The Bush administration and the neocons are forever coming up with reasons for why the US occupation of Iraq should continue. No matter how many times their arguments are knocked down by facts on the ground, they simply dust themselves off and recycle a prior bumper sticker slogan.
Now it’s John Burns, pushing the notion that if the US withdraws there’ll a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions as the Iraqis slaughter each other. The administration is seizing eagerly on this, which is a bit like Dracula saying his castle is the best security guarantee against local peasant girls being attacked by vampires.
There’ll certainly be no prospect of peace so long as US troops are occupying Iraq. Ask Iraqis, whom we can safely assume have a clearer grasp than Burns of what might improve the awful conditions of their lives. Outside Kurdistan, continued American occupation is not a popular view. Over 80 per cent of Iraqis tell pollsters they want the Americans out.
Will things get worse if Americans leave? Probably so, at least for a while. In 2005 the US said there would be a bloodbath if they left. So they stayed and there’s been a worsening bloodbath.
This would hilarious were it not so tragic. The bloodbaths the occupation is supposed to be preventing is still occurring. The refugee crisis the occupation was supposed to prevent is worse than imagined, and the puppet government in Iraqi is hanging on by a thread. With the surge going nowhere and no plan B on the table, the neocons are returning to the “genocide” argument.
Increasingly, the preferred argument of the Forever Caucus is that if we leave Iraq there will be “genocide,” as surely as dandelions follow a spring rain.
Here David Brooks shamefullly invents up a number (“10,000 Iraqi deaths a month…a tough moral issue”).
Here (at 5:50 in the video) John McCain says, “the Democrats want to set a date for withdrawal; there will be chaos in the region, and there will be genocide.”
Jonah Goldberg says an impending genocide will be history’s indictment of liberals failings in Iraq!
The saddest part of this tale is that the people being given a platform for framing the debate (by the MSM, of course) are the very people who have not only been entirely wrong since the beginning, but have been leading this debacle since before the invasion and are now denying it.
Hence, today we have yet another Op-Ed declaring that We Really Are Winning in Iraq This Time — this one in the NYT from “liberal” Brookings Institution “scholars” Ken Pollack and Mike O’Hanlon. They accuse war critics of being “unaware of the significant changes taking place,” proclaim that “we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms,” and the piece is entitled “A War we Might Just Win.”
The Op-Ed is an exercise in rank deceit from the start. To lavish themselves with credibility — as though they are war skeptics whom you can trust — they identify themselves at the beginning “as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” In reality, they were not only among the biggest cheerleaders for the war, but repeatedly praised the Pentagon’s strategy in Iraq and continuously assured Americans things were going well. They are among the primary authors and principal deceivers responsible for this disaster.
Worse, they announce that “the Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility,” as though they have not.