Bush Mad Iraqis Won't Kiss His Ass For Destroying Their Country

Bush Said to Be Frustrated by Level of Public Support in Iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/washington/16policy.html?ex=1156392000&en=a6824cca66752eb7&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY

By THOM SHANKER and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: August 16, 2006

WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 — President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.

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Also in the Guide The Race for the U.S. House Governors' Races Those who attended a Monday lunch at the Pentagon that included the president’s war cabinet and several outside experts said Mr. Bush carefully avoided expressing a clear personal view of the new prime minister of Iraq, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But in what participants described as a telling line of questioning, Mr. Bush did ask each of the academic experts for their assessment of the prime minister’s effectiveness.

“I sensed a frustration with the lack of progress on the bigger picture of Iraq generally — that we continue to lose a lot of lives, it continues to sap our budget,” said one person who attended the meeting. “The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success.”

Another person who attended the session said he interpreted Mr. Bush’s comments less as an expression of frustration than as uncertainty over the prospects of the new Iraqi government. “He said he really didn’t quite have a sense yet of how effective the government was,” said this person, who, like several who discussed the session, agreed to speak only anonymously because it was a private lunch.

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.

The White House would not comment on the details of the discussion but a senior official warned against drawing conclusions on what the president thinks based on questions he asked in the process of drawing out the invited guests.

Participants said Mr. Bush appeared serious and engaged during the lunch, which lasted more than 90 minutes, as the experts went through a lengthy discussion of the political, ethnic, religious and security challenges in Iraq. And through it all, Mr. Bush showed no signs of veering from the administration’s policies to support the new government and train Iraqi security forces to take over the fight, and only then bring American troops home.

One participant in the lunch, Carole A. O’Leary, a professor at American University who is also doing work in Iraq with a State Department grant, said Mr. Bush expressed the view that “the Shia-led government needs to clearly and publicly express the same appreciation for United States efforts and sacrifices as they do in private.”

The White House began to open its doors to a wider range of views earlier this year, after acknowledging that months of complaints after Hurricane Katrina that the president and his team were isolated — “living in a bubble” was a frequent refrain — had gotten through. But that accelerated after Joshua B. Bolten became White House chief of staff in the spring.

One of the participants at the Monday lunch, Eric Davis, a Rutgers University political science professor who previously served as director of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, released a text of his remarks.

Mr. Davis said he discussed the regional upheaval that could follow if Iraq descended into chaos or was allowed to divide along ethnic lines. “I believe that the American people do not fully understand the potential domino effects that the collapse of Iraq into disorder and anarchy would have on the Middle East and the global political system,” he said.

Mr. Davis said he urged the creation of more jobs for younger Iraqis, and proposed a major reconstruction fund to be underwritten by Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil states seeking regional stability.

Although none of the academics openly criticized Bush administration policy, according to those in attendance, Mr. Davis did take issue with the administration’s order to remove Baath Party members from public service, and he urged the hiring of more qualified Baathists in Iraq or living abroad, and inviting retired army officers back into service.

Vali R. Nasr, an expert on Shia Islam, said the Pentagon meeting appeared to be an effort to give White House, Pentagon and State Department officials better insight into Iraq’s religious and ethnic mix.

“They wanted new insight, so they could better understand the arena in which they are making policy,” said Mr. Nasr, author of “The Shia Revival.” He said he got no sense that the Bush administration was contemplating a shift in its Iraq policy.

Some who have been brought into past meetings with President Bush, even fierce critics of the conduct of the Iraq war, give credit to the White House for beginning to listen to alternate viewpoints.

Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired Army commander who went to the White House in May, said he believed that Mr. Bolten has been largely responsible for bringing in new voices to counsel the president.

“They’re listening to new ideas and they’re listening to the reality,” said General McCaffrey, who has criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and believes that the Iraq war could break the United States Army.

But one critic of the administration’s management of the war effort said he remained unconvinced that the White House was actually listening to alternative viewpoints.

The critic, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a telephone interview that “one of the hallmarks of this administration has been stubbornness to any change of approach.”

Ignore, wrong thread.

We're sorry we aren't thanking you for all of our civilians you've killed in the past 3 years, we will have to learn to be more grateful in the future.

Is the US planning a coup in Iraq?
World Socialist Website

On August 16, an extraordinary article appeared in the New York Times providing details of a top-level private meeting on US strategy in Iraq at the Pentagon last week. President Bush, who was present along with his war cabinet and selected “outside experts”, voiced his open dissatisfaction that the new Iraqi government—and the Iraqi people—had not shown greater support for US policies. “More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that the Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd,” the newspaper reported. The angry protest on August 4 against the US-backed Israeli war in Lebanon drew more than 100,000 people from the capital and other Iraqi cities.

The New York Times article, which had all the hallmarks of a planted story, did not of course speak openly of a coup against Maliki. Nevertheless it constituted an unmistakable threat to the Baghdad regime that its days were numbered if it did not toe the US line. Prior to his trip to Washington last month, Maliki publicly condemned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. While his comments were just a pale reflection of popular sentiment in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, they soured the Bush administration’s plans to use the visit as a much-needed boost prior to mid-term US elections.

The New York Times followed up the report with a further article on August 17 on the latest Defence Department indices of the catastrophe in Iraq: the number of roadside bombs aimed mainly against American forces reached an all-time high of 2,625 in July as compared to 1,454 in January. “The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels. The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time,” a senior Defence Department official told the newspaper.

