees the last time and I almost sent my knee to you, and it would have been more interesting than myself.”

A few reporters giggled. “But I have an artificial one,” Vidal became serious, “and could come here to see the beginning of the end of colonialism in the Western Hemisphere.”

He told the media that he “worried about the collapse of the Republic. We have lost habeas corpus and the Constitution that we inherited from England 700 years ago. Suddenly, we were robbed of it. The current regime has done it, and the legal bases of our Republic have gone with it, and as I am one of the historians of that Republic, I am not happy.”

How did he see Cuban reality as opposed to what the US government reported? “They never told us why we should hate the Cubans. I think Kennedy and his compatriots were motivated [in their aggressive anti-Castro policies] by vanity.” He said, “My friend John F. Kennedy was running for president,” (1960) and he foolishly allowed the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion to take place. “Vanity has played a large role in the relationship,” he added, referring to the terrorist war aged by the brothers Kennedy against Cuba after the April 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Vidal paused and jumped backward in time. “When we invaded Cuba [in 1898] it was only a pretext to start the war against Spain and end up taking the Philippines, as we did in the end.” The Cuban reporters taped and wrote. “I hate to say it,” Vidal continued with a smile, “but you were just a step for the United States to reach Asia, although we always had our eyes on the Caribbean.”

Vidal the historian recalled how after World War II, Harry Truman began to say: “‘the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.’” At the onset of the Cold War, the Russians having suffered 20 million dead, “there was barely anybody to come. Even so, the decision was made: the only way to rule the country is by terrorizing everybody. Bush is trying it – with some success.”

Vidal explained to Cuban audiences that “We had our first coup d’état following 9/11, and it happened like in no other real country, oh no. Ours is influenced by television, by Hollywood... Now we have a president’s son; his father didn’t know how to talk, and the son has failed at it too. The president’s only job, according to the founding fathers who drafted the Constitution, was to write the State of the Nation address once a year: how much money has come in, how much has been spent, how much was lent.”

Vidal the actor imitated Bush’s smirk: “We’ve got to help the Iraqis with democracy to make the world a safer place.” Vidal the historian advised: “Think about the future when you declare war on someone and make a good estimate of how much it will cost.”

On December 10, Vidal saw history in parts of 16th Century buildings in Habana Vieja, recently restored by architects to look like the original churches and government buildings. That night, he dined with Culture Minister Abel Prieto, a man “who saved culture in this country,” according to a Cuba poet.

Prieto called Vidal “the moral conscience of the United States.” In his mid fifties, with long, Beatles style hair, and wearing jeans and a sport shirt, Prieto has waged a two-decade long struggle with harder liners to give writers maximum freedom to express themselves in films, print and graphic and plastic arts – not on TV, radio or in print news.

Prieto became known throughout Cuba when he challenged Fidel who in a television forum disparaged writers’ and artists’ need to travel. Fidel publicly admitted his error and apologized. In his tenure, the poet-writer as Cabinet Minister has even muted the harsh line between exiles and island artists by accepting exile literature as part of the overall Cuban patrimony.

“Our cultural policy is not decided by the market as happens in so many places, where the people may not know of a great writer or musician of their own country and, however, know perfectly well the intimacies of Michael Jackson.”

Prieto explained that Cuba “cannot design a future for the Cuban where every family has - as seen in the Yankee films - two cars, a pool or a chalet. However, we can guarantee conditions of a decent life and at the same time a rich life in spiritual and cultural terms. It is a conception of culture as a form of growth and personal realization that is related to the quality of life. In this sense, we are convinced that culture can be an antidote against consumerism and against the oft repeated idea that only buying can create happiness in this world. I think that that is our goal.”

Vidal saw little consumerism in Cuba. “It has been reassuring,” Vidal told a Cuban reporter, “to see a country doing things well, as should be, while my country is doing things poorly.” Vidal visited three universities in his short stay: The University of Habana, the University of Information Sciences located at Lourdes, west of Havana on the site where in 2001 the Russians abandoned their only base from which to monitor US compliance with the test ban treaties.

Cuban geeks, professors and students, explained and showed their new higher learning institution to Vidal, who admitted to his ignorance about computers. We then visited the Latin American School of Medicine, where Gore met US and Latin American students – among thousands of foreign scholarship recipients -- receiving free medical education, including text books and uniforms. Vidal and the accompanying politicians left impressed with the school and the idea behind it – educating people to become doctors who otherwise could not afford medical school.

The next day, December 12, a Cuban guide whisked Vidal through the National Fine Arts Museum – it would require a full day to see it all -- and then to the National Ballet School, where the 81-year old master of irony gazed in wonder at the boys and girls exercising discipline over their gloriously conditioned bodies. He then met with Alicia Alonso, founder of Cuba’s ballet company whom he had met in the 1940s – she says she still dances -- when she performed as prima ballerina at the New York City Ballet. Nostalgia turned to celebration at the University of Havana’s Magna Aula auditorium. The Rector honored Vidal with a plaque on the University’s 270th anniversary. I thought he should have received such honors in the United States for the twenty five novels, numerous plays, screen plays and books of essays and history he has contributed to our literary culture. Indeed, he is part of the US national treasure. How ironic – and perhaps just -- for a great historian and man of peace (and irony) to receive respect in Cuba, while the New York Times has ignored or panned his works – or offered them to undeserving reviewers. Irony? The Times did, however, promote Bush’s war by putting reporter Judith Miller’s fantasy stories (Iraqi weapons of mass destruction) on its front page.

Vidal’s latest, Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (2006), has not yet appeared in Cuba, but Cubans waited for him to autograph Burr, published in Cuba. Vidal addressed students and professors, artists and writers on the theme of US empire overwhelming the Republic. When asked about the US Office of Foreign Assets Control fining of director Oliver Stone $6,322.20 (Stone was filming an HBO documentary “Comandante”), for violating the Cuban embargo in 2002 and 2003 (paying for services in which the Cuban government has an interest), Vidal quipped: “I hope he gives the money to charity instead.” “I’m not afraid of being fined for traveling to Cuba” Vidal declared. Indeed, “I can also sue, we still have courts. I would welcome an opportunity to perhaps file suit against the government.”

