The Dilemma Facing Bush: America or the Empire?

Deep down, President George W. Bush should grasp the seriousness of his debacle. If true, then he must also appreciate the time element in averting the worst-case scenario, which he, along with an increasingly alienated number of ideologues are imposing on their country.

Iraq is a multifaceted disaster, and its calamitous effects are hurting America on an uncountable number of levels. The number of US soldiers killed in Iraq is creeping up to the 2,000 mark. The figure of those wounded and maimed, some forever disabled, is several folds higher.

This war is too costly. Hundreds of millions of dollars are diverted from the US budget everyday to feed the ever-demanding war machine.

The US Army is stretched too thin, bogged down in a war gone awry. Even many of America’s “part time soldiers”, the National Guard, whose sole mission is to tend to the nation’s needs in times of crisis, were deployed to Iraq. The consequences of such indiscretions were exhibited in the Katrina disaster to a humiliating degree.

Public opinion has been illustrative of Bush’s heedless foreign policy conduct. A recent CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll found that 67 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq. The majority of Americans, according to the poll, want to see serious cuts in military spending and a diversion of resources to help in the post-Katrina rebuilding efforts.

But that is simply not feasible. The security in Iraq is deteriorating. The anti-occupation insurgency is gaining momentum. What’s going on in Iraq is not the work of a few infiltrators, nor can it be narrowly defined according to ethnic classification or the character of one or a cluster of individuals.

If the war was a faltering empire’s attempt to thrust itself in a highly strategic geopolitical location and thus gain control over precious energy sources, then the war was a strategic blunder. It is threatening the stability of an entire region, concurrently exposing the inadequacies of US military capabilities.

If US military strategists, especially those close to the president possess the courage to extract lessons from history and recognize the complexity of the political reality in Iraq, while honestly examining the war’s course over the past two and a half years, they would undoubtedly conclude that the war in Iraq is simply not winnable.

Knowing that they cannot prevail over the war, the Bush administration is focusing on winning time by diverting attention from the disasters of war, whether at home or abroad, by tirelessly contriving smokescreens. There was the “bringing democracy” to the Arab world charade with its last episode being the election in Egypt. Even a pompous president with a mission must recognize a disaster when he sees one. It is improbable that Bush actually believes his own rhetoric of a world full of promise, which he supposedly molded, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon or Gaza.

Americans are definitely distancing themselves from the inflated projection of the administration’s fantastic achievements. Despite the duplicity and outright ignorance of the media, an estimated 300,000 antiwar protestors descended on Washington D.C. on Sept. 24, demanding an immediate end to the war in Iraq. They included representatives of 250 American families who lost loved ones in Iraq. Also coming in droves were hundreds of war veterans, many of whom became disabled in Iraq. But Bush is unlikely to yield. He too has a crowd for which he cares deeply, convoluted interest groups that are a bizarre mix of business elites and corporate contractors, religious fanatics and top military brass.

This self-inflicted predicament presents Bush and his administration with two arduous options: To disown their commitment to the empire and to exit Iraq immediately, saving some face and an opportunity, if even a meager one, to manage the crisis they’ve helped create with the hope of reconciling with the majority of the American people, or to weather the Iraqi storm with the hope of a miracle before their ship is completely sunk.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who marched on Washington in protest of Bush and his costly wars, in fact the majority of Americans have made their voices loud and clear. Will Bush and his self-righteous ideologues listen, just for once?

— Ramzy Baroud teaches mass communication at Australia’s Curtin University of Technology, Malaysia Campus. His forthcoming book, Writings on the Second Palestinian Uprising is being published by Pluto Press, London.