Foreign Policy

If there's one salient feature of the Bush administration it is that it generally does the opposite of what it says -- its policies are the opposite of what its rhetoric claims or proclaims. When Bush criticizes his opponents for something, it's usually a good indicator that it's something he's done or planning to do. So when Bush took the unusual step of allowing an op-ed piece to be published under his name in the Wall Street Journal, it was bound to offer some insight into administration plans, albeit indirectly.

"This was a good week for the cause of freedom," Bush proclaimed in his radio address June 10, 2006. "On Wednesday night in Iraq, U.S. military forces killed the terrorist Zarqawi." Bush did not mention the 19 US military casualties, the 44 Iraqi police and military casualties, or the 321 Iraqi civilian casualties this month. He did go on to recap Zarqawi's "long history of murder and bloodshed," but understandably did not discuss the US role in hyping Zarqawi's importance within Iraq and beyond, or that coalition forces had Zarqawi in custody on at least one occasion, and released him.

Updated November 30, 2006

On September 29, 2005 the Center for American Progress released a report titled Strategic Redeployment, which proposed a specific course of action in Iraq, the Middle East, and beyond. Prepared by Lawrence Korb, who was an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, and Brian Katulis, who held staff positions at the National Security Council and in the State Department during the Clinton administration, the proposals sought to "minimize the damage to the United States in the short term, mitigate the drawbacks of our eventual withdrawal from Iraq, and secure our interests in the long term."

by Normon Solomon
Reprinted with permission of the author.

When the French government suggested a diplomatic initiative that might interfere with the White House agenda for war, the president responded by saying that the proposed scenario would "ratify terror." The date was July 24, 1964, the president was Lyndon Johnson and the war was in Vietnam.

Four decades later, the anti-terror rationale is not just another argument for revving up the U.S. war machinery. Fighting "terror" is now the central rationale for war.

by Walter C. Uhler
Reprinted with permission of the author.

In my article "Democracy or dominion?" (recently republished in Annual Editions: World Politics 05/06), much attention was devoted to the severely impoverished civic education that impairs most Americans, and thus their democracy. Putting aside the thoughtless, often inbred, devotion of so many rightwing Republican Party stalwarts, such tenacious civic impairment constitutes the most formidable barrier preventing the impeachment of President George W. Bush.

January 30, 2005, when the Iraqi elections are scheduled to take place, is the 37th anniversary of the Tet offensive -- a major attack launched by the North Vietnamese against American and South Vietnamese forces in 1968, which many observers consider the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam. Certainly it marked the point at which Americans lost confidence in official pronouncements that the war in Vietnam was winnable.

In January 1968, Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles Krohn (now retired) was serving with the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry, which had been ordered to relieve a group of Marines who were surrounded by enemy forces in Hue, Vietnam's ancient capital. "It was a valiant but futile effort, and the battalion casualty rate was more than 60 percent," Krohn wrote recently in the Washington Post. Wondering if the Iraqi insurgents are students of history, Krohn continued, "Are they aware that protracted war goes against the grain of the American experience? Do they understand that the president's encouraging words are effective, but only up to a point, given battlefield reversals and disappointment?"

Updated February 10, 2007

On Thursday May 29, 2003 Bush told Polish television. "We found the weapons of mass destruction.... We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." Bush's remark referred to two laboratories housed in trailers that had been initially identified by the CIA as "probably designed to product biological weapons." This week an official British investigation concluded that the units were not mobile germ warfare labs, but rather installations for filling artillery balloons with hydrogen, as Iraqis had stated. Questions about the administration's use of claims about Iraqi WMDs to justify the war made headlines in the mainstream media in early May after Defense Department Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair magazine that "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."