PRESIDENT George W Bush’s plan to stabilise Iraq through a military ‘surge’ is ‘a lost cause’, said the New York Times last Sunday.
The New York newspaper’s evidence for the prosecution is unanswerable. It states: ‘Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilise the country afterward.’
Its conclusion is that Bush has ‘neither the vision nor the means to do that.’
The newspaper confides its fear to its readers that ‘It is frighteningly clear that Mr Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor.’
The New York Times statement comes just days after an opinion poll found that just under 50 per cent want to see Bush impeached, while over 50 per cent want to see his Vice President Cheney get the same treatment.
Meanwhile, in Iraq Salah al-Ubaydi, official spokesman for the Martyr Al-Sadr Office in Al-Najaf, said that statements made by the Iraqi puppet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, that the Al Sadr movement had been infiltrated by Ba’athists and Saddamists, had given the occupation troops the go-ahead to strike at the Al-Sadr trend and attempt to eliminate it.
He added: ‘The statements that Al-Maliki made were meant to salvage his government following the emergence of a plan in which parties inside and outside of Iraq cooperated to oust his government. . .
We have indirectly announced that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki concluded agreements and made pledges to the US government to keep his government in office when he met with George Bush this year.
‘That is why the US President and US politicians have said at several conferences and on frequent media occasions that Al-Maliki must honour his undertakings.’
The al-Sadr spokesman then commented that the Maliki government ‘is done away with’ as far as the Al-Sadr movement and the occupation is concerned, ‘and the coming days will be a testimony to this.’
Maliki has been unable to carry out his pledge to the US to disarm the Al-Sadr movement, while the US security surge to drive insurgents out of Baghdad has failed.
The US is now along with various Arab states talking to Paul Bremer’s first choice as Iraqi premier in May 2003, the ex-Ba’athist, Allawi.
Allawi is now seeking to organise a coup d’etat, organising with Ba’athist generals and Kurdish militia chiefs, who supported the Saddam regime, to do the job. He is waiting for the US go-ahead.
Meanwhile, the US is supplying the Arab tribes in Al Anbar, who all supported Saddam, and still do, with modern weapons, on the basis that they can be relied on to fight Al-Qaeda, and that their control of the area will keep it quiet.
In other words Al Anbar has already been handed back to Saddam’s heirs.
As far as the British are concerned in Basra, their latest sally out of their Basra fortress has cost them a number of killed and wounded soldiers and seen their Challenger tanks attacked and disabled by shaped IED attacks.
They cannot afford much more of this. The British occupation of southern Iraq is already past history.
The occupation of Iraq is crumbling. What remains to be done is for the insurgent movements to form a united front and to bring forward a military and political leadership to expel the occupiers and establish a workers and peasants revolutionary government.