“He’s a true patriot,” said the Cuban writer next to me.

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. His FIDEL film is available on DVD. His new book, A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD, with an introduction by Gore Vidal, will be published in February by CounterPunch Press. This interview is the first of two parts.

Petraeus! Is Baghdad Burning?

“Jodl! Is Paris burning?”
—Adolf Hitler
Aug. 25, 1944


By Stan Goff

Editor’s note: In this piece, a retired U.S. Special Forces soldier takes an oil-filtered look at Bush’s “surge” plan for Iraq.

Backstage

The United States makes up about 5 percent of the Earth’s population, but as an aggregate we burn more than 25 percent of its fossil energy. That’s roughly true of all three main forms of fossil energy—oil, natural gas and coal.

The coal we get mainly by having West Virginians surrender their mountains, where coal operators now lop the tops off those mountains to get at the seams of coal and dump the rubble into nearby watercourses. That’s what we do for most of our electricity. Canada sells us most of the natural gas we use ... nearly 90 percent in fact.


The reason I lead into a discussion of the Bush administration’s military “surge” plan for Iraq by talking about fossil fuels is that neither the government nor the media seem inclined to talk about the subject.

The problem we have is that our nation’s transportation fleet is almost completely dependent on that other store of ancient sunlight, petroleum. Neither natural gas nor coal can feasibly run fleets of tractor-trailer trucks, trains, airplanes and a quarter-billion passenger vehicles (around 98 million of which are SUVs and larger). Neither coal nor natural gas can run ships, tanks and attack helicopters either.

The other thing we need oil for is food ... more than people realize. In Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he traces the U.S. food chain back to the oil fields through corn, which is now the basis of most of our other foods, then back to the oil field. It is widely known that each calorie of food consumed in the world today represents an expenditure of 10 calories of fossil energy, but Pollan’s remarks while observing a cattle feed lot, where the beef-on-the-hoof was being force-fed corn produced by Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, are more to the point than any statistical review:

I don’t have a sufficiently vivid imagination to look at my steer and see a barrel of oil, but petroleum is one of the most important ingredients in the production of modern meat, and the Persian Gulf is surely a link in the food chain that passes through this (or any) feedlot. Steer 534 started his life part of a food chain that derived all of its energy from the sun, which nourished the grasses that nourished him and his mother. When 534 moved from ranch to feedlot, from grass to corn, he joined an industrial food chain powered by fossil fuel—and therefore defended by the U.S. military, another never counted cost of cheap food.

Empty gas tanks and empty bellies are not the basis of political stability, or profit, here in the United States of America, where the appropriation of immense amounts of time and space, using this store of ancient sunlight, is considered almost our birthright.

The Hydrocarbon Law

The reason I lead into a discussion of the Bush administration’s military “surge” plan for Iraq by talking about fossil fuels is that neither the government nor the media seem inclined to talk about the subject. The desperation of the coming escalation of criminal lunacy is based not on some fantasy but on a real and coming competition between the U.S. and basically everyone else for these energy stores, even as most honest experts agree that world production of oil has now peaked and will begin an inexorable and irreversible decline. The reason for attempting to implant permanent U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf area and install compliant governments (the real reason for the war from the very beginning) has everything to do with securing control over the region.

The surge plan is a painfully twisted military option, but what is twisting it is not well understood. Stability in Iraq could be achieved relatively easily, even now, in conjunction with a precipitous redeployment of Anglo-American military forces. The strange attractor—strange mostly because the media never mention it—is Iraq’s ”first postwar draft hydrocarbon law,” which would ”set up a committee consisting of highly qualified experts to speed up the process of issuing tenders and signing contracts with international oil companies to develop Iraq’s untapped oilfields.” This law, which is tantamount to privatization with an Anglo-American franchise in perpetuity, is the bottom line for the U.S., as evidenced by the fact that this is the one, absolute, bottom-line point of agreement between the Bush administration and the so-called Iraq Study Group. The rhetorical scuffle between these two entities is not the what, but the how.

The population of Sadr City, the “neighborhood” under the leadership of Sadr, is approximately that of Brooklyn.

Before any assessment of the balance of forces in Iraq can be undertaken from a purely military perspective (never possible, since military success is always measured against political objectives), it is essential to survey the major Iraqi military and political actors on where they stand with regard to the proposed Iraqi “oil law.” If the top priority is to salvage U.S. access to future hydrocarbon mining in Iraq, then the fundamental requirement is a comparatively “stable” Iraqi government that supports this access. The fundamental show-stopper is any leader or set of leaders who reject this plan.

The catch for the U.S. is that, as we shall see, the Iraqi leaders who support the hydrocarbon law have no legitimacy upon which to establish stability, and the leaders who have the popular legitimacy to establish stability support neither the occupation nor the hydrocarbon law.

When the situation is looked at in this way, we can bypass all the chatter from government and media mystigogues about regional stability for the sake of the people, democracy, terrorism, et cetera. These rhetorical smoke screens are concealing two inescapable facts: (1) The U.S. has lost the Iraq war and (2) the best retrenchment position possible now is to salvage the draft hydrocarbon law.

The Shiite “Government”

This explains, to a large degree, why the U.S. is harassing Iranian diplomats, even as it courts Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), as Dawa Party leader and putative Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s replacement. Hakim, after all, is practically an Iranian citizen. Why would the Bush administration court the most pro-Iranian leader among the diverse Shiite factions as successor in the event that Maliki fails to live up to U.S. expectations? Hakim has been a consistent and strong supporter of the hydrocarbon law.

The Shiite leader who has most vehemently opposed this law, and the U.S. occupation, has been Muqtada al-Sadr. The press has frequently portrayed Sadr as pro-Iranian, and nothing could be further from the truth. The SCIRI has been most aggressive in the demand to divide Iraq into a very loose federation and transform southeastern Iraq into an Iranian rump state. Sadr has called for Iraqi unification, left the door open to Sunnis for an anti-occupation alliance, denounced the hydrocarbon law, and modeled his political and military leadership on Hezbollah.

