PRESIDENT Bush and Premier Blair have admitted their chronic incompetence over the prosecution of the war in Iraq, and have appealed to the rest of the world to come to their aid, and seek a way out of the Iraqi quagmire into which their regimes are fast disappearing.
Both leaders are now despised by the mass of the US and British people. The only tactic remaining open to the two leaders is to publicly humiliate themselves, by publicly admitting to failure and stupidity, in the hope that their belated ‘honesty’ can secure some support.
This policy is just one step away from resignation.
Bush with all of the swagger knocked out of him, and Blair with nothing left to boast or spin about made their confessions in front of a White House press conference on Thursday evening.
Bush admitted that his John Wayne ‘bring ’em on’ taunt to the Iraqi insurgents had brought on more than he and the American army could chew.
He admitted that that ‘kind of tough talk sent the wrong message to people’ who were led to believe that the US was going to walk all over the Iraqi people.
However, the American people are now faced with the bill for this imperialist arrogance. So far this is up to 2,500 US soldiers dead, around 20,000 seriously injured, and many thousands with severe mental problems, as well as the ‘collateral damage’ of up to 100,000 dead Iraqis. Then there is the matter of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent on the war so far.
The American masses know that the braggart Bush lied his way into the war, but cannot brag his way out of it. They are certain to move to get rid of Bush and his Republican administration.
Bush also spoke about the impact of the Abu Ghraib atrocities saying that it was ‘the biggest mistake that’s happened so far, at least from our country’s involvement in Iraq’.
It will not be lost on the US workers that he referred to Abu Ghraib as a ‘mistake’ not as a series of war crimes, and that he acknowledged that it arose out of ‘our country’s involvement in Iraq’, and not out of the bad character of a number of US troops.
In fact, he and his administration, including Rumsfeld and Cheney are responsible for Abu Ghraib and the masses of Iraqi dead. This is why it will become a matter of honour for the US workers to deal with them.
The only way that Bush can appease their anger will be to get the US troops out of Iraq as quickly as he can.
Blair’s admissions were staggering: He said: ‘I think it’s easy to go back over mistakes that we may have made. But the biggest reason why Iraq has been difficult is the determination by our opponents to defeat us. And I don’t think we should be surprised at that. . . I think that probably in retrospect, though at the time it was very difficult to argue this, we could have done de-Ba’athification in a more differentiated way than we did.’
Blair launched an aggressive war without realising that ‘our opponents’ were determined to ‘defeat us’.
This fool thought he would be able to walk all over the Iraqi people, unopposed, and that all of Iraq’s security organs could be dissolved without any kick-back.
Blair is a political fool. His basic criteria is where Bush treads he must follow, since there is no other way that British capitalism can survive.
The fact that his cabinet and the British general staff allowed him to play the military adventurer, despite the army’s almost 100 years experience of military operations in Mesopotamia against the Arab masses, is proof of the considerable degeneration that has taken place in the British ruling class.
Blair’s admission of incompetence and responsibility for the carnage in Iraq can only be replied to in one way. He and his government must be swept out of office and be replaced by a workers’ government that will withdraw all British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately.
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