Author: Charley Reese

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

If anyone doubts that the

republic created by the U.S. Constitution

is dead, he or she only has to watch the Republican

presidential debates. Save for Ron Paul, all of the candidates believe a

president can take the country to war on his own, though most concede it might be a good idea to “consult” attorneys and even Congress.

The Constitution, written by men more intelligent and better educated than today’s crop of political duds, is quite clear. The president has no authority to take the country to war. The sole authority for declaring war rests 100 percent with Congress.

Naturally, if a shipload of pirates sailed up the Potomac and began shooting at the tourists, you wouldn’t need a declaration to authorize returning fire. American troops defending themselves while they are under attack is not the issue. The issue is that if a president wants to take the country to war against another country, he must, as Franklin Roosevelt did after Pearl Harbor, ask Congress to make that decision.

The founding fathers, having suffered under a monarch, deliberately created a weak president. His powers, as specified by the Constitution, are limited mainly to administering the laws passed by Congress, making appointments, negotiating treaties and being the official greeter when dealing with foreign powers. His role as commander in chief is limited to just what it says — the military. The president is not our commander in chief, as the current president seems to think.

Lest anyone be beguiled by the current politicians’ determination to create an emperor and an empire, even the president’s appointments and treaties have to be confirmed by the Senate. Congress has sole authority over taxation and spending. Appropriations for the military are limited by the Constitution to two years. Furthermore, Congress is elected independently of the president and is a separate branch of government. It is under no obligation whatsoever to do anything the president asks it to do, and the president has no authority whatsoever to do anything not authorized by Congress and the Constitution.

The Constitution, which apparently not many Americans have ever bothered to read, is the supreme law of the land. It does not make suggestions. It commands. It was written in clear English. It has provisions to amend it, but it should never be amended by interpretation. That is always a usurpation of power and should be grounds for impeachment.

There is only one way for the U.S. to be a real nation of laws. That way is for the people to demand that every single public official obey the laws as they are written and obey them to the letter. The current president seems to think he can alter laws with “signing statements” and legislate with executive orders. He should have been impeached a long time ago.

The kernel of the nut is this: In our constitutional republic, sovereignty rests in the people. If the people are too stupid or ignorant, too lazy or indifferent, to hold their public officials accountable for violating the laws and the Constitution, then of course they will deserve the tyranny they will surely get.

Self-government is tremendously more difficult and demanding than living under a dictatorship. In a dictatorship, all you have to do is obey. I fear that concept appeals to some Americans today. It’s understandable. Responsibility can be a heavy load to carry. It’s much easier to relegate all of that to the Great Leader and just do what we are told.

Anybody who’s ever been in the military or jail knows what I’m talking about. When you are deprived of the ability to make choices, you are simultaneously relieved of the responsibility for making them. Responsibility is the other side of the coin of freedom.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP Photo/HO,Warner Bros

The American government has come to resemble the characters in The Wizard of Oz. We have the Cowardly Congress, a president without a brain, and a foreign-policy establishment without a heart.

Our politicians are still trying to play the empire game long after the age of empires has ended. Blinded by arrogance, they cannot see that with every passing day, the world needs us less and less and hates us more and more. We are passing through that phase when the grandeur of the empire exists only in the minds of politicians who have insulated themselves from reality.

A friend of mine, a classical scholar, sometimes tells his students, “No one woke up one morning in 476 A.D. and said, ‘Gee, I’m in the Dark Ages.'” The transition from the heyday of Roman power to a stage of barbarism was a gradual process. We are in a process of change. No one is going to announce on TV that the U.S. is no longer a superpower.

Nevertheless, the signs are there if you look for them. A nation that was able to help crush the Axis powers in three and a half years hasn’t won a war since then. We have had four years of struggling with an insurgency in a small, poor, and broken country. Our economy is shaky under mountains of debt. Half of our people make less than 42,000 inflated dollars a year.

Where we were once the arsenal of democracy, today there is hardly a major weapons system that doesn’t rely on imports of one kind or another. Much of the industry that is left is foreign-owned. Japan, which once lay prostrate, dominates the American automobile market. It is extremely difficult to find anything today that is not made in China or some other cheap-labor country.

In the meantime, the cowardly Congress doesn’t have the guts to tackle any of the major problems confronting the American people. Our president continues to embarrass us practically every time he opens his mouth in public. The foreign-policy establishment is riddled with aging draft dodgers agitating for more wars — against small countries, of course.