Here is where we come to the nub of The Surge, and why it is probably the political death knell of Nouri al-Maliki. The principle aim of The Surge is to break the power of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr not only has the seats in the Potemkin parliament of Iraq that put Maliki (a leader in a relatively small Shiite party, the Dawa) into power against the SCIRI (the largest parliamentary faction); he commands the ferocious loyalty of two and a half million people and has an 80,000-strong militia concentrated a stone’s throw from the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad. Baghdad has about 6 million people; New York City has 8 million, just by way of comparison. The population of Sadr City, the “neighborhood” under the leadership of Sadr, is approximately that of Brooklyn.

To realize this helps in understanding the considerations that go into planning a military operation. We need some kind of comparative scale to really comprehend the dangerous lunacy of The Surge.

There is, in reality, no such thing as an Iraqi government now. There is this formation inside the Green Zone. Maliki cannot leave the Green Zone without an escort of armored vehicles and attack helicopters. If anyone can explain how this constitutes governance, I’m all ears.

Congressional and media accounts constantly refer to the Iraqi government as the entity that requires U.S. military assistance to become the guarantor of Iraqi security. But the Maliki government—or any other government that relies on U.S. military protection to survive for a week—commands the loyalty of only a fraction of the armed actors in Iraq, and it positions itself tactically against most other armed actors. The armed forces being trained for that “government” are themselves loyal to factions with agendas, and these forces are filled with opportunists and infiltrators. Consider these facts: Seventy percent of Iraqis now are asking for an end to the Anglo-American occupation (that number goes up dramatically when the Kurds are subtracted). And the Iraqis themselves are not merely Sunni or Shiite (as simplified accounts have it) but are identified with three major armed Shiite factions, two major Sunni armed factions, or a Kurdish militia of 100,000 that resides in the north and itself is divided into two camps. In light of those realities there is no possibility of one faction gaining the acquiescence of the whole Iraqi population and the various armed expressions of populations. The Bush surge plan is designed to eliminate Maliki’s Shiite opposition inside Baghdad, i.e., Sadr and his Mahdi Army.


Next page: If the Americans proceed with what appears to be a cruel and mindless plan (surely emanating from Dick Cheney’s lair) there will be a possibility of igniting the Mother of All Tactical Nightmares for the U.S.: a general armed Shiite uprising in the southeast.

The Battleground

That Baghdad has become the concentrated focus of most U.S. military efforts in Iraq now is material evidence of the scale of the U.S. defeat there; it is also an indication of exactly how desperate the surge notion really is.

While the U.S. gross troop numbers are about 130,000 (with around 25,000 mercenaries as an augmentative force), the actual number of combat troops is about 70,000. Before we can begin to subdivide these forces for any possible operation to slaughter and raze Sadr City, we have to account for basic operations and force protection at nine major permanent U.S. bases across Iraq, at least five large contingency bases, and an unknown number of smaller forward operating bases. Camp Anaconda in Balad alone has at least 25,000 troops.

According to Globalsecurity.org:

The base is so large it has its own “neighborhoods”. These include: “KBR-land” (a Halliburton subsidiary company); “CJSOTF” which is home to a special operations unit, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force and is surrounded by especially high walls that is, according to The Washington Post, so secretive that even the base Army public affairs chief has never been inside. There is a Subway sandwich shop, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye’s, a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges which sell an impressive array of goods, four mess halls, a miniature golf course and a hospital. The base has a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10 MPH.

The Surge would inject fewer troops than are required to maintain one “camp.” If the entire surge figure of 21,400 troops is compared with the number of hostile residents in Sadr City, the ratio is about 112 hostiles for every American. This can mean only one thing: airstrikes, followed by a ruthless house-to-house slaughter. Sadr City is targeted to be the next Fallujah.


Defeat is failure to achieve the political objectives of a war. This happened long ago.

For those who are susceptible to the personification of war, that is, the reduction of whole populations to a single leader—as in, “we are going to take out Saddam”—I will remind readers that Sadr City is half men and half women, with 40 percent of the population under 14 years of age. A million children. Sadr City is approximately 33 million square feet. That is a population density of one child per 33 square feet—less than a 6-foot-by-6-foot room. The very smallest lethality radius from so-called precision weapons delivered by aircraft is about 20 meters. Even the humble infantry grenade launcher fires an M406, characterized this way in the manual:

The HE [high-explosive] round has an olive drab aluminum skirt with a steel projectile attached, gold markings, and a yellow tip. It arms between 14 and 27 meters, produces a ground burst that causes casualties within a 130-meter radius, and has a kill radius of 5 meters.

Do the math.

In Fallujah, a mass evacuation was organized before the general assault on the city. The mandatory mass evacuation went through checkpoints in the American cordon sanitaire. While women and children and very old people were allowed out, all “military-aged males” were turned back into the city, which, once the assault started, became a free-fire zone, and those men were dealt with like the Jews of Warsaw. Thousands of people refused to evacuate for a variety of reasons. They were subsequently caught up in the general slaughter. This is the likely operational template for Sadr City.

The Other Math

There is another calculation associated with these kinds of “surge” operations: the aftermath. Muqtada al-Sadr has been effectively demonized in the U.S., but he is wildly popular and influential in Iraq, especially in southeastern Iraq, which has heretofore shown the least resistance to the Anglo-American occupation. In an attack on Sadr City, according to powerful rumors, Kurdish peshmerga troops will be used to do some of the fighting, an insane political gambit. If the Americans proceed with what appears to be a cruel and mindless plan (surely emanating from Dick Cheney’s lair) there will be a possibility of igniting the Mother of All Tactical Nightmares for the U.S.: a general armed Shiite uprising in the southeast.

Maliki, of course, knows this, and has objected strenuously—only to be blown off like a gnat by the Bush administration and its fresh coterie of compliant generals. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, author of yet another U.S. military manual on counterinsurgency (none of which has ever worked—ever), is the designated paladin for this disgraceful enterprise; he’s getting his fourth star for this, making him a real general.

“Petraeus is being given a losing hand,” notes former Gen. Barry McCaffrey. “I say that reluctantly. The war is unmistakably going in the wrong direction. The only good news in all this is that Petraeus is so incredibly intelligent and creative.... I’m sure he’ll say to himself, ‘I’m not going to be the last soldier off the roof of the embassy in the Green Zone.’ ”

This is the most encouraging thing that can be said by a colleague?

