| Valentine |
06-22-2005 06:44 PM |
Iraq Catastophe Unfolding -- US & Iraqi casualties continue to climb
Much like the body-count reporting during the U.S. war against Vietnam, U.S. officers make a rough estimate of the dead Iraqis and count everyone killed, even children, as an enemy combatant. To guess at the real progress of the battle in Iraq, it is perhaps more helpful to see the reaction of the ruling politicians in Washington and their pundits. For example, very recently, Vice President & de-facto president Dick Cheney claimed that the United States and its Iraqi forces were winning the war and that the "insurgency was in its last throes." Cheney is one of the chief architects of the war on Iraq, but this comment sounded to me as if Bush's puppeteer had remained in the bunker he fled to on Sept. 11, 2001, and missed the entire unfolding reality of the Iraq occupation. Completely missed it.
Just in the last month many hundreds of Iraqi puppet troops and police have been killed all over Iraq. Also since then, Bush's support in U.S. polls has dropped significantly. Regarding Iraq, it's now at 37 percent in the CBS-New York Times poll. Bush himself has avoided making that same bold claim. He has confined himself to pledging that the United States will "stay the course" in Iraq, whatever the sacrifices. "More and more Iraqis are becoming battle-hardened and trained to defend themselves," Bush said.
Bush probably means to apply this comment to the puppet troops. Most intelligent observers will apply it more accurately to the resistance forces. Another champion of "staying the course" is that elite chief flack of globalization, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. On June 15, he looked at the disaster for U.S. imperialism occurring in Iraq and suggested that the Pentagon "double the American boots on the ground."
Doubling the number of boots implies doubling the number of young people to fill those boots. The Times Op-Ed columnist doesn't explain how this will be accomplished when recruiters are having nervous breakdowns trying to meet their quotas, which they fail to do. For Friedman, nothing could be worse for the U.S. empire's fortunes than to be driven from Iraq by the Iraqi people in arms.
Despite the enormous problems the Iraq occupation is causing U.S. imperialism, ruling-class opinion agrees with Friedman. Not just Bush and the Republican leadership, either. The Democratic Party national leadership has refused to confront Bush on the war.
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