Bush wasn't satisfied with just eliminating the threat he conjured of WMD's in Iraq. When that justification was knocked down, he claimed to be on the hunt for Saddam. When our military gunned down Saddam's sons, and eventually captured the former Iraqi leader, Bush shifted to nation-building and rhetoric about building democracy in Iraq and in the region. A regime was created through the staging of an election under the increased occupation of the country's invaders who were actively suppressing the Sunni opposition's influence in the vote by staging attacks in their communities at the behest, and with the assistance of the interim regime we had installed with the exile, Allawi, at the head.
A Shiite-dominated Iraqi regime was born out of that electoral process. The U.S. armed and trained Iraqis to serve in the police and military, presumably to fight against the Iraqi resistance. But its units quickly devolved into militias, and then into what were described by the Sunni communities and others as Death Squads because of their bloody repression and reprisals, carried out with impunity as they operate behind the dominating influence of our military.
Americans have been fighting and dying in Iraq for over four years in defense of Bush's notion of democracy in Iraq, but there hasn't been any real democracy there. Even the elections which allowed the present Iraqi regime to achieve power had very few of the safeguards or standards which would allow us to point to their government as the ultimate expression of the Iraqi people's will. Yet, Bush still uses the autocracy he manufactured in Iraq behind his manufactured invasion and occupation as reason and license to continue to sacrifice American soldiers at the rate of 1-3 a day; to the total today of 3245 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the initial invasion.
"Iraq is a young democracy," Bush said in his speech defying Congress as they voted to demand he withdraw from Iraq by a date certain. "It is fighting for its survival in a region that is vital to our security. The lesson of September the 11th must not be (forgot). To cut off support for the security forces would put our own security at risk," he said.
It's a desperate plea from Bush, but his interest in remaining in Iraq is not for Iraqis, as he claims. It's for his own 'deciding' interest in continuing his strident projection of U.S. military power behind the continued sacrifice of our soldiers in Iraq. There are no armies in Iraq preparing to invade the U.S. as we withdraw. But, Bush is afraid; and he wants us to be afraid as well. Bush fears retaliation for the deaths he's allowed to be inflicted on innocent Iraqis. He's waged his own war against Iraqis, right alongside those killers he regularly calls evil.
However, it's his own prestige he's attempting to salvage as he presses our overburdened forces forward in Iraq, in pursuit of some "victory" that he can only define as "progress." That's all he's offering America as an outcome of his escalation. After five years of Bush pulling us along in Iraq, it's more than reasonable to expect that progress for our forces in Iraq means more of the same chaos and a deepening of their involvement in that chaos. All of that progress resting on the prospect for success of our cobbled Iraqi regime, whose relationship to 'democracy' is like the eventual emergence of fireweed in a forest after a devastating blaze.
As someone, somewhere has said before, "sometimes the only way to progress is to stop."
A Shiite-dominated Iraqi regime was born out of that electoral process. The U.S. armed and trained Iraqis to serve in the police and military, presumably to fight against the Iraqi resistance. But its units quickly devolved into militias, and then into what were described by the Sunni communities and others as Death Squads because of their bloody repression and reprisals, carried out with impunity as they operate behind the dominating influence of our military.
Americans have been fighting and dying in Iraq for over four years in defense of Bush's notion of democracy in Iraq, but there hasn't been any real democracy there. Even the elections which allowed the present Iraqi regime to achieve power had very few of the safeguards or standards which would allow us to point to their government as the ultimate expression of the Iraqi people's will. Yet, Bush still uses the autocracy he manufactured in Iraq behind his manufactured invasion and occupation as reason and license to continue to sacrifice American soldiers at the rate of 1-3 a day; to the total today of 3245 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the initial invasion.
"Iraq is a young democracy," Bush said in his speech defying Congress as they voted to demand he withdraw from Iraq by a date certain. "It is fighting for its survival in a region that is vital to our security. The lesson of September the 11th must not be (forgot). To cut off support for the security forces would put our own security at risk," he said.
However, it's his own prestige he's attempting to salvage as he presses our overburdened forces forward in Iraq, in pursuit of some "victory" that he can only define as "progress." That's all he's offering America as an outcome of his escalation. After five years of Bush pulling us along in Iraq, it's more than reasonable to expect that progress for our forces in Iraq means more of the same chaos and a deepening of their involvement in that chaos. All of that progress resting on the prospect for success of our cobbled Iraqi regime, whose relationship to 'democracy' is like the eventual emergence of fireweed in a forest after a devastating blaze.
As someone, somewhere has said before, "sometimes the only way to progress is to stop."
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