McCaffrey’s main concern, of course, lies with a number of other generals. The war in Iraq is lost, but the outcome of that loss has also been the severe degradation of U.S. ground forces in the Army and Marine Corps. The last Baghdad “surge” was in August, when 10,000 troops were re-positioned from elsewhere in Iraq to put the lid back on the city, and U.S. casualties increased. Troops there now are being extended, and troops on rest-and-refit cycles have been called up for early redeployment. Morale has been steadily ground down; divorce rates are up; National Guard troops have just been told that the president has overwritten their 24-month combat deployment limit; and material across the board is being used up or seriously overused.

Reps. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee, and Solomon Ortiz, D-Texas, chairman of the Air-Land Subcommittee, wrote on Dec. 17:

The military readiness crisis is far broader and deeper than the number of men and women in uniform. Simply increasing the size of the Army, which, by the way, was authorized by Congress several years ago but never carried out, is a necessary step. Yet, by itself, it does nothing to address the quality, level of training or equipment condition of the total force.

The impact of the war in Iraq on the Army and Marine Corps has been terribly and unnecessarily destructive. It began with military planning that allowed the invasion to be used as a test drive for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “transformational” force....

-- Two-thirds of Army units in the United States are not combat ready because of severe shortages in equipment, training and troops.

-- Not one brigade combat team in the United States is fully trained and equipped to meet all potential deployments.

-- The Army has had to extend combat deployments in Iraq just to maintain the current force level.

-- The Marine Corps had to call 2,500 reservists back to active duty so their units in Iraq could be fully manned. These were reservists who had already served on active duty and were trying to return to their civilian lives.

-- The Army has had to pay up to $40,000 re-enlistment bonuses to keep highly trained military personnel from walking away.

-- The Iraqi climate, marked by extreme temperatures and frequent sandstorms, causes abnormal wear on precision components, such as high-speed turbines in helicopter and tank engines. To complicate matters, when many units rotate back to the United States, they have to leave their equipment behind for the units rotating in. As a result, 40 percent of the Army’s total ground equipment is now in Iraq or Afghanistan. That means even longer continuous use and less opportunity for maintenance and refit.

The Nihilists

I am not advocating increased readiness to attack more foreigners in the future; I do not think anyone poses a credible conventional military threat to the U.S.; and I believe the “global war on terrorism” is a dangerous sham. But these concerns by generals and politicians reflect a real situation. U.S. ground forces are being (no pun intended) ground down by a losing war in Iraq. The reason that neither the public nor many of the troops themselves see this defeat is that we have been indoctrinated to see defeat as synonymous with surrender. It is not. Defeat is failure to achieve the political objectives of a war. This happened long ago.

The surge is a criminal last stand that will cost the lives of soldiers on both sides of this occupation and the lives of countless civilians, and it very well could lead to scenes as humiliating as that at the Saigon Embassy in 1975.

On Aug. 25, 1944, crushed between the Red Army smashing across the Danube and the Free French, American and Senegalese troops marching through the Champs Elysee, Hitler knew the end of the Third Reich was approaching. He had given the order to Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, the German “governor” of Paris, to destroy Paris rather than let it fall into the hands of the Allies. As word of the Allied entry into Paris reached Hitler, he is reputed to have called his chief of staff, Gen. Alfred Jodl, and demanded: “Jodl! Is Paris burning?”

I can almost hear the echo now from Cheney’s office, the curtains pulled, the malignant presence glowering in the dark, “Petraeus! Is Baghdad burning?”



Stan Goff is a retired veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces. During an active-duty career that spanned 1970 to 1996, he served with the elite Delta Force and Rangers, and in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia and Haiti. He is a veteran of the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama and also taught military science at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Goff is the author of the books “Hideous Dream—A Soldier’s Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti,” “Full Spectrum Disorder—The Military in the New American Century” and “Sex & War.”

Can Hugo Chavez Beat The Devil?

Can Hugo Chavez Beat The Devil?

By Sherwood Ross
After Venezuela's Hugo Chavez told the United Nations he could smell the sulphur in the chamber where President Bush spoke the previous day, some angry Bostonians wanted to pull down the big CITGO neon sign in Kenmore Square, since CITGO oil is pumped in Chavez Country. The loquacious Chavez had the temerity to compare President Bush with the devil, which virtually all in Congress refuse to do even though they can smell more than sulphur rising from the stinking bonfires of Iraq that Mr. Bush is stoking with his pitchfork.

It never ceases to amaze how foreigners can grasp what a leader like Bush is all about when the leader's own followers can't see it. American radio audiences back in the Thirties that heard excerpts of Hitler's rants knew Der Fuhrer was nuts but Hitler's German audiences were ecstatic, possibly because Hitler was telling them what they wanted to hear.

They thought Hitler was sane and his oratorical flourishes the outcry of a mesmerizing orator. Millions of people the world over, including the UN Secretary-General and the Pope of Rome, shouted that Bush's planned invasion of Iraq was illegal but Americans bought into Bush's lie Saddam Hussein had WMD and rationalized an invasion that set an innocent nation afire. The world at large could see it, but not Mr. and Mrs. America.

Apparently, the Bushidos were telling Americans what they wanted to hear, that they had to knock off Saddam Hussein before he reduced their proud cities to piles of irradiated rubble. Just as Germans roared approval when Hitler recounted how they got screwed at the post-World War One peace conference at Versailles, Congress went nuts over the idea Hussein had WMD, which Vice-President Dick Cheney assured them he had "for a certainty."

Chavez, just re-elected to his third term with a hefty 63% majority, has now decided to twist the Yankee devil's capitalist tail by threatening to nationalize several key Venezuelan industries. He couldn't provoke a bigger outcry in Washington than if he had ordered his marketing staff to laminate his smiling photo on all CITGO credit cards and pass out bumper strips at his gas stations reading, "Buy CITGO! Beat the Devil!" Like him or not, Chavez shows courage as well as calculation. Every Latin schoolboy knows the ugly history of U.S. intervention whenever and wherever some Hispanic leader took over, or threatened to take over, a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Socialist Salvador Allende was murdered in Chile with the connivance of President Nixon and Henry Kissinger; Ronald Reagan dispatched the Contras to slaughter innocent Nicaraguans; Jack Kennedy okayed the Bay of Pigs assault on Cuba, ad nauseum. To order your own country to conduct its economic affairs in a manner not previously sanctioned by the White House is to risk signing your own death warrant.

A proponent of "21st-century socialism," Chavez wants to put electric and telecommunications companies at the service of the state, rather than at the service of their shareholders. The Associated Press reported January 12th, Chavez "is disposed to pay fair market prices...that would make these 'nationalizations' much less radical than initially feared and not all that unusual in Latin America."

White House press secretary Tony Snow claimed nationalization "has a long and inglorious history of failure around the world," a declaration that overlooks the success right here at home of Halliburton Corp., whose sales and profits have soared dramatically since it became a Frankenstein creature of the military-industrial complex and no longer has to bother with competitive bidding to secure multi-billion dollar contracts for disemboweling Iraq. Most of the other principal corporate piggies at the Pentagon trough are also gorging themselves on non-bid delicacies subsidized by the very taxpayers who voted to elect Free Market Bush.

In point of fact, though, nationalization of basic industries has worked in a number of countries, including Chile, Brazil and Colombia, where state-run oil is the norm, AP says. "A 2004 World Bank study that looked at 181 state-run utilities in 15 Latin American and Caribbean countries that were privatized in the 1990s--- in fixed telecommunications, electricity and water distribution and sewers --- found that on the whole, labor productivity, efficiency and quality of service improved, especially in telecoms" although water and sewers "tended to be problematic."

By contraxt, when Argentina's Carlos Menem, a bullish privatizer, sold off scores of firms during his 1989-99 presidency, "the selloffs helped modernize the country, yet critics complained the fortunes reaped were later squandered or illegally pocketed and that many buyers failed to make needed investments. Similar complains tagged sweeping privatizations in Peru and Boliva." Given the fact President Bush is as busy in Iraq as a wretch up to his neck in quicksand grasping to crawl out, Chavez can probably nationalize CANTV and the other entities he has in mind without having the CIA come after him the way it pounced on Che Guevera when he tried to foment a revolution in Bolivia. Chavez does not use force and violence like Guevera or nationalize without compensation like Castro.

It's a fair question to inquire if any leader anywhere in the world is safe from American meddling if he or she adopts a Socialist economic system, or even a mixed economy system that does not totally embrace Free Enterprise Capitalist Economic Principles, also known in some quarters inhabited by the poor and exploited consumers of the earth by the acronym FECES. If Socialism is such an awful idea why not allow the Chavez's of the world make their own mistakes and, as they are discredited, leave it up to their publics to remove them? Indeed, if Tony Snow thinks State-run enterprises are so dreadful, why doesn't he threaten the mayors of American cities who operate thousands of public electric, waterworks, and sewerage utilities?

I am no economist and make no argument for or against capitalism or socialism. This scribble is only to remind the U.S. has an arrogant history of crushing governments whose elected leaders want to advance their societies by establishing their own economic agendas. Both Afghanistan and Iraq refused to allow U.S.-backed consortiums to lay oil pipleines across their territory and both got invaded for it, (in case you didn't know those wars have more to do with o-i-l than d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y.) Chavez's declaration of "Socialism or Death" is widely understood by the ordinary people of Latin America, where leaders risk the latter if they adopt the former. Now the world watches to see if the populist Mr. Chavez can indeed "beat the devil."

***********
(Sherwood Ross is a Florida-based reporter who recently obtained a CITGO credit card and says his Japanese-made car can run as well on CITGO as on Exxon.)

Rafael Correa asumió la Presidencia de la República

Ecuador: Rafael Correa asumió el poder

Eduardo Tamayo G.

ALAI AMLATINA, 15/01/2007, Quito.- Con la decisión de impulsar la Asamblea Constituyente y de dejar atrás “la larga noche del neoliberalismo”, Rafael Correa asumió la Presidencia de la República en medio de la expectativa ciudadana y respaldado por los presidentes Evo Morales de Bolivia y Hugo Chávez de Venezuela.

Correa recibió la banda presidencial del presidente saliente Alfredo Palacio y no del presidente del Congreso, el arquitecto Jorge Cevallos del opositor Partido Renovador Institucional Acción Nacional (PRIAN), como ha sido la tradición. Este último, sin embargo, le tomó el respectivo juramento. La negativa de Cevallos se debe a que el líder de su partido, el magnate bananero Alvaro Noboa, perdedor en los comicios del 26 de noviembre, no ha reconocido la legitimidad del triunfo de Correa. Apenas asistieron a la posesión del nuevo Presidente 25 de los 100 diputados pero el local estuvo copado por las numerosas delegaciones internacionales que fueron invitadas.

Durante su discurso de posesión, Correa dijo que renegociará la deuda externa, que priorizará las inversiones sociales en educación y salud antes que el pago de la deuda, promoverá la creación de un Tribunal Internacional de Arbitraje de Deuda Soberana, impulsará la lucha contra la corrupción, se apartará de las políticas neoliberales impuestas por el Consenso de Washington, atenderá a los grupos vulnerables y a los migrantes, combatirá las formas de explotación de los trabajadores disfrazadas con eufemismos como “flexibilización laboral”, “tercerización” y “contratos por horas” y avanzará en la integración sudamericana. (1)

Horas después, el Presidente Correa dio a conocer, en una concentración popular realizada en la ciudad Mitad del Mundo y con la asistencia de los presidentes Evo Morales y Hugo Chávez, su decreto número dos mediante el cual ordena al Tribunal Supremo Electoral “realizar, dirigir y vigilar” una consulta popular para el próximo 18 de marzo para “que el soberano, el pueblo ecuatoriano, ordene o niegue esa Asamblea Nacional Constituyente de plenos poderes que busque superar el bloqueo político, económico y social en el que el país se encuentra”. El texto del decreto será remitido al mismo tiempo al Congreso para su conocimiento más no para calificarlo o tramitarlo, según el Ejecutivo.

