The Choice

Ramzy Baroud in the Japan Times:

But that is simply not feasible. The security in Iraq is deteriorating, and the insurgency is gaining momentum. All attempts to diminish the authenticity or magnitude of the resistance have failed. What's going on in Iraq is not the work of a few infiltrators, nor can it be narrowly defined according to ethnic classification or the character of one or a cluster of individuals.

If the war was a faltering empire's attempt to thrust itself in a highly strategic geopolitical location and thus gain control over precious energy sources, then it was a strategic blunder. It is threatening the stability of an entire region and also exposing the inadequacies of U.S. military capabilities.

If U.S. military strategists -- especially those close to the president -- possess the courage to extract lessons from history and recognize the complexity of the political reality in Iraq, they would undoubtedly conclude that the war in Iraq is simply unwinnable.

Knowing that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war, the Bush administration is focusing on winning time by diverting attention from Iraq with smoke screens. There was the "bringing democracy" to the Arab world charade, with its last episode being the elections mockery in Egypt. And before that was the frenzy over the Islamic madrassas and how they gives birth to "little terrorists" -- to use the outlandish term of one CNN journalist, and so forth.

But every smoke screen has eventually dispersed to reveal the same tragic reality that the White House is laboriously trying to conceal: Bush's war has no future strategy and no quantifiable objective. Once these two elements are removed, all that is left behind is war for the sake of war, a perpetual, endless military strife devoid of meaning except that cruelly inferred by an extremist zealot or a conceited ideologue. Evidently, the Bush constituency thrives on both.

Even a pompous president with a divine mission must recognize a disaster when he sees one. It is improbable that Bush actually believes his own rhetoric of a world full of promise, which he supposedly molded, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon or Gaza.

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But Bush is unlikely to yield. He too has a crowd for which he cares deeply, convoluted interest groups that are a bizarre mix of business elites and corporate contractors, religious fanatics and top military brass.

Bush's immediate constituency is unified in its war agenda, each group for its own reasons. An immediate withdrawal from Iraq is an ideological defeat; an irreplaceable financial loss for some; an end, if temporarily, to unwarranted military interventionism and the injurious diminishment to America's political hegemony. Considering that occupying and controlling Iraq was the pinnacle of the Bush war advocates' infamous manifesto on how to "secure the realms" of an increasingly challenged empire, a withdrawal from Iraq would certainly be the end of that dream.

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This self-inflicted predicament presents Bush and his administration with two arduous options: to disown their commitment to the empire and to exit Iraq immediately, saving some face and an opportunity -- if only a meager one -- to manage the crisis they've helped create with the hope of reconciling with the majority of the American people, or to weather the Iraqi storm, hoping for a miracle before their ship is completely sunk.