Why they are so, but, like to village curs,
Bark when their fellows do." --Shakespeare
It should be clear to most everyone by now that Bush has absolutely no intention of doing anything the American people have demanded of him. After his veto of the Iraq withdrawal legislation Tuesday, Bush took pains to explain the reasons for his obstinacy which centered almost exclusively on Iraqi concerns instead of any American interest. Apparently, the political success of the regime installed and maintained behind the sacrifices of our soldiers is more important to Bush than anything the American people are telling him with their votes in November, and more important than their response to almost every poll they've answered insisting that he bring our troops home.
Bush insisted, anyway, in a speech Wednesday, that his escalation of his occupation is a 'new strategy', rather than just a ramping up of the old one which has resulted in over 3400 U.S. troops' lives lost in Iraq; 104 killed last month, as Bush admits, as a direct result of his new escalation.
"The most important fact about our new strategy," Bush told the Association of General Contractors, "it is fundamentally different from the previous strategy. The previous strategy wasn't working the way we wanted it to work," he said.
There are some "new" aspects of his escalation of the occupation of Baghdad - like the decision to construct a 'wall' isolating the Sunni community from whatever amenities and opportunities the residents there would expect to be entitled to avail themselves of from a "free and democratic" Iraq. The building of walls meshes perfectly with the apparent decision of the Bush regime to throw their support behind the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and to cast all of the Sunnis as "enemies" akin to those in their community who took on the moniker of Bush's nemesis, al-Qaeda, in their resistance to the new regime.
All talk of reconciliation between the warring sects in Iraq has given way to a notion that some amount of legislative maneuvering by the Maliki regime and his fractured parliament will satisfy for the democracy which was promised Iraqis who were privileged to vote in the elections held under the increased U.S. military occupation of the sovereign nation. Talk of the Shiite majority reconciling with the Sunnis who were driven from power and opportunity by the U.S. invasion has been replaced with the generic goal of passing legislation reversing the de-Batthification of the military and the government which was zealously ordered after the initial invasion by Bush and Rumsfeld.
Still, Bush insisted Wednesday that his "top priority is to help the Iraqi leaders," who, he says, "were elected by nearly 12 million of their citizens -- secure their population." And that the "young democracy needed some time to make important political decisions to help reconcile the country."
It's a no-brainer for most Americans, steeped in the broad history and tradition of our own democracy, that one election held years ago under the supervision of the U.S. military -- which invaded and overthrew the existing regime -- is no substitute for the checks and balances an accountable government provides by enabling a continuing process where average citizens can actually participate and influence their rulers and their elevated edicts.
There is no democratic process of accountability of the new regime to the Iraqis they intend to govern. Indeed, there has been a sustained effort to intimidate and stifle the influence of those communities who have actively opposed the imposition of the Maliki authority and the new regime's support for the U.S. invaders. Along with their U.S. benefactors, the Maliki regime has directed their new army to assist the U.S. military in re-occupying these opposition communities to intimidate them from their active opposition of the new government's political initiatives and actions.
It's ludicrous -- for most Americans and most Iraqis -- that there's an expectation that the Iraqi regime would engineer some legislative machinations behind the intimidating influence of our occupying army and call it democracy. Yet, that's what Bush and the supporters of his bloody occupation are telling us they expect to achieve from this deadly escalation; a political victory in Iraq's compromised legislature.
It's no matter to Bush and his cabal that the Sadr coalition, who enabled the new regime to power with their support for the Maliki regime -- walked away from their positions within the new parliament; they'll just appoint more compliant ones. It's of no consequence to those who are zealously packing our soldiers into the middle of Iraq's civil war that there is no reliable effort from the new regime to bend to the will of the Iraqis they lord over in the majority's insistence that our forces leave their country.
In fact, the Bush administration's support for the continuation of the manufactured authority of the Maliki regime -- in the face of the continuing resistance and opposition to Bush's continued occupation -- is a direct reflection with the president's spurring of the will of the majority of Americans that he end the fiasco and exit.
The most pernicious ignorance of the will of those Bush seeks to dominate with his manufactured authority here at home and in Iraq has to be his continuing insistence that the 'Iraqi al-Qaeda' he's motivated with his diversion from the hunt for the original perpetrators in Afghanistan, threaten more than his pathetic attempts to consolidate power in Iraq. The notion that they'd 'follow us home' is nothing more than Bush's own paranoid fear of the backlash of his own indiscriminate aggression against innocent Iraqis.
"I don't need to remind you who al Qaeda is," Bush told the contractors. "Al Qaeda is the group that plot and planned and trained killers to come and kill people on our soil. The same bunch that is causing havoc in Iraq were the ones who came and murdered our citizens. I've got to tell you, that day deeply affected my decision-making. And I vowed that I would do anything that I possibly could within the law to protect the American citizens against further attack by these ideologues, by these murderers," he said.
Bush's 'Iraqi al-Qaeda' are becoming as important and elevated as the original 9-11 orchestrators have been as a result of his rhetoric raising the combatants to a level of importance reserved for nation-states which actually threaten our defenses with substantial armies and weaponry. While the original al-Qaeda continue to influence recruits and supporters by the mere fact of their Bush-enabled freedom from prosecution, Bush is satisfied to regard the 2% or so Iraqis our intelligence agencies identify as al-Qaeda sympathizers as the most important threat our country faces which deserves the bulk of our nation's defenses and the continuing and escalated sacrifice of our nation's defenders in Iraq.
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