El objetivo de la Asamblea, que es apoyada por sectores ciudadanos y movimientos sociales, es elaborar una nueva constitución que reemplace a la de 1997, que si bien reconoce algunos derechos ciudadanos, impuso un lineamiento económico de corte neoliberal y una estructuración del Estado que ha facilitado la politización de las instituciones del Estado y el reparto de prebendas en beneficio de caciques o grupos de poder.

Otro decreto que dio a conocer Correa fue la rebaja de su sueldo a la mitad (de 8.000 a 4.000 dólares) y la disposición de que ningún funcionario público ganará más que el Presidente de la República.

Delegaciones internacionales

A la posesión del mandatario ecuatoriano asistieron los presidentes Evo Morales de Bolivia, Hugo Chávez de Venezuela, Rafael Uribe de Colombia, Alan García de Perú, Daniel Ortega de Nicaragua, René Preval de Haití, Nicanor Duarte de Paraguay, Michelle Bachellet de Chile, Lula da Silva de Brasil, Mahmoud Ahmadineyad de Irán y el presidente saharaui Mohamed Abdelasis. También estuvieron presentes el vicepresidente del Consejo de Estado de Cuba, Carlos Lage, el vicepresidente de Argentina Daniel Scioli, el príncipe de Asturias Felipe de Borbón en representación de Estado, y otras decenas de delegados.

El presidente de Argentina Néstor Kirchner se excusó de asistir invocando “razones de salud”, sin embargo el verdadero motivo sería la presencia del mandatario iraní, pues, como es de conocimiento, un juez argentino dictó una orden de captura internacional contra ex funcionarios de Irán acusándolos de ser los supuestos responsables del atentado contra una asociación judía, denominada AMIA. Mientras la derecha ecuatoriana cuestionó la presencia de Mahmoud Ahmadineyad por su posición respecto a Israel, para el gobierno de Correa su presencia se justifica pues el Ecuador tiene previsto reingresar a la Organización de Países Exportadores de Petróleo (OPEP) de la cual Irán forma parte.

El presidente colombiano resolvió asistir a Quito tras un acuerdo con el Presidente Correa sobre el asunto de las aspersiones de glifosato en la frontera limítrofe con Ecuador. En diciembre, Uribe resolvió reiniciar unilateralmente las fumigaciones luego de un año de suspensiones acordado por los cancilleres Francisco Carrión de Ecuador y Carolina Barco de Colombia. Luego de la decisión colombiana, Quito impulsó medidas diplomáticas exigiendo a Bogotá el cese de las fumigaciones y llegando incluso a retirar al embajador ecuatoriano en Colombia.

Antes de posesionarse, Rafael Correa condenó al gobierno de Colombia y viajó a la frontera para constatar los efectos de las aspersiones, sin embargo, durante un encuentro mantenido con Uribe en Managua, acordó impulsar un nuevo estudio tripartito con la intervención de los dos gobiernos y de la OEA/ONU, y que Colombia dará “aviso previo” de las zonas en donde se fumigará a fin que técnicos ecuatorianos “vayan a ver que el glifosato no pase a territorio ecuatoriano”.

Este acuerdo fue criticado por ambientalistas, indígenas y organizaciones campesinas del Ecuador que lo calificaron como el “primer resbalón de Rafael Correa”. Durante una reunión del Comité Interinstitucional contra las Fumigaciones, realizado el pasado 13 de enero en Quito, se señaló que ya no se requieren nuevos estudios (porque ya asisten varios que comprueban hasta la saciedad los daños que causan a la salud humana y el medio ambiente) sino más políticas de reparación. Además se demandó que Uribe cese las fumigaciones y se rindió un homenaje al ministro de Relaciones Exteriores saliente, Francisco Carrión, por su firme posición respecto a la política de Uribe que no es más que un instrumento de Estados Unidos.

Correa recibe bastón de mando

Ayer domingo, en la parroquia indígena de Zumbahua, ubicada en la provincia central de Cotopaxi, el presidente Correa recibió un bastón de mando, confeccionado con madera de chonta e incrustaciones de plata, de parte de las comunidades indígenas como un símbolo de sabiduría, fuerza y ánimo para trabajar, pero que a la vez representa el compromiso de no traicionar al pueblo, según señalaron.

Los presidentes Chávez y Evo Morales acompañaron a Correa y fueron ovacionados por más de 20.000 asistentes que provenían sobre todo de los sectores indígenas y rurales.

Durante este acto se combinaron los ritos indígenas y cristianos. Luego de que los yachacs (sabios) invocando a la Madre Tierra, al sol y a la luna, al Urucu-Yaya (Gran Cerro) le hicieron una “limpia” de cuerpo y espíritu al Presidente Correa, y la “reina” indígena de Zumbahua le colocó un sombrero y un poncho de lana, tres sacerdotes salesianos, encabezados por el padre italiano Luigi Ricardi, oficiaron una misa en kikchua en la que comulgaron Correa y Chávez.

En esta parroquia del páramo andino, ubicada a 3750 metros de altura, Rafael Correa hizo trabajo voluntario en apoyo a los indígenas junto con los padres salesianos, durante esta experiencia vivencial aprendió kikchua y, según ha manifestado, constituyó su mejor “postgrado”.

Correa, Chávez y Evo, con los brazos en alto y tomados de las manos, corearon junto con los asistentes el estribillo “alerta, alerta, que camina la espada de Bolívar, por América Latina”, mientras es escuchaba, como música de fondo, “La samba” en homenaje al Che Guevara, que fue invocado como ejemplo tanto por Correa como Chávez.

En Zumbahua, Chávez invitó al Ecuador a rechazar el ALCA y a integrarse a la Alternativa Bolivariana de las Américas y anunció que va a firmar con Ecuador y a hacer realidad varios convenios de integración. “Vengo a nombre de millones y millones de venezolanos, a nombre de la República Bolivariana, de nuestro pueblo y de nuestro gobierno a ponerme (…) a la orden del pueblo ecuatoriano, Hugo Chávez se pone a la orden de Rafael Correa”, dijo. Parafraseando a José Martí, Chávez agregó: “déme Ecuador en que servirlo y tendrá Ecuador un hijo”.

