THE CAUSE AND EFFECT OF OUR HIJACKED AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY: Middle East Chaos and the Bush Doctrine

Flags of Palestine (left) and Israel (right) with map of Palestine (red) and Israel (yellow) in the middle

We have just passed the inauspicious third anniversary of the Iraq war and occupation — an enterprise with no end in sight. This adventure has produced countless casualties of many dimensions. But the primary casualty beyond Iraq has been the Palestinian Question.

Flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq war on their final flight home

The vast energy and resources that could have gone into solving this intractable problem have, for the past three years, been pouring instead into our bottomless pit of entanglement – known as Iraq. The political capital that Bush claimed after his reelection that could have been spent getting seriously engaged in the establishment of an independent Palestinian state has instead been squandered on ill-advised domestic issues, but primarily on the Iraq war and occupation.

This tragic misuse of superpower military power and prestige will be historically recorded as a foreign policy blunder of the first magnitude. It is a mess of our own making that will take many years to recover from.

On this third anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, we find America more divided than ever. And we find the Bush Administration, including Condi Rice, more indifferent and uninspired by the Israeli/Palestinian problem than ever. They have other more important things to worry about — or so they think. As a nation, we are all acutely aware that our image on the world stage is that of an arrogant bully, but most Americans think it’s just our enemies who promote this impression — and that most of those enemies use the Iraq war as their primary example.

Iraqi protesters burn the American flag on the third anniversary of the war, which started on March 19, 2003, with the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad

What most of us fail to understand — much less feel passionate about — is that everything in the Middle East is connected in profound historical terms. And we fail to appreciate how so much of the animosity in the region toward us springs from Middle Eastern anger and Muslim anger, because of the festering and unresolved Palestinian occupation – and our historical lopsided support of Israel.

The Bush Doctrine of preemptive war against Iraq three years ago sealed our fate. It became the straightjacket that now insures that the great power of the American presidency will not be available to help solve this problem — and free us from the international impression that our commitment to Palestinian justice is hollow and insincere.

It insures that our occupation of Iraq will devour the Bush Administration’s attention until the end of his term, because they have no plan — and that’s a tragedy for all concerned.

Goals for Americans Foundation is preparing a unique workable plan that is designed specifically for the unique ethnic makeup of Iraq. This plan will be released very soon.

Israeli soldier and Palestinian family

While we’re now locked in the Iraq occupation and Bush scrambles for legitimacy, history is unfolding in Israel and the Palestinian territories without us. The recent electoral victories for Hamas and the Israeli parliamentary elections will set a course for the region that few can predict. We will be, for all practical purposes, mere observers instead of active mediators for peace and justice. Such is the blowback from the Bush Doctrine and its first fatal expression, the Iraq war.

THE WAY BACK:

Ending the Occupation and Reclaiming the High Ground

The road back to the Palestinian Question for us is through Baghdad! There are no alternatives, no shortcuts, and certainly no detours. The occupation of Iraq by 130,000 U.S. troops is now our first responsibility, like it or not!

Colin Powell sold the case for the Iraq war at the United Nations with faulty evidence on February 5, 2003. He regrets this now.

Colin Powell reportedly said to President Bush during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, “You break it, you own it!” Years earlier, at the conclusion of the first Gulf War, Bush Sr. was wise enough to stop short of invasion and occupation, and “owning” the price tag for managing and rebuilding the country of 26 million people. He went to the edge of the abyss, saw what would be involved, and carefully stepped back.

In March 2003, the current President Bush, with authorization from a weak subservient Congress, plunged us voluntarily into war on what we now realize was a mountain of unsubstantiated rumors promoted with a relentless campaign of fear mongering.

We were told Saddam Hussein was hiding an arsenal of lethal weapons of mass destruction, which we now know he was not. The Administration promoted the idea that Hussein was affiliated with Al-Qaeda, and thus September 11, which we now know he was not. We were told the intelligence community supported these suspicions and claims. We now know that the Administration cherry-picked intelligence reports to support its preconceived ideas and discarded any information that challenged the rationale for war. We know that the neocon war hawks in the Pentagon — Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Feith, Scooter Libby, and others within the Pentagon filtered and spun the intelligence out of the C.I.A. to suit their needs.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote a top-secret memo after a meeting in the Oval Office on January 31, 2003, indicating that President Bush intended to go to war in Iraq — no matter what.

