Noted historian Eric Foner in a December 7 article on OpEd News.com calls George Bush “the worst president in US history….(who) in his first six years in office….managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors.”  Equally noted historian Gabriel Kolko agrees, and along with his other comments, calls the Bush administration “the worst set of incompetents ever to hold power in Washington.” And referring specifically to the war in Iraq, Kolko colorfully describes what former Reagan administration National Security Agency (NSA) chief General William Odom calls “….the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States” by saying the Bush administration “shocked and awed….itself.”  Hard to say it better than that.

 

Enter James Baker and the Iraq Study Group (ISG) that reported its findings publicly on December 6 after most of it was leaked well in advance making its release and full-court corporate media press hyping and griping anti-climactic as well as disappointing and disturbing.  The ISG was formed in March with at least four crucial aims:

 

–to avoid a perceived inevitable political and fiscal train wreck caused by the disastrous Bush administration policy over the past six years.

 

— to buy time for the failed and discredited Bush administration attempting to save it along with the family’s name and reputation. 

 

— to devise a scheme to assure US dominance in the Middle East, fast slipping away, is restored and maintained going forward so this country doesn’t lose control over what a State Department spokesperson in 1945 called a “stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history -(the region’s oil).”

 

— to be a (thinly-veiled) attempt to assuage public anger over a war gone sour, that’s illegal, can’t be won, is taking a terrible toll, and never should have been waged. 

 

The ISG did it by proposing 79 recommendations supposedly comprising a change of course strategy that, in fact, amounts to little more than moving the existing chess pieces around the Iraq board, ending up almost where we are now – in a hopeless unresolvable quagmire approaching an apocalypse with no possibility of winning an unwinnable war and no high-level policy-makers thinking we can save for a president mired in a state of denial. 

 

He’s out of touch with reality, and according to Capitol Hill Blue editor Doug Thompson from insider reports he’s getting calling the president “a dangerous cornered animal” he writes: Bush is a man “living on the edge” growing “more sullen and moody with each passing day….his paranoia….increasing to manic levels as he launches into tirades about traitors in his own party, in the press and among his allies (and) feels betrayed by….James Baker (whose ISG report he feels humiliated his administration).”  The president, hasn’t a clue that Jim Baker didn’t do this.  George Bush did a very thorough job of it himself.

 

What the ISG Should Have Addressed but Didn’t 

 

That said and well reported, what’s most striking about the ISG report isn’t what it says but what it leaves out.  Beginning in 1991, the US conducted an unending war of aggression in two phases, with a dozen years of punishing and unjustifiable sanctions sandwiched between them, against a country posing no threat to us or its neighbors following its long and costly war in the 1980s with Iran (that the US urged Saddam to wage and supported him throughout) from which it needed financial help to recover but hadn’t gotten enough to make a significant difference.  It began after Saddam misread US intentions regarding his troubled relations with Kuwait, allowing himself to be deceived by the first Bush administration into believing we had no interest in how he chose to settle his justifiable dispute which Washington had a hand in creating. 

 

With US urging, Kuwait demanded repayment of $14 billion in outstanding loans incurred to help finance Saddam’s war with Iran, it also helped keep oil prices low when Iraq needed them higher to oblige, and it was slant drilling into Iraqi territory and provokingly refusing to negotiate a reasonable settlement to all disputes.  Finally, Iraq took matters into its own hands to do by invasion what it couldn’t achieve through months of failed diplomacy but only with de facto US approval it thought it got that proved not to be.

 

Saddam fell into the trap, and the rest is history.  He’s now still in the dock after one conviction, was sentenced to be hanged by the US-administered kangaroo court after the first of his trials, his country is occupied and in ruins, and his people are living in a state of out-of-control violence and desparation because of an illegal and brutal occupation that must end unconditionally for them to have any hope for a normal life again.

 

The ISG report ignores this history and the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place.  It began with Saddam’s misguided invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990 with the US then claiming it would liberate the country forcibly even though he was willing to negotiate a  settlement and pull out his forces.  But once the trap was baited with Saddam in it, there was no turning back from a war the US wanted.  Events were unstoppable which was clear from GHW Bush’s belligerent language saying “(Saddam’s) Naked aggression will not stand” and refusing all his overtures to negotiate and his willingness to remove his occupying forces wanting only reasonable redress.

 

GWH Bush got the war he wanted, but the US plan wasn’t to liberate Kuwait.  It was to remove or fatally weaken a leader we couldn’t dominate and liberate his nation’s oil and sovereignty from his control to ours.  It was also a way to accomplish what GHW Bush said at war’s end six weeks after it began on January 17, 1991: “It’s a proud day for America – and, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” but he failed to explain what he meant was this now gave the US license to attack and invade another country any time henceforth it could convince the public a threat existed to justify it.  Given the power and complicity of the corporate-controlled media, that hasn’t been a problem since. 

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