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July 15, 2007
Why doesn't the Australian government do something useful on Iraq and call for the US to rethink its foreign policy, and recognise the virtues of so-called "soft power" and acting through international institutions including the United Nations? Both the Australian public and the Iraqi public want us to leave Iraq. However, both the Australia government and the Iraqi government want us to stay. So we're staying. So much for democracy.
Martin Rowson
Howard and Co could put pressure on Bush, who is a corner being forced to defend his policy in Iraq, after a report on the effectiveness of the "surge" strategy concluded that the military situation had improved but political and economic targets had not been met.The trajectory of horror in Iraq his clear-- the U.S. military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm. But Bush is staying the course. He's locked himself in. As commander-in-chief, Bush calls the shots, and he's not giving an inch to the critics, because he is convinced that Iraq is the central front of the war on terror.
Oh I know that Howard and Downer will never do this as they are neo-cons through and through.They accept America's sense of manifest destiny, and they see the Iraq war as one of liberation rather than conquest--a naked smash-and-grab raid on a sovereign state to allow the foreign power safe and unimpeded access to whatever pickings the plundered nation has to offer.
Presumably, the Canberra neo-cons are in denial. They do not accept that judged even by the lights of Bush's own "war on terror" standards, Iraq has been a spectacular failure. It took a country that had been free of jihadist militants and turned it into their most fecund breeding ground; it also took a country that posed no threat to the United States and made it into a place where thousands of Americans, not to mention many tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis, have been killed. If Al Qaeda began as a fringe sect, then it has become, thanks in no small measure to the Bush administration, a global movement able to draw on deep wells of support.
The ALP could speak out, given its tradition of multilateralism. I presume that they support the US's empire of bases" the 700 or more military bases, giant to micro, that the Pentagon has listed as part of the Pentagon's global basing structure. This "footprint" is a way of getting at the nature of imperial power for a country that largely avoided colonies, but nonetheless managed to garrison the globe. Rudd starts from the premise the assumption that the United States should be the dominant force in international relations, accepts that the US is the empire of our age, and he sees the US's post–September 11 imperial mission in a benign light---export of democracy and saving the souls of the subject peoples.
However, doesn't the ALP share the new consensus which holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Thisi does not take any political courage as paid-up members of the US's foreign policy establishment, rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption.
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Gary
I see that Bush is saying that there's no surrender to the enemy, which in Bush's mind is the insurgents and al-Qa'ida in Iraq. He added:
"I don't think Congress ought to be running the war. Trying to run a war through resolution is a prescription for failure, as far as I'm concerned, and we can't afford to fail. Congress has got all the right to appropriate money, but the idea of telling our military how to conduct operations, for example, or how to, you know, deal with troop strength, I don't think it makes sense, I don't think it makes sense today, nor do I think it's a good precedent for the future."
Surely Bush doesn't see Congress as an enemy for which there can be no surrender?