Recently we learned of the President’s intention to invade Iraq no matter what, as revealed in a top-secret British memo from an Oval Office meeting on January 31, 2003, between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. The memo explains how Bush expressed his intention to launch a preemptive war to topple Saddam Hussein even if the U.N. inspectors found no WMDs, and even if the U.N. denied him a second resolution giving Hussein an ultimatum. He also talked about providing some kind of provocation to justify the war.

In this memo, Bush is recorded as having said about post-invasion Iraq, “it is unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.”

The Shiite Golden Mosque before and after it was bombed on February 22, 2006

This statement of simple-minded arrogance underscores just how little understanding the President had about Iraq, its people, its culture and … the adventure he was determined to plunge us into. The “internecine warfare” he casually dismissed in that meeting three years ago is now what many refer to as the unfolding civil war.

We are now three years into the war and occupation, and sectarian warfare has only gotten worse, especially during the first months of this year. A member of the Iraqi parliament recently referred to the daily bloodshed as “sectarian cleansing” — a horrifying term that invokes images of the Bosnian civil war at it worst.

The sectarian violence accelerated on February 22 when the Askariya Shiite shrine in Samarra was bombed. Since then, the daily carnage of car bombs, kidnappings, and executions, drive-by shootings, and random mayhem has continued unabated. The judicial system and security forces seem powerless to bring anyone to justice, which just increases the sense of lawlessness and helplessness within the population. Witnesses frequently report that death squads and kidnappers are in the company of uniformed security forces, which are predominately Shiite.

Bloody Shiites battered by Sunni insurgents

This is not the quick-and-easy war and painless exit that the Bush Administration promised us. This is not the occupation that Cheney said would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. Three years into the occupation, Iraq is not a country basking in the glow of security and equality, is not a country held together with a common vision of democratic pluralism.

This instead is the bloody and costly quagmire many warned us about during the lead-up to the war. Iraq is the nightmare the Vietnam-era veterans were terrified would happen someday.

WHERE WE STAND NOW

And the Options Before Us

The Bush apologists and unrepentant neoconservatives are now telling us that the only thing standing in the way of a successful end to the sectarian violence now terrorizing Iraq is the formation of a unity government. The parliamentary elections in January predictably resulted in a majority victory for the Shiites, united under the United Iraqi Alliance. The best-case scenario was for them to quickly pull in Kurds and Sunnis to form a unity government that would garner the respect and loyalty of all Iraqis above all other loyalties.

But war has an annoying way of obliterating best-case scenarios, especially when the planners of that war don’t bother doing their homework, or to listen to those who do. The State Department presented the Bush Administration with a detailed blueprint for nation-building which Bush and his neoconservative advisers dismissed out of hand. Rumsfeld’s plan for a war-on-the-cheap and a quick and painless occupation left little room for the real-world messiness and open-ended timelines that war generates.

On May 1, 2003, President Bush piloted a jet to the USS Abraham Lincoln and gave a speech in front of a banner that said “Mission Accomplished.” What seemed like a good photo opportunity at the time later came back to haunt the Administration.

Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” declaration as the invasion concluded has degenerated into a three-year disaster with no end in sight. The unity government, which supposedly will salvage this mess, is on indefinite hold while the different factions circle one another and their death squads terrorize the streets.

One American delegation after another has made the trip to Baghdad recently to plead, beg, and threaten the three major factions to move forward with forming a government — all to no avail. The forces of sectarian hatred appear now to be beyond our control. Interim President Alawi has called the present situation a civil war in the making. The Bush Administration, in full denial, still thinks the best-case scenario is possible, if only a unity government can be pulled together with duct tape and superglue.

It appears as though we are now siding more with the Sunnis against the increasingly vigilante-prone Shiites — an unimaginable idea before this year. And the Shiites, in kind, seem ever more willing to ignore our directives and warnings. The Bush Administration is very unhappy with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and his close association with the more radical Shiite elements in his coalition, and has signaled through U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Kahlilzad that they’d rather not see him continue in that role. But al-Jaafari shows no sign of caving in or stepping aside. Our influence is being marginalized in the middle of a war of our President’s own making.

As this drags out, the chances of the greater population ever having faith in a unity government grow dimmer and dimmer, as does the patience of the American public. And it appears the fault lines that break the country into three ethnic factions — Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites — are rumbling and ready to break wide open.

Perhaps it is time we face reality and orchestrate the peaceful breakup of Iraq instead of resisting it at a terrible and ultimately futile cost — and this is (or will be) the basis of our Iraqi “Salvation” Plan — soon to be released.

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