No Exit Strategy for the Lost

On the ropes, swept in last week's congressional elections, and pummelled by the loss of Uncle ‘Donny’ Rumsfeld, it finally seemed as though George ‘guns’n’oil’ Bush would at last be forced to concede that the Iraq war constitutes the biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam. Well he did, almost. The Administration have now admitted that illegally entering and occupying a major oil-producing and exporting nation in the middle of one of the world’s most unstable and anti-American regions without a post-war strategy, reconstruction strategy, or exit strategy might have led to ‘some mistakes’.

So have the Republicans finally learned their lesson? Yep, they surely have. George’s solution to this debacle is simple - send in another 20,000 troops for one last, final ‘big push’ and save the Bush family’s legacy in Iraq, namely the oil revenues to make it all worth while. ‘One last big push’, you say? For those who recall the First World War battles of the Somme, Ypres and Verdun, where countless millions died in a pitched battles over decimated patches of land without gain, this may all sound darkly familiar.

James Baker, Daddy’s foreign policy advisor, is on the record as having stated that the reason the Allied forces did not attempt to overthrow Saddam after the First Gulf War was to avoid the trap of being ‘sucked into another Vietnam’. Well, George Jr. was always his own man and evidently took little heed of his Father’s advice to steer well clear of meddling in the politics of foreign climes. Not even the cynical and blatantly obvious ruse of sentencing Saddam to death two days before the mid-term elections could persuade the American electorate that Saddam was the greater of the two evils and that the war was a just excursion.

The cost of this failure is not inconsiderable. According to Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, the Iraq war will cost the US (ignoring the cost 3,000 dead and 20,000 American wounded) almost $2 trillion. Well actually it will cost a lot more than that, as Dr.Stiglitz now believes that this figure fails to take into account economic disruption, resulting oil price fluctuations, veterans' long-term medical care, rebuilding a devastated military, and a hundred other indirect costs too innumerable to list here (even in this blog…). So why is George Jr. staying on after conquest and total melt-down? The answer is simple. Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih wants to increase Iraqi oil output to 6 million barrels per day from a current level of 2.3 million by 2010. Six million barrels per day, a ‘conservative figure’ we are led to believe, represents an equivalent $ value of $354 million per day, or $129 billion a year by 2010, assuming of course that oil prices rise no further (hmmm…).

So within fifteen years George Jr. could almost recoup the cost of his war in oil revenues alone, without even taking into account arms sales, cheap Iraqi labor, reconstruction contracts, or other deals brokered with his puppet regime. Unfortunately the Iranian and Iraqi Shias are not likely to buy into this plan, nor are the people of Iraq whose future reconstruction depends largely upon the Americans leaving both them and their oil revenues well alone.

So what are the exit strategies for a war weary and beleaguered American military which has lost both its morale and its moral mandate? A sudden evacuation will look like Saigon all over again; a phased withdrawal will appear to be a painful and pointless admission of failure whilst Iraq spirals into all-out civil war; and a further ‘Final Big Push’ will just add salt to an already painful and bloody wound (if not actually triggering World War III). Withdrawal will leave a resurgent Iran with a power vacuum to occupy unopposed, while an impotent and crippled America looks on helplessly, sabre-rattling on the sidelines like some old Confederate general who has been long vanquished.

Or perhaps the thinking is darker yet. George Jr. realises that Iran is going nuclear, that he’s currently got troops massed on both sides of her border and that, at least as far as Iran is concerned, it’s now or never. Besides, with a World War on nobody will have the time or opportunity to organise a Presidential election to vote him out of office. We'll have to wait for the general mobilisation to know for sure. To the Glory of the Somme and to the last great American president!


R.I.P. this day Milton Friedman, economist, Nobel Laureate, genius, scholar, libertarian & humanist 1912-2006


'Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent' ~ Issac Asimov

'Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear' ~ General Douglas MacArthur

'The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault' ~ Major Ralph Peters, US Military