The fighting in Najaf exposes the fraud of the June 30 “sovereignty” handover, and represents a complete failure of Bush’s Iraq strategy, but Kerry can’t bring himself to condemn the whole thing as the colossal disaster that it is.
When Bush announced the June 30 date for a handover of “sovereignty” to Iraq, it was clear that this was a political deadline aimed at pushing the war out of the news pages during the campaign season, not a logical date based upon democratic progress in the country.
Now it is clear that the critics of that PR tactic were right. There is no Iraqi government—just a puppet regime that does the bidding of its U.S. masters.
Ayad Alawi, the U.S.-picked “prime minister” and former CIA asset, can only look to the U.S. military to defend his regime’s authority in Baghdad and southern Iraq. His claim of independence is further exposed as a fraud when he is compelled to “authorize” the U.S. attack on Muktada al-Sadr’s militia in Najaf.
From the beginning, the U.S. game plan has been to marginalize the Shites, whom the Bush Administration and its neo-con “thinkers” have always considered to be too close to Iran, but that is a doomed strategy. With Iraq 60 percent Shia, the only way to keep them out of power is by repression—the same kind of repression that was long practiced by Saddam Hussein.
So as in Vietnam, but for different reasons, our soldiers are now mired in an unwinnable war, forced to bomb and terrorize innocent civilians, all the while creating, through their efforts, an ever-larger resistance.
The colossal disaster that Bush has managed to produce in three and a half short years is truly mind-boggling.
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Original: Bush’s Iraq Policy a Shambles, But Can Kerry Challenge It?