Buried at the conclusion of the article, however, was the astonishing admission by one of the participants in the Pentagon meeting that Bush administration officials were already beginning to plan for a post-Maliki era. “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” an unnamed military affairs expert told the New York Times. “Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect, but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

The Bush administration’s attempts to dress up its illegal occupation of Iraq as “democratic” have always been a fraud. Ever since the 2003 invasion, US officials have had a direct hand in drawing up constitutional arrangements, steering elections and forming cabinets. Maliki was only installed as prime minister in May after a protracted White House campaign to force his predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari to stand aside. To speak of “considering alternatives other than democracy” can only have one meaning—that the Bush administration is contemplating plans to ditch the constitution, remove Maliki and insert a regime more directly amenable to Washington’s orders.

This would not be the first time that US imperialism has ousted one of its own puppets. In 1963, as American strategy in Vietnam was floundering, the Kennedy administration gave the green light to army plotters to overthrow South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. While loyal to Washington, Diem’s autocratic methods had provoked popular opposition and undermined US efforts to strengthen the South Vietnamese army in its war against the National Liberation Front.

On November 1, 1963, rebel army units mutinied and marched on the presidential palace in Saigon. Diem, who had escaped, rang the US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who assured the Vietnamese president that the US had no hand in the coup and expressed concern for his safety. A few hours later, the reassured Diem surrendered, only to be shot dead along with his notorious brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, and replaced by a military junta.

The Bush administration has plenty of reasons to get rid of Maliki. In launching its invasion of Iraq, Washington never wanted an independent or democratic government in Baghdad. Its aims were to transform the country into a pliable client state that would function as a base of operations to further its designs throughout the region, particularly against Iran. But the White House has become increasingly dissatisfied with the political results of its military adventure. Because of its own disastrous miscalculations it has been forced to rely on a coalition government dominated by Shiite parties with longstanding connections to Tehran.

Inside Iraq, the Bush administration’s calculations that Maliki’s “government of national unity” would quell anti-American resistance and halt the descent into civil war have already proven worthless. Far from scaling back, the Pentagon has had to maintain troop levels and dispatch thousands of extra soldiers to Baghdad in a desperate effort to reconquer the capital. With Congressional elections looming, the defeat of the pro-war senator Joseph Lieberman in the Democratic Party primary on August 8 raised fears in the White House that widespread antiwar sentiment would decimate the Republican Party at the polls amid US debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East as a whole.

The removal of Maliki and the imposition of a subservient military regime would, at least in the short term, solve a few of the Bush administration’s political problems by removing any objections in Baghdad to a ruthless crackdown in the country and to US plans for new provocations against Iran and Syria.

Significantly, the New York Times’ accounts of discussions in the White House and Pentagon have been paralleled in Baghdad by persistent rumours of a coup. On July 29, the Washington Post reported the remarks of prominent Shiite politician Hadi al-Amiri, who warned that “some tongues” were talking about toppling the Maliki coalition and replacing it with a “national salvation government”. It would mean, he said, “cancelling the constitution, cancelling the results of the elections and going back to square one... and we will not accept that.”

Having pursued a policy of reckless militarism in the Middle East for the past five years, the Bush administration is more than capable of toppling an Iraqi regime that no longer suits its immediate purposes. However, far from stabilising the American occupation, a coup in Baghdad would no more extricate the White House from its political crisis than the ousting of Diem did in 1963. As in Vietnam, the US is sinking deeper and deeper into a political and military quagmire in Iraq.

Bush Contemplates Rebirth of Dictatorship for Iraq
The Progressive

There was a big clue planted at the bottom of the very long lead article in The New York Times of August 17.

That story noted the alarming rise in insurgent attacks against American and Iraqi forces.

The number of IEDs in July was 2,625, just about twice what it was back in January, when Zarqawi was still prowling around.

Clearly, his death did nothing to slow the pace down or snuff out the insurgency.

The shelf life of Bush propaganda is only about one week these days.

But back to the clue.

The last three paragraphs of this story revealed that “senior administration officials . . . are considering alternatives other than democracy,” according to a military expert who was just briefed at the White House.

Hmmm, “alternatives other than democracy.”

My, what can those be?

Monarchy? Dictatorship?

In that same edition, The New York Times ran a headline about the death of the brutal Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner, proclaiming him to be a “colorful dictator.”

That’s an obscenity. According to Amnesty International, “During Stroessner's military dictatorship, gross and systematic violations of human rights occurred. Amnesty International repeatedly expressed concern to the Paraguayan Government about long-term prisoners of conscience and allegations of torture, ‘disappearance’ and death in custody of political prisoners, as well as reports of prolonged detentions of political opponents.”

(For a glimpse at the horrors he committed, go to http://www.amnestyusa.org.)

The Bush Administration may be looking for an Iraqi Stroessner, or another, more reliable Saddam.

That may have been what Cheney and Rumsfeld had in mind all along. From the very beginning, they wanted to install in power Ahmad Chalabi and his groups of exiles roosting in the Iraqi National Congress, writes George Packer in his book The Assassin’s Gate. When the situation in Iraq began to deteriorate, Cheney blamed those in the Administration who refused to go along with this plan.

“In the fall of 2003, Dick Cheney approached his colleague Colin Powell, stuck a finger in his chest, and said, ‘If you hadn’t opposed the INC and Chalabi, we wouldn’t be in this mess,’ ” Packer reports.

Maybe Chalabi is waiting in the wings still—or some other Saddam wannabe.

Bush appears to be taking applications.