Patraeus II

This week our old friend – oops make that W’s old friend – General Patraeus returns to the halls of Congress. Not the one trick pony W is, this guy is brighter and has more angles to offer, but what he will tell the Congress this week will have one theme running through it – or is that running us through?! Ambassador Crocker will be there, too, but only as an echo.

More than anything else, Patraeus will press for maintaining as high a number of U.S. troops in Iraq. He will assert that the surge has worked; that Iraq has achieved new levels of security; that al Maliki’s fiasco in Basra was evidence – not of the inability of the Iraqi government to handle its own security – but of the need for continued American involvement.

Additionally, and most heinously, it is likely that he will do his best to paint Iran as the villain of Basra. He will hold that Iran’s assistance with intelligence and logistical support enabled the Sadrist militia to outmaneuver the Iraqi troops. The upshot will be an attempt to increase American feeling against Iran. Perhaps even to gain support for invading that country.

You can be sure that he will not speak, unless forced to do so, to the fact that the Green Zone – the only area of Iraq that has ever offered a sense of security since the invasion – is now under fire. He will not speak to the fact that a great part of the problem in Basra was that Iraqi troops and police shed their uniforms and took their weapons to join the Sadrists against their own “government”. He will not speak to the fact that the Iraqi security forces were proven in Basra to be monumentally incapable of defending their own government’s interests. He will not speak to the fact that the Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al Maliki, has lost any semblance of the little respect and power he ever had with the Iraqi people. He will not speak of the fact that the sectarian hatred between Shi’ites and Sunnis is the driving force behind both the insurgency and the discriminatory practices of the Iraqi government. He will not speak to the fact that the U.S.’s slimy champion, Ahmed Chalibi, is still the apple of the neo-cons’ eye and still waits in the wings to take power in Iraq. He will not mention that the U.S. military is nearly at the breaking point from extended tours in Iraq, let alone the potential effects of expanded warfare.

In the background is the fact that Iran’s loose cannon, President Ahmedinejad, has committed the same sin as Saddam Hussein. He has called for valuing oil in a currency other than the U.S. dollar.

The more I see of this, the more convinced I become that what we are witnessing is the death throes of the U.S. empire. We have staked our future on the control of oil. The first step in that stake was the valuation of oil in U.S. dollars early in the history of petroleum’s economic dominance. The fight in Iraq is an attempt to stifle the voice for change. The death of that stake will come with the valuation of oil by any other means, therefore we must try again to stifle that dissenting voice.

We are fighting “Islamic terrorists” only because most of the world’s oil is located in the Middle East where Islam has taken hold. That’s why we are not really fighting Islamic terrorists at all. We are fighting oil rich terrorists.

The huge danger to the U.S. in all this is that a war with Iran would be a much bigger fiasco than the mess in Iraq. Iran is much more powerful. Its government is not strong, but it has much deeper pockets, a better military, and a much more loyal population than Hussein had in Iraq. It would stretch our military beyond its maximum capabilities and, I think, would ultimately destroy us. Our only chance to win would be to use our nuclear arsenal – a thought that brings shivers of revulsion and fear to my spine.

We are losing the long range fight because it exposes the hypocrisy of our standard positions around the world. Our “democratic” Iraqi government has now declared that Sadrists will be blocked from voting unless they disband their militia. Our unleashed ally, Israel, the political seat of our troubles in the Middle East, has condemned Switzerland for recently contracting to buy Iranian natural gas, but has also been exposed as having a long standing order with Iran for petroleum. Our own leaders continue to foment hatred against Muslims by subtle use of terms that demean Islam while protesting that they have no fight with Islam. We continuously say that we are trying to establish freedom and democracy around the world while everything we do seeks to protect our economic dominance around the world - democracy be damned.

Ultimately, the bellicosity of this administration will, if it remains unbridled, lead us to our own destruction. The current recession is only a shadow of the devastation that a war with Iran would bring on swiftly.

It is time, in our history, for the U.S. to recognize that it cannot continue to dominate the world with the gunboat diplomacy of the past. It is time, in our history, for us to recognize that possessing the world’s largest cache of nuclear weapons does not justify bullying behavior. It is time, in the world’s history, for the concept of nation-state dominance to give way to concepts more likely to result in the maintenance of growth in the wealth and well-being of nations. It is certainly high time, in this administration’s history, to pull back its fangs and seek the high ground of diplomacy in lieu of the flood of blood and violence that military adventurism has unleashed.

If only Congress had the strength of character to ask the right questions of people like Petraeus and Gates. If that doesn’t happen this week – and it won’t - we will continue our slippery slide into the foul muck in which we are already chin deep, and even a presidential election may come too late.


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle