In this week's article, "Drying up the Jihadist Sea", Krauthammer has taken a sudden about-face and abandoned his normally strident militarism. Instead, he devotes his entire column to promoting "amnesty" for the members of the Iraqi resistance. This abrupt change of heart would have been inconceivable just a few months ago.
Are things really so bad in Iraq that the fire-breathing Krauthammer is ready to send up the white flag?
On the 4th of July Bush vowed that the US "would never accept anything less than victory" to the troops at Fort Bragg North Carolina. Was the dissembler-and-chief lying, yet again?
Apparently so.
Krauthammer does an admirable job of dressing it up, but the bottom line is, the Bush team is tossing in the towel and calling it a day.
According to Krauthammer, Swaggering George knows all about the amnesty plan and "is firmly behind this policy."
Well, now, that does change things. Can we expect to see G.W. in a flight-suit tottering behind Krauthammer with his Appomattox sword in hand?
All the pompous victory speeches and blather about "dead-enders and terrorists" was just more empty rhetoric. The real strategy is to conceal America's ignominious defeat while keeping a couple of well-placed bases in the Iraqi oil fields.
Krauthammer is as capable as anyone at camouflaging the truth and bending the facts to fit his crackpot ideology. He begins his article with a paragraph-long summary of the reasons that the nation went to war: "deposing Saddam and replacing his regime with a democratic government unthreatening to the region and strategically friendly to the United States."
Hmmmm? That's an interesting theory but, unfortunately, it is a lie.
The United States went to war with Iraq to disarm Saddam of his weapons of mass destruction (as Krauthammer is well aware). His synopsis is pure neocon revisionism.
He adds that the "most serious misconception had nothing to do with troop levels or whether to disband an army that had already disbanded itself."
Wrong again. Nearly every critic of the war including Colin Powell has stated unequivocally that the lack of troops on the ground and the disbanding the Saddam's army were major miscalculations which contributed heavily to the US's inability to establish security and win the peace. Krauthammer is just trying to protect fellow-traveler and bungler George Armstrong Rumsfeld from additional criticism.
Krauthammer goes on, "The melting away of the Ba'athist regime gave the Sunni resistance weaponry, discipline and organizational know-how of a high-order"
"Melting away"? There was no melting away. Rumsfeld energized the resistance by ordering his stooge Paul Bremer to initiate a process of de-Ba'athification. It was a disastrous decision that has resulted in the unintended deaths of 2600 American soldiers. Just yesterday the Associated Press reported that the top leaders in Saddam's regime were running the "insurgency". In other words, the US government now admits that the resistance is mainly controlled by members of the Ba'ath party. Krauthammer finds it too uncomfortable to admit that we're now caving in to the very people that Bush promised to defeat.
Then, Krauthammer makes this startling admission: "The insurgency continues, and IS NOT GOING TO BE DEFEATED MILITARILY."
Finally, the cold light of reason has found its way into the dark corner of neoconservative denial.
"But", Krauthammer adds, "that does not mean we lose. Insurgencies can be undone by co-optation."
Already the wheels are turning as Krauthammer and crew work out the details for a permanent presence in Iraq. But, how? "Co-optation" is a neat sounding word but what does it mean?
It means that Bush plans to give the Ba'ath Party a place at the political table with the Shiite death squads and the Kurds who've been subjugated by Saddam for the last 40 years.
It is utter madness and it will not work.
But, beyond these major drawbacks, how is Bush going to sell "amnesty" (which many see as synonymous to surrender) to the American people?
This isn't a problem for the pliable Krauthammer whose set of principles would fit comfortably in a matchbox.
"Amnesty will be an essential element in any reconciliation policy....The posturing over amnesty can only make it more difficult."
In other words, "Get over it".
Krauthammer scolds the Democrats for quibbling over something so incidental as joining forces with the "evildoers" who have been killing American servicemen for 3 years. What's so bad about that? After all, no one in Krauthammer's family died.
Can we really grasp how whacky this idea is? War is not something that the neocons can casually turn off like a water faucet. It's crazy.
For those who think that Bush's Iraq policy is totally adrift, Krauthammer offers these soothing words to assuage their anxiety: "Our objective in any war is not revenge but success."
Really? Tell that to the people in Abu Ghraib and Falluja.
It doesn't seem like the Bush administration has the remotest idea of what they are doing. They simply lurch from one bad idea to the next while the mountains of carnage continue to rise.
Krauthammer's Ruminations at the Warmongers Lair
It is astonishing to consider the 180-degree reversal the neocons have managed since the onset of the war in 2003. Here's a sampling of Krauthammer's triumphant speech at the American Enterprise Institute in April 2003 immediately following the fall of Baghdad. Its boastful tone pretty well summarizes the delusional aspirations of its author:
"The importance of the war in Iraq is that it has demonstrated for the first time in history the capacity of one country, the United States, to destroy a totalitarian regime without destroying the country. That's never been done in human history."
"We did in ..Iraq..(what) could only be called surgical preemption, in a way that had been previously unimaginable... the Ba'ath Party (was) a classic Stalinist state and it collapsed as a result of our precision, high-tech and the very novel kind of warfare." (preemption)
"The brilliance of the campaign on Iraq was not just the military pyrotechnics, the integration of intelligence, the use of air power, et cetera. At the root of the success of the war in Iraq was a deep understanding of the nature of Stalinist totalitarian regimes. It understood that it was a brittle form of regime, that it existed entirely on fear, repression and terror, that it has a desiccated ideology." (Compare this statement to Krauthammer's sudden willingness to make amends with the Ba'atist resistance)
"We have the capacity to wage this kind of war with relatively few casualties, both among combatants on the allied side and among civilians on the other side. And that I think has had a deep impression in the region and around the world."
"The only people in the world who still question whether or not we won in Iraq are Upper West Side liberals who aren't quite sure that we won the Cold War either".
[Laughter.]
"The fact is that in the Arab World, they understand that they have suffered the most significant, and in their eyes, humiliating defeat since the Six Day War. There are tyrants throughout the region who sit uneasily on their thrones. All of them have seen the statues toppled in Baghdad, and they know that their citizens also have seen those statues, and they know that the statues outside the windows of those who saw it in Cairo, and in Damascus, and elsewhere also can be toppled."
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