True, we still have lots of nuclear weapons, but do you think any American president would want to get into a nuclear shooting match with China or Russia? Look at how we reacted to two airplanes crashing into two office buildings. What do you think we would do if San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco became radioactive ruins with millions of casualties? We are not prepared mentally, spiritually, or materially to deal with a nuclear war.

We are like all empires in their final stages. We have grown soft. We like our comforts. We don’t wish to be inconvenienced. We like poor Mexicans to do our stoop work and poor Americans to do our fighting, provided they do it far away so we won’t be disturbed by explosions and screams. We enjoy our decadence, and there are always people in the media who can rationalize anything, no matter how sick and revolting it is.

As for trying to understand the world, we are just too busy being amused and following the adventures of Britney Spears and other celebrities. We like to let the TV and the politicians do our thinking for us. It saves energy. They tell us whom to hate.

The only way to avoid a bad end is to find some realists and put them in public office. We need a brave Congress, not a pack of cowards. We desperately need a president with a brain. We need to retire the warmongers in the foreign-policy establishment. Otherwise, we will join the other third-rate countries, once empires, on history’s discard pile.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

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Opinion Viewpoint

A Bully Puppet

Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is rising a notch in my estimation. He’s begun to snap back at his American critics. Bully for him.

Arrogant American politicians, in calling for his ouster, shed all pretense of any interest in democracy. Clearly, they see themselves as imperial overlords dissatisfied with someone they consider an American stooge. American generals even now are starting to talk about the need for a dictator, though they don’t use that term. Maybe, they are telling journalists, democracy for Iraq wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Nevertheless, al-Maliki is the legitimately chosen head of a legitimately elected government. It’s not up to American senators and presidential candidates to decide who should be prime minister of Iraq. These empty-headed windbags wouldn’t dream of calling for the ouster of the British prime minister. That they so readily do so in the case of Iraq simply shows you how they disdain the democracy they claim to support.

In fairness to al-Maliki, it should be pointed out that the much-publicized hand-over of “sovereignty” to the Iraqi government was and is a sham. Iraq’s army has to answer to the Americans, not to the Iraqi government. Iraq has no intelligence agency. The intelligence agency was set up and is run by the CIA. The U.S. is still the occupier of Iraq, and there is relatively little freedom of the Iraqi government to set its own policies.

Add to that the fact that the Iraqi government, regardless of who leads it, is stuck with a country that we “bombed back into the pre-industrial age,” to use the boastful phrase of General Norman Schwarzkopf during the first Gulf War. Then, with our singularly inept attempt at occupation, we fired its government and its army.

If every member of the Iraqi parliament had a genius IQ, they’d have a hard time digging themselves out of the hole we dug for the country.

The Iraqi fiasco is a black comedy — black because of the tragic loss of life and suffering it has caused, but a comedy nevertheless because of the Three Stooges-type antics of American officials, beginning with President Bush.

The president has misled and continues to mislead the American people in an attempt to rationalize his failed policy. His pathetically juvenile claim that the terrorists would follow Americans home if the U.S. withdrew from Iraq is laughable. Al-Qaeda declared war on us long before we did it the enormous favor of invading Iraq, thus both reinforcing al-Qaeda’s propaganda and providing it with a new recruitment and training ground.

Bush’s ill-fated war has not only increased the stock of the world’s terrorists, it replaced a Sunni-led government with a Shiite-led government that is close to Iran. You couldn’t screw this situation up any worse than if you had let Osama bin Laden plan the invasion. I have never seen such a stupid administration as this one.

And make no mistake — there is no easy solution or way out of this morass. Just as so many knowledgeable people, both here and in the Middle East, warned the president beforehand, Bush has set loose the wild dogs of war — chaos and havoc in a previously stable region — and he doesn’t have any idea at all of how to round them up.

I long ago predicted the end result of this blundering around would be a new dictatorship, because a brutally strong central authority is the only way Iraq’s feuding factions can be controlled. This time, however, it likely will be someone allied to Iran.

Iraq’s misery and difficulties remind me of a quotation from a Turkish officer, who said, “The trouble with being an ally of the United States is that you can never tell when it’s going to decide to stab itself in the back.”

Amen.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: (AP Photo/Frank O. Braynard Collection)

The most important issue facing America is not even being debated by the presidential candidates. With the exception of Ron Paul, all of the candidates are acting on the assumption that America’s interventionist foreign policy should continue. They only differ on the details of the intervention.

