Bush’s Iraq’s “surge” policy goes full gear

CSMS Magazine Staff WritersPresident Bush’s television speech last night, announcing his dispatch of over 20,000 more American troops to Iraq, signaled a major escalation of his now two-pronged war against both the Sunni insurgency and the Shiite militias. And what does that mean? It means that the bloodletting of Iraq will SURGE to an imaginable proportion, and God only knows when it will subside. If anything, the new “surge” is threatening to engulf a Middle East conflagration after Bush’s promise to expand the war into Syria, Iran and other targets in the Middle East.This decision to escalate the US military intervention is nothing but a slap in the face of the American voters, who voted overwhelmingly last November against the Bush Administration’s policies in Iraq by electing a democratic majority in Congress.According to many observers, the first wave of additional troops has already begun deploying to the region, and a total of six brigades will be ordered all together, five into the city of Baghdad and one into Anbar Province, center of the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation. Bush has also sent an additional aircraft carrier task force—equipped with hundreds of nuclear weapons—into the Persian Gulf.The program to reduce the violence in Baghdad, according to the speech, is likely to result into “greater American and Iraqi casualties.” He blamed past failures of the US occupation forces on too few troops and “too many restrictions on the troops we did have.” In other words, we must kill millions of Iraqis before subduing the rest.But what happened last Monday, when Shiite Iraqi soldiers and American troops rampaged through a Sunni neighborhood while killing at least 50 people and leveling entire city blocks, was just a prelude of what sets to come in 2007 for a humiliated, repressed population living in the hellhole of Iraq.Rolling the dice in IraqEveryone agrees that there is no military solution in Iraq. It is obvious that the protracted urban warfare that the US finds itself in Iraq will fade only and only when the country recovers its lost independence, which means only a speedy end to the Anglo-American occupation can bring about peace or, at the very least, a since of normalcy to the country. But the hawks in Washington and their Iraqi lackeys are prepared to roll the dice. “A sustained presence in Central Baghdad will inevitably put an end to the violence,” claimed David Brooks from the Weekly Standard, the conservatives’ mouthpiece in Washington.A diabolical plan to incinerate the Sunni presence in Baghdad, just like the lower scale plan set by the Kurds in the oil-rich, northern city of Kurkuc, is fully underway now that president Bush has officially announce the “surge,” in total disregard for the military families, for the exposed soldiers dying every day, for the Iraq Commission and for the vast majority of the population who voted against the war last November.The offensive, which targets the Sunni-populated areas of Baghdad, will not stop there. Once the Sunnis are obliterated, the offensive will turn to the Shiite areas, especially the vast working-class area of eastern Baghdad known as Sadr City. Until now, US military forces have been barred from combat operations in that part of the capital. Last night speech has officially put an end to that. “Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter these neighborhoods and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated,” Bush said with a stern face.We need to start tightening our seatbelt, for the result will be the incineration of entire neighborhoods by US firepower, and a death toll among the Shiites that will exceed that of under Saddam Hussein. Furthermore, the threat to escalate the war, perhaps to expand it to both Syria and Iran can only be interpreted as a tacit understanding by the hawks that the deteriorating position for the US occupation regime in Iraq could be salvaged by widening the scope of the war.We have all the reasons to believe that the increased violence in Iraq is only the beginning. But Bush does not see it that way. “From Afghanistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian Territories, millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence,” he said. “And they are looking at Iraq. They want to know: Will America withdraw and yield the future of that country to the extremists or will we stand with the Iraqis who have made the choice for freedom?”This assertion is an insult to our intelligence. Tens of millions of people in the Middle East, and the vast majority of the population of the entire world, oppose the US invasion and conquest of Iraq and understand it, quite correctly, as a reassertion of Western colonialism in a particularly crude and brutal form.However, this latest western crusade in Arabia is predicted to fail, like most previous ones did. No one can rule a nation that refuses to be ruled.