Conniver-in-chief
I have not been reticent about my belief that George W. Bush is an evil man with no loyalty to the United States of America or the U.S. Constitution, that he has never been a conservative and that he is arguably worse than any past U.S. president except Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln.
All that being said, I have always looked on with bemusement as the increasingly unhinged left wing of the Democratic party has raged irrationally about this supposedly "conservative" president. But after his comments about the state of the Iraqi occupation last week, I began to understand how incredibly infuriating the president's blithe and unblinking lying can be.
In his response to Gen. Petraeus's predictably optimistic report, George W. Bush declared:
The success of a free Iraq is critical to the security of the United States. ... Whatever political party you belong to, whatever your position on Iraq, we should be able to agree that America has a vital interest in preventing chaos and providing hope in the Middle East.
That is pure and utter hogwash. America has a vital interest in protecting its borders from invasion by foreign armies... and millions of Mexicans. It has a vital interest in protecting its citizens' liberties from terrorists... and excessive federal government power. But a free Iraq is not only not critical to the security of the United States, it is arguably more dangerous to that security than a non-free one; that is why the neocons are currently mulling over the possibility of overthrowing the free, elected Maliki government in favor of a puppet regime that is less amenable to Iran.
Chaos in the Middle East is actually in America's interest; the global jihad is not likely to be very interested in shooting up shopping malls in Topeka or bombing office buildings in Manhattan when more tempting prizes are up for grabs in Iraq. "Divide" is an integral component of "divide and conquer," after all, the only thing more dangerous than a free and united Shiite Iraq allied with Iran is a free and united Sunni Iraq allied with Saudi Arabia. And "providing hope" is not a vital American interest anywhere, least of all in the Middle East.
The truth is that "the splurge," as the soldiers call it, is not going well. Insurgent violence always decreases in the face of overwhelming force, but this is only a temporary measure and the violence has increased in areas outside the reinforced zones, just as Mao's guerilla doctrine dictates. Once the surge ends, the violence will return. In a discussion about this tactical irrelevancy last week on the blog, one Iraq veteran commented:
Spent more than two years in Iraq and most likely will have to do 15 more months unless it goes back to 12-month rotations after "the splurge" is reduced. There is absolutely NO chance of success there! None!
The reason a troop reinforcement is irrelevant is that it is merely a temporary and tactical measure which cannot even begin to compensate for the complete strategic disaster that the occupation was always bound to be. Removing Hussein from power was strategically feasible for a great military power, magically converting Shiite war leaders into 18th century Christian gentlemen is not. Middle Eastern democracy is a non-starter, we'll be fortunate if our own perverted form of strictly limited democracy survives another two decades.
Alan Greenspan let the cat out of the bag, albeit in an indirect manner. He asserted that the occupation is a function of the administration's desire for oil, specifically, oil priced in dollars. Given that Greenspan was the gentleman responsible for creating the dollars with which Iraqi oil could be purchased until Hussein declared otherwise in late 2000, chances are that he has a pretty good notion of what he's talking about here. This means that the drums presently beating for war with Iran most likely have more to do with the plunging dollar and Iran's recent announcement that its oil would henceforth be priced in Euros instead of anything relating to Israel or those sneaky, invisible WMDs which have presumably now migrated across the Iran-Iraq border.
"Follow the money" is the policeman's policy when searching for the motive underlying a murder. No doubt future historians will find that to be a useful motto when investigating the reasons for the seemingly insane actions of the corrupt Bush administration too.