Evo Morales, por su lado, expresó: “estoy seguro, presidente Correa que no nos vas a abandonar, no vas a abandonar a los hermanos indígenas del Ecuador (…) los pueblos indígenas en algunos momentos hemos sido abandonados por nuestros intelectuales, por nuestros profesionales, por nuestros compatriotas, pero cada día que pasa van sumándose personalidades, intelectuales para acabar con la injusticia y las desigualdades”.

Morales también señaló que en la lucha contra el neoliberalismo es fundamental nacionalizar los recursos naturales y recordó que Bolivia el año pasado tuvo un superavit fiscal, por primera vez desde 1970, gracias a que “no hemos tenido miedo de nacionalizar el gas natural y los hidrocarburos y este año vamos a recuperar otros recursos naturales, pero para eso no solamente es importante ser presidente sino tener a un pueblo organizado y movilizado por recuperar los recursos naturales”.

Apoyo a Evo

Luego de regresar de Zumbahua, Evo Morales asistió a un acto de apoyo a su candidatura al Premio Nobel de la Paz, organizado por el Comité ecuatoriano conformado por dirigentes indígenas y sociales, intelectuales, periodistas, artistas y activistas de derechos humanos.

Morales, cuya nominación al Nobel fue presentada oficialmente al jurado internacional de Noruega el pasado 6 de diciembre de 2006 por Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, merecedor de ese galardón en 1980, dijo: “nuevamente para mí es una gran sorpresa estar acá y recibir sobre todo este apoyo del pueblo ecuatoriano para esta candidatura, pero también quiero decir que con premio o sin premio vamos a seguir luchando por los pueblos indígenas hasta liberar Latinoamérica (…) muchas gracias por todo el apoyo y esta nominación que da una nueva fortaleza no a Evo Morales sino a los pueblos indígenas del continente”.


Nota

(1) Ver Discurso de posesión de Rafael Correa, Presidente del Ecuador
http://alainet.org/active/15371&lang=es

Surge: US troops prepare for George Bush's last stand, But with allies they don't trust and enemies who confuse them, commanders know it'll be bloody

from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday
14 January 2007 11:49

By Kim Sengupta
Published: 14 January 2007

The narrow ambush alleys of Kadhamiyah, the tenements providing sniper cover at Diyala Bridge, the dusty, sprawling killing grounds of Sadr City. These are the strongholds of the Shia militias that the Americans will have to take in the battle for Baghdad.

The US forces in the "surge" into the Iraqi capital face a war on two fronts. The murder miles of Haifa Street and Adhamiyah are the homes to the Sunni insurgency, which continues its bloody course four years after the official end of the war, and there is no sign of this stopping as the US forces take on the Shias.

There are other logistical difficulties of fighting an urban guerrilla war in a city like Baghdad. The militias have spread from their power bases into the so called "mixed areas". Outside the Hamra Hotel, where the dwindling group of Western journalists in Baghdad stays, there are checkpoints run by the Mehdi army, led by the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; their Shia competitors, the Badr Brigade; and the Kurdish Peshmerga. Further out are the Shia Defenders of Kadhamiyah, set up by Mr Sadr's cousin Hussein al-Sadr and the government-backed Tiger and Scorpion Brigades.

They all look similar: balaclavas or wrap-around sunglasses and headbands, black leather gloves with fingers cut off, and a very lethal arsenal of weapons. When not manning checkpoints, they hurtle through the streets in 4x4s, scattering the traffic by firing in the air. It is impossible to say which particular group they belong to.

This is what confronts the US forces gathering for George W Bush's last throw of the dice in Iraq. He sees the battle to wrest control of Baghdad from the militias as the key to salvaging victory in the Iraqi quagmire, but distinguishing friend from foe will not be easy. The President has already warned that bloodshed will increase, but will there be any gains?

The main target, the Mehdi army, has around 50,000 well-armed fighters in the capital, mostly concentrated in Sadr City, the vast slum next to Baghdad, and the Shia holy city of Najaf and surrounding areas. But Mr Sadr also has 25,000 more militiamen in the south, where British forces will be in the firing line of retaliation for what the Americans do in Baghdad.

The Shia militias are backed by Iran, while the Syrians are accused of harbouring Sunni insurgents. In his speech last week Mr Bush once again accused the two countries of "allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq ... We will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq. "

To many, this rhetoric is paving the way for a wider escalation. William Arkin writes in The Washington Post: "There is an ominous element here ... To me that means the threat of strikes on targets in those countries." A British analyst, Robert Emerson, adds: "The Americans want to take on the Shia militias. Iran backs them, and will undoubtedly step up covert aid to them. How long will the Americans let that continue before they do something?" Even if there is no "hot pursuit", the Iranian response to US action in Baghdad is likely to place British forces in danger. The UK military has withdrawn from much of the south, concentrating its 7,200 troops in Basra. US authorities were against the British pullout from much of Maysan province, including the capital, Amarah, and are now particularly concerned about plans to hand over all security in the province, including the long Iranian border, to the Iraqi government at the end of February.

Instead of ending patrols by the 600-strong detachment of the Queen's Royal Lancers, the Americans want the British to significantly boost their numbers, especially at the border, in anticipation of Iran's attempts to aid its allies. Doing so would not only mean reversing the process of gradual disengagement, under which up to 3,000 British troops were due to return this spring, but getting sucked back into what threatens to be a prolonged war of attrition. This is particularly problematic for Britain, with its Afghanistan commitment in the background. The accepted consensus is that the Taliban, with hundreds of fighters training and arming in Pakistan, will launch a spring offensive after the winter lull in fighting.

But the first effects of the "surge" will be felt in Baghdad. At present the Americans have more or less withdrawn from the streets of the city, leaving Iraqi forces to man the checkpoints. Instead they base themselves in "Fort Apaches" - heavily fortified camps - emerging to carry out operations, invariably with the use of pulverising, and sometimes indiscriminate, firepower. After being reinforced by some 20,000 troops, the Americans will once again deploy on the streets. Baghdad will be divided into either nine or 11 sectors, according to different contingency plans being drawn up, in which the US troops will work alongside Iraqi forces with "embedded" US personnel.

The soldiers will aim to create mini "green zones" - cut-down versions of the area in the capital where US and British officials, and the Iraqi government, take refuge - guarded by checkpoints, sandbags and barbed wire. Residents would be issued with ID badges, and their every entry and exit logged.

To do this the US and Iraqi government forces will have to win back these areas from the militias. In particular they will have to take on the Shia fighters, many of them government backed, who have been accused of operating death squads.

Ironically, these death squads are the direct by-product of US policy. At the beginning of 2004, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out "irregular missions". The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the "Salvador Option" after the US-backed counter-insurgency in Latin America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless violations of human rights. Some of the most persistent allegations of abuse have been made against the Wolf Brigade. Their main US adviser until April last year was James Steele, who states in his autobiography that he commanded the US military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerrilla war. The complaints against Iraqi special forces continue.

While in Iraq, I interviewed Ahmed Sadoun, who was arrested in Mosul and held for seven months before being released without charge. He showed the marks on his body of beatings and burning. Mr Sadoun, 38, did not know which paramilitary group had seized him. But they were accompanied by American soldiers, and the Wolf Brigade was widely involved in suppressing disturbances in Mosul at the time.

As for the Mehdi army, the Americans fought a short and fierce battle with Mr Sadr's militia in Najaf two years ago. At the time, however, the Sunni insurgents were still the bigger threat, and it was deemed convenient to let Shia clerics organise a truce. Since then the Mehdi army has been left relatively untroubled by both the US and UK forces. When it briefly took over Amarah in a recent action and blew up a number of police stations, a British force was sent up from Basra, but did not intervene, leaving the Iraqi army to deal with the situation.

There are also tricky political considerations. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, depends on parliamentary support from Muqtada al-Sadr's followers. Recently US and Iraqi forces went into Sadr City, named after the cleric's father, to capture, according to the military, "a top, illegal armed group commander directing widespread death-squad activity".

Instead of congratulating the troops, Mr Maliki angrily complained he was not told about the operation. "We will ask for clarification of what happened in Sadr City, we will review the issue with the multinational forces so that it will not be repeated," he added. Falan Hassan Shansai, leader of the Sadr bloc, which has 30 of the 275 seats in parliament, warned of the consequences if there was a repetition.

Many in the US military believe the Shia militias, especially the Mehdi army, is too entrenched to be removed. Sergeant Jeff Nelson, an intelligence analyst with the US army's 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, in Baghdad, said recently: "They have infiltrated every branch of public service and every political office they can get their hands on. As soon as the US leaves, they will be able to dominate the area with key citizens, key offices."

Sgt Nelson said his battalion had investigated 40 sectarian killings and collected 57 bodies in a week. None had led to an arrest: "Sometimes we have a feeling of complete hopelessness."

The new strategy is modelled on an operation carried out by Colonel HR McMaster in Tal Afar, north of Baghdad, in 2005. His troops took over the town, which had a reputation for violence, searched it section by section, established a presence and kept the insurgents out. Col McMaster became established as a counter-insurgency expert, and his name is intrinsically linked with the new policy. Both President Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, have spoken of his action at Tal Afar as a blueprint for Iraq as a whole.

The overall commander picked by Mr Bush to lead the mission, Lt-Gen David Petraeus, is another Iraq veteran with a counter-insurgency reputation. He is one of the few senior members of the US military to support the " surge". He also supports the "hearts and minds" policies advocated by the British military, again unlike many of his US colleagues, who believe the army is for fighting, not nation-building.

They are not the only ones, however, who doubt whether some sort of Northern Ireland option can really be applied to a state in anarchy, like Iraq, especially by an army not culturally attuned to it. The time when it could have been applied, say US and British officers, has gone. The last chance may have been in 2005, when a plan presented by the British was rejected by Donald Rumsfeld.

Critics point out that Baghdad is not Tal Afar, a small place in a remote area. There is also deep scepticism about the ability of the Iraqi armed forces to fulfil their role in the equation. They were supposed to play a major part along the Americans in Operations "Forward Together" and "Forward Together II" in Baghdad last summer. However, at that time, only two of the six battalions supposed to take part in the mission actually turned up.

The correct analogy for the coming battle for Baghdad is not Tal Afar, but a US operation carried out in the Iraqi capital last year. More than 12,000 US troops, supported by helicopter gunships swooping over the rooftops, were sent in to destroy the Shia militias and break the back of the Sunni insurgency.

But by the end of the campaign the power of the gunmen had not diminished, and the scale of bloodshed had risen. It is an ominous template for a struggle on which not only President Bush's credibility, but the future of Iraq is likely to depend.

US ARMY: The plan to 'sanitise' Baghdad

Most of the extra 20,000 US reinforcements will deploy in Baghdad, which will be divided into up to 11 sectors. A plan based on the successful pacification of the northern town of Tal Afar will be carried out, with " safe zones" being created, surrounded by checkpoints, sandbags and barbed wire. Residents would be issued with ID badges, and have their entry and exit logged. The eventual aim is to "join up the dots" and create a large "sanitised" area, from which both Shia militias and Sunni insurgents will be kept out. US troops will also be "embedded" with Iraqi forces taking part in the operation.

IRAQI GOVERNMENT FORCES: Infiltrated and unreliable

The battle for Baghdad will fail unless the newly trained Iraqi army, paramilitary and police forces play their part. In a strategy called " clear and hold", the ultimate aim is for them to retain control when US forces eventually go back into their barracks.

But the Iraqi police in particular has been heavily infiltrated by Shia militias, and the Iraqi army, although not tainted to such an extent, has not proved the most reliable of allies for the US in the past. Out of six battalions scheduled to take part in an operation in Baghdad last year, only two turned up for duty.

MILITIAS: US to take on Shia leader

Until now the focus of US action in Iraq has been the Sunni insurgency. The new strategy is to take on the Shia militias which, often in official uniforms, have operated death squads and carried out sectarian attacks on Sunnis and, at times, Christians. The main target of the Americans is said to be Muqtada al-Sadr, whose heavily armed Mehdi army is blamed for much of the communal strife. Any action against his fighters in Baghdad may lead to retaliation against British troops in the Shia south. There is also anxiety about the reaction of Iran, which backs the Shia militias.

Raymond Whitaker