Thursday, February 22, 2007

Mission Creep, Strategic Drift, And An Unending War: Just The Recipe For Success In Iraq

Why the W, Rove and Co continues predict the future in some areas but not others is an obvious political gambit to gain support for their agenda. Here's the most recent:
The terrorists also know that as freedom takes hold, the ideologies of hatred and resentment will lose their appeal, and the advance of liberty, equality and self government in the broader Middle East will lead to a much safer world for our children and our grandchildren...We know that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. We know that if we leave Iraq before the mission is completed, the enemy is going to come after us. Having seen our interests attacked repeatedly over the years, and knowing the ambitions of the terrorists, this nation has made a decision: We will engage these enemies. We will face them far from home, so we do not have to face them on the streets of our own cities.
Trouble is, that when the Big Dick Cheney suggest things are getting better in Iraq and then claim that withdrawing troops would be harmful to the war on terror, he does it in the face of the British move to withdrawal their troops. If withdrawing troops is good enough for the British, why not for our troops in harms way?
This isn’t the first reduction in the British contingent, which originally numbered 40,000. But it comes at a time of spiraling violence in Iraq and emboldened opposition in Washington to Mr. Bush’s disastrous war. It also comes as Mr. Blair is preparing to leave office, painfully aware that popular fury over the war threatens to overwhelm his entire legacy.

The British announcement has already served as the catalyst for other departures. Denmark, with 460 troops under British command, announced yesterday that it would leave by August. With the Pentagon already straining to find enough soldiers for Iraq, a troop drawdown by its most militarily capable ally can only add to the strain — and to the clamor for bringing American forces home as well.
There's nothing artificial about those deadlines. Are the terrorists more or less emboldened by the announcements? Who can say for sure, really?

What we do know is that the coalition of the willing is getting smaller and smaller. Moreover, I've always wondered this: Why is it that the coalition of the willing never included troops from nations of Arabian persuasion? If this really was a decisive struggle as the W, Rove and Co. suggest, the coalition would be getting larger and more inclusive, not shrinking and more exclusive, no? You can go to this link for a list of the actual number of troops provided by coalition members, if you are curious.

Surely, when you have trusted republicans suggesting that the Iraq war is "A train wreck," perhaps we need a new approach rather than stay the course or more of the same (read: surge).

Perhaps, it is time to turn the “Global War on Terror” off, and turn it onto what it really should be - a war on Al Qaeda. Instead, we get mission creep, strategic drift, and an unending war that will be about as successful as the never ending, republican initiated "war on drugs." Really, when the Big Dick Cheney says,
Every member of our military can be certain that America will stay on the offensive in the war on terror.
when will we know that we are done? Mr. Cheney, the American People don't issue blank checks forever, even if the entire Republican controlled congress voted to support your war at the outset. But, remember, the war in Iraq was supported before all the facts were laid on the table.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"But, remember, the war in Iraq was supported before all the facts were laid on the table."

Absolutely correct. However, so was the invasion of Afghanistan and as for THAT one, we STILL haven't had the facts laid on the table; if they were then the entire country would be calling for Bush and Cheney's impeachment and criminal trial for mass murder and terrorism of their own people.

"Perhaps, it is time to turn the “Global War on Terror” off, and turn it onto what it really should be - a war on Al Qaeda."

I mean no offense, but I can't help but point out that such a statement betrays a thorough misunderstanding of what the "Global War on Terror" really is. It is nothing more than a thinly-disguised war for control over as much of the world's oil resources as possible. The Cheney administration and their puppetmasters realize that 1.the world's supply of oil is finite, and dwindling, as we have already used up the vast majority of it; 2.we are using it up faster and faster, especially now that China is falling more and more in love with the automobile; and 3.as the remaining oil supply gets smaller and smaller the price of it per barrel is going to increase more and more. They also know that the Caspian Sea oil fields are the last mostly-untapped treasure house of oil in the world; the problem arose since the Caspian doesn't have an outlet to a deep-water port, being a landlocked inland sea, the only sensible way to get any oil extracted there to a port is by building a pipeline. So they came up with a plan to build a pipeline from the Caspian, across a former-Soviet central Asian country, then across Afghanistan, to Pakistan and a deep-water port. The fly in the ointment was the Taliban government of Afghanistan who didn't want a pipeline crossing their territory for any price. So they threatened and cajoled, all to no effect; so they had two options remaining: Either abandon the pipeline project altogether, or invade Afghanistan, overthrowing the Taliban government and replacing it with a puppet government friendly to their oil pipeline plan. Of course they chose to carry out the latter, and started planning for an invasion of Afghanistan in the summer of 2001:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm
But another problem arose: The American people would certainly not support the idea of invading Afghanistan just for the sake of some pipeline scheme, so they needed a large catalyzing event to scare the shit out of the American masses and make them agree to an invasion of Afghanistan as "retribution" for it. So within a few months they rigged up "9/11", their tailor-made pretext for an invasion of Afghanistan, with the potential to make it dovetail nicely with their other oil war plan they were cooking up, an invasion of Iraq, the world's second-largest oil producer, which would give them control over the extraction of oil from the enormous lake of it that exists under Iraq. Remember the bullshit they tried to forcefeed us, trying to make the American people conflate Saddam and Al Qaeda? Think it would have worked if they hadn't had 9/11 before to short-circuit everyone's common sense and make America scared of its own shadow? Here are a few articles mentioning the Unocal pipeline-through-Afghanistan scheme:
http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/05/19/OutOfAfghanistan
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0513/p05s01-wosc.html
http://www.newscentralasia.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1031
So what I'm saying is, in order for someone to have a realistic, honest discussion regarding the "War on Terror", first you would need to truly understand that the bill of goods you have been sold is a farce that in no way gives you the real picture as to what the "War on Terror" is all about, that the "War on Terror" is an OIL WAR, plain and simple. All the bullshit and propaganda about "fighting terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here" is just that, bullshit and propaganda. The "terrorists" who planned 9/11 live in Washington, D.C., not some cave in Afghanistan. Common sense and a healthy curiosity are the antidotes to the Cheney regime mind-fuck. I implore all Americans to THINK FOR YOURSELVES, to ASK QUESTIONS instead of just blindly accepting myths that are for several reasons impossible. I know it is psychologically painful, but in the long run (and really, the short run too) we are MUCH better off accepting the provable truth rather than giving lip service to an impossible pack of lies, if for no other reason than it makes it much less likely the bastards who cooked up 9/11 will bring us "another 9/11" as ANOTHER pretext for some OTHER ghastly atrocity they feel like doing. The alarm clock is ringing itself off the nightstand America. Wake up before it's too late.

Tobias Struck said...

Enlightment. Thank you.