Iraq, Bloody Iraq

19 July 2006 |permalink | email article

No, the headline is not a misprint. You might think so with much of Southern Lebanon in flames because of Israeli air strikes, 500,000 homeless, Hezbollah rockets inching closer to Tel Aviv, and the civilian death toll escalating in the region.

Given the Mideast crisis, and Bush’s high-risk strategy to seek long-term fundamental change over short-term peace and stability once favored by Clinton, coverage has been minimal about the endangered U.S. presence in Iraq.

Recall that Bush justified the war to oust Saddam Hussein not just as an attempt to remove a terror threat to the U.S., but as a crucial step in resolving the Israeli-Palestine issue and bringing democracy to the entire Middle East. That movement has elected two Hezbollah ministers to Lebanon’s government and given Hamas control of Palestine.

But Wednesday’s front-page headlines in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post offer a far different portrait of what’s going on as Iraq implodes:

Iraqi Death Toll Rises Above 100 Per Day, U.N. Says (NYT); In Iraq, Civil War All but Declared (LAT); Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush’s Foreign Policy (WashPo).

The administration’s failure to grasp the centuries old sectarian enmity between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq has been a strategic failure of historic proportions. Bush bought into the mantra pushed by now disenchanted neocons that regime change, first in Iraq and then in Syria and Iran, would make the region safe for democracy.

Bush is now faulted on foreign policy failures for not more aggressively confronting threats and failing to advance U.S. interests in North Korea and Iran. In Iraq, inadequate troop levels, incompetent management of the war and an inability to crush the insurgency are cited as reasons for killing the dream.

The bloodletting, in Iraq, by Hezbollah and Israel, has been serous enough. Then came last night’s bombshell announcement from Baghdad that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al–Mailki, a Shiite Arab, forcefully denounced the Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

It marks a stunning departure from Bush’s position and illustrates the growing power of a Shiite Muslim identity across the Middle East. Malik’s Shiite Arab party has close ties with Iran, which is supporting Hezbollah and developing nuclear weapons, which could alter the balance of power there.

Consider this: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last week estimated the Iraq war has cost $291 billion so far and would total almost half a trillion dollars even if all U. S. troops were withdrawn by the end of 2009. By 2009?

 

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