Since Paul doesn’t have a chance of winning, I can therefore guarantee that regardless of who wins the nominations and regardless of who ends up in the White House, we will be saddled with the same failed interventionist policy. As in the past, it will preclude peace and result in conflicts that ultimately will bring America down. We can squander blood and treasure only so long before we collapse. Then we will join the heap of has-been empires like the British, French, Dutch and Soviets.

That’s why I have no interest in the presidential race.

The United States has no moral or legal right to interfere in the internal affairs of any other nation. It is not threatened by any nation-state and therefore has no need of allies. An ally is someone who fights on your side during a war. When the war ends, the need for alliances ends.

George Washington — still the wisest man ever to serve as president — warned us against interventionism. He warned us against the influence of foreign lobbies. As he said, there is no reason for America to involve itself in the intrigues, feuds, and wars that plague most parts of the world. Our only contact with the outside world should be in trade and commerce.

The problem of terrorism, which is a direct result of our interventionist policies, is not a war. It is a conflict with a few individuals. If we stopped our interventionist foreign policies, the problem of terrorists would gradually fade away. In the meantime, terrorism can be handled by intelligence and police work. It is not a fight the military can win.

The concept of a preemptive war should be an abomination to every American. Preemptive war is a war of aggression. It was the policy of Hitler’s Germany and of the Japanese imperial government. To our national shame, apparently many Americans support the concept. They should never again criticize the Japanese for Pearl Harbor, the Third Reich for the invasion of Poland, or the Soviet Union for the invasion of Afghanistan. Click your heels and salute. You are no different from the people who cheered for Hitler.

The concept of a so-called humanitarian war, trotted out by Bill Clinton to justify intervention in the Balkans, is a contradiction in terms. War itself is a crime against humanity. No sane person can justify inflicting death and destruction in the name of humanitarianism.

The great tragedy caused by the interventionists is that they sabotage the peaceful and prosperous country that America could be. It’s no mystery why the infrastructure is beginning to fail. It’s no mystery why public education fails in so many places. It’s no mystery why health care is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Look at the cost of the empire — the military and intelligence budgets, the cost of the wars. Between the military-industrial complex and the new war-service industry, the treasury is being sucked dry by the worst people for the worst reasons.

In the meantime, what are the presidential candidates talking about? A few social schemes. Different strategies for intervention. They are like the first-class passengers on the Titanic, sitting around discussing their business deals and various affairs. They show no sign of awareness of the real world outside the televised game show called Win the Nomination.

Who’s ahead? Who zinged who? Who cares?

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: (AP Photo/USAF)

The evolution of excuses for blundering into and maintaining the Iraq war is becoming comical. The first excuse was weapons of mass destruction. Do you remember the constant talk about weapons of mass destruction, “the worst weapons in the hands of the worst dictator”? Do you remember how President Bush said the sole reason for the war was to disarm Saddam Hussein? Do you remember how we were warned about a smoking gun that could be a mushroom cloud? Do you remember how Iraq was an “imminent” threat to the world? Do you remember how a 65-year-old dictator, widely acknowledged as not the smartest guy in the world, was compared to Hitler, who had put together a regime and an army that conquered Europe?

Well, oops. Not a single weapon of mass destruction was found in the country. Furthermore, the Iraqis had said there were no weapons of mass destruction. To cover their behinds, U.S. officials started peddling the story that Saddam wanted people to believe he had weapons of mass destruction. That U.S. lie didn’t fly because Saddam and his government repeatedly denied that the weapons existed. Furthermore, Iraq had invited in U.N. inspectors who were verifying the absence of weapons, which was one reason Bush forced the inspectors out by going to war. He had to start his war before the inspectors proved his bogus intelligence amounted to a pack of lies.

Enter the second excuse: Bush wanted to spread democracy in the Middle East, starting with Iraq. That never progressed past elections because, as everyone familiar with the country knew or should have known, a vote would elect a Shia majority with two fractious minorities, Kurds and Sunnis. This is the government that has proven to be totally ineffective. It also greatly increased the influence of Iran. It has sparked the civil war in Iraq.

Bush lately has hinted that his faith in democracy is weakening by implying that a reasonable authority would be acceptable. Trouble is, the U.S. can’t even find a dictator willing to take the job, given the present situation.

Now, when the issue has become getting Americans home from a war that has lasted longer than World War II, the final excuse is to trot out the empire’s favorite ambiguity: stability. If we leave Iraq, instability will result. It’s hard to believe anyone can say that with a straight face. Iraq is unstable already. It’s in the midst of civil war, with a million refugees and displaced people, hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, its economy a total wreck, and virtually all work on repairing the infrastructure at a standstill.

Ironically, the last time Iraq was stable was when Saddam was in power. Iraq is unstable because we made it unstable. We destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, its economy, and its government. We did. One of the most shameful lies peddled by the Bush administration has been to blame the poor state of Iraq’s infrastructure on Saddam. We destroyed that infrastructure with wars, bombings, and medieval sanctions. The miracle is that with all we were doing, Saddam managed to produce more electricity and more oil than our occupation has been able to produce.

Finally, how is it the U.S. can claim that after four years, there is no trained Iraqi army and police force able to handle security? We send kids into combat with about 16 weeks of training. And why is the U.S. building the largest embassy in the world in a Third World country that is in chaos?

What “Herbert Hoover” Bush has done is destroy the credibility of the U.S., sully our reputation almost beyond repair, demonstrate the weakness of our leadership and the vulnerability of our military, and convince many people in the world that we are an evil nation of idiots led by fools. Let’s at least hope that he destroys the Republican Party, too. It deserves a zero existence.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

When President Teddy Roosevelt attended the funeral of a member of British royalty, he declined the offer of a
gilded carriage for the funeral procession. Roosevelt told his British hosts that it would be inappropriate for the head of a republic. He would therefore walk. One of President Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite things to do was to pack a lunch, drive up into the Pine Mountains, pull off the road, spread a blanket, and enjoy a picnic lunch with two or three of his friends.

In 1933, an assassin opened fire on Roosevelt during an appearance in an open car in Miami. The mayor of Chicago, however, was in the way and took the bullets. The Secret Service members immediately started to speed away, and Roosevelt ordered them to stop and retrieve the wounded mayor. At first they didn’t, until he shouted, “Damn it, back this car up and get the mayor!” They did and carried the wounded mayor to the hospital in the president’s car. The mayor later died.

President Harry Truman always took a vigorous daily walk — on the streets of Washington. When his term ended, he and his wife took a cab to the train station, where they returned to Missouri. Truman, by the way, refused all offers to serve on corporate boards of directors. “You don’t want me, you want the presidency, and that’s not mine to sell,” he said.

If you will recall the funeral procession for Princess Diana, you will remember that the royal princes walked the route to Westminster Cathedral. Imagine that — British royalty walking down a street jammed with common people.

The last time President George W. Bush visited the British Isles, the Air Force had to fly over a fleet of 16 armored limousines for use of the president and his entourage.

If you are young and don’t like to read (I hope this hasn’t become a redundancy), then you are probably unaware of the transition from a republic to an empire. One of the reasons I’m so contemptuous of modern politicians is that I don’t compare them with each other; I compare them with the great men of the past. The last elected president who had genuinely great accomplishments on his résumé was Dwight Eisenhower.

There is no such thing as a flawless politician. We should never expect perfection in anything involving human beings. But there very much is such a thing as character, and that’s where we’ve gotten careless in our choice of leaders.

The foundations of character are honesty, courage, and fidelity. An adulterer who is unfaithful to his wife is hardly likely to be faithful to his oath of office. John F. Kennedy was an adulterer and a playboy, but he was the first president to be marketed like a bar of soap or a tube of toothpaste. It becomes more and more difficult these days to distinguish between accomplishment and image.

To get even an idea of a person’s character, you have to look at his whole life, not just the public image. People rarely, if ever, change their character after adolescence. Hopefully, they will grow in knowledge and perhaps wisdom, but most people remain the same people they always were as far as character is concerned. Self-indulgent cowards don’t become brave stoics.

Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, discovered that the hellish experience didn’t change anybody. Those who were bad remained bad, and those who were good remained good.

I suppose the question for us today is, Have we lost the ability to distinguish between good and bad?

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: KHZ | dreamstime.com

If I were an American soldier in Iraq, I’d be tempted mightily to say, “Good luck and goodbye,” and then start for home. I can’t see losing even one more soldier in a war over a country in which 99.9 percent of the American people have no interest.

Iraq had no effect on the American people before President Bush’s illegal invasion of it. It has no effect on us now, unless you have loved ones being fed into the meat grinder that is making futility sausage. What possible difference does it make to us who rules Iraq?

As a matter of fact, we should not only pull all of our troops out of Iraq but also withdraw them from Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and anywhere else they happen to be in the Middle East. If our leaders had the brains to do this, they would discover that the people in that part of the world are quite capable of running their own affairs.

Some of them might kill each other, but eventually things would settle down. It is, after all, one of the oldest civilizations in the world. In the meantime, no one in that part of the world could use us as an excuse for doing anything, and it wouldn’t be Americans who are getting killed.

I would also pull out of Afghanistan and say to the government, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda, you fellows work this out among yourselves, because frankly we don’t give a damn. Your hardscrabble country isn’t worth 10 bucks, much less the billions we’ve spent on it. If you need water, dig a well; if you need food, grow it. Goodbye and good luck.

The American people have been conned into accepting the idea of an empire, when there is no need for one. Wherever there is oil, it will be available for sale because it is otherwise worthless, and why should we care from whom we buy it? Some of the worst people in the world are sitting on big oil reserves, and you know what? Their oil burns just as well as anybody else’s.

The imperialists have created the illusion that we are in control of the world and if we weren’t, everything would fall apart. That’s not true. First of all, we are not in control of the world. Secondly, we are not the world’s only remaining superpower. We could not whip China or Russia in an all-out war and probably not even Iran.

It’s true that we have a lot of fancy weapons, but we bought them all on credit, and it won’t be long before our credit will be maxed out. The Chinese have already demonstrated that they can take out satellites, and I’m sure the Russians have that capability too. The problem with relying on high-tech solutions comes when your high tech crashes. Knock out those satellites, and the U.S. will not only be blind but impotent.

Furthermore, we’re trying to be an empire on the cheap. To run an empire, you need lots and lots of cannon fodder. Since we stupidly decided to have an all-volunteer Army, we can’t afford too much cannon fodder. How many of our soldiers could we lose before everyone started screaming “stop the war”? We’ve lost a little over 3,500 troops in Iraq so far, and pressure is starting to build.

What the knuckleheads in Washington have created is an empire of delusions and illusions. It’s time for the nation to wake up and adopt a realistic foreign policy, which is trade and friendly relations with anybody who wants it. As for those who don’t, we simply ignore them. We don’t need to be anybody’s enemy.

As for defense, defending our space is easy and cheap. As another mark of imperial stupidity, the rulers of the empire can’t even do that while they fail overseas.

Charley Reese writes for the Lew Rockwell syndicate. He has been a journalist for 50 years.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Don’t Trust Government

In reading an excellent book, Satanic Purses: Money, Myth and Misinformation, by R.T. Naylor, I suddenly realized why Adolf Hitler was so popular during the first years of his administration.

The funny thing is that the book is not about Hitler or Germany but about the U.S. and the bogus war on terror. It is an outstanding book, carefully researched and footnoted and written in a reasonable manner, though with delicious dollops of sarcasm.

It’s the carefully detailed accounts of injustices committed by the U.S. government against American Muslims that gave me the insight about Hitler.

In the early days of the Third Reich, if you weren’t a criminal, a communist, or a Jew, you never saw the dark side of the Nazi government. You saw an economy being revitalized, superhighways being built, Germans being put back to work, the disgraceful Versailles Treaty being scrapped. It must have looked a lot like morning in Germany to the people who had suffered through runaway inflation, economic depression, and street riots.

Similarly, if you are not a Muslim or an Arab-American who has been a victim of the Patriot Act and other laws carelessly passed in the hysteria following the attacks in 2001, then the Bush administration probably looks perfectly normal. You probably even believe that it is really protecting you from terrorists, just as many Germans believed Hitler was protecting them from the “bad guys.”

What Taylor’s book demonstrates is how often this is pure nonsense and at the same time what terrible damage is being done to the rule of law and America’s traditional respect for human rights.

Typically, the government will swoop down and seize an organization’s records and computers, while making public accusations of the people being “involved” with terrorists. The important point is that this is done before any determination of guilt or innocence has even begun. By the time a defendant gets to court, if he ever does, he’s ruined. Quite often, then the fearless feds will say, “Well, never mind about this terrorist business, just plead guilty to a minor immigration violation.” Often defendants are bullied into admitting guilt they don’t deserve by threats of being declared an enemy combatant, which means indