Bush's Last Stand

The War Party is down, but not out

By Justin Raimondo

"......Not quite. It is untrue that the Shi'ite death squads were unleashed only "in retaliation" for the depredations of their Sunni archrivals – they started their deadly work early on, and have been operating full blast ever since the Americans decided to tilt in their direction.

While the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr is a relatively recent phenomenon, the existence of Shi'ite death squads predated the attack on the Golden Mosque: the Badr Brigade, now re-dubbed the Badr Organization – the armed militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) – was founded in Tehran in the 1980s. It is the military wing of SCIRI, the biggest political party in Iraq, and the major winner of the "purple finger" elections that Bush hails as a "stunning achievement." The Badr Boyz are the biggest, most organized, best-financed death squad in the country: they are up to their turbans in sectarian killings, and have infiltrated the Interior Ministry on such a large scale that they virtually control the national police and other security branches. The Iraqi elections, far from being a countervailing influence to the death squads, served to empower them.....

Bush is giving the signal for the Shi'ite death squads – in which our own troops will be "embedded" – to redouble their dirty work: it's the "El Salvador option" made manifest. And all in the name of fighting sectarian violence! That's the beauty of it. Later on in his peroration, Bush avers that "even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue. And we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties." Given the objective consequences of his policies, what he really meant was especially if our strategy works exactly as planned.....

The last sentence ought to give us pause, because it underscores the real danger of remaining in Iraq one day longer, never mind four to six months or a year. Bush clearly sees the struggle in regional terms, and seeks to expand the conflict beyond Iraq's borders. That has always been the point of our intervention in Iraq: to establish a launching pad for the "liberation" of the Middle East.

Why else are U.S. soldiers storming the Iranian consulate in Irbil, and taking six consular personnel hostage – clearly an act of war?......

The longer we stay in Iraq, the likelier we are to get sucked into an Iranian quagmire that will dwarf our present predicament by several orders of magnitude. I would bank on a Cambodia-style incursion, a la Richard Nixon – a maneuver that, executed in the volatile Middle East, is likely to cause a seismic explosion that would reverberate across the globe with tremendous force. That's why we don't need a "surge" – and every moment we delay in getting out of Iraq takes us closer to the edge of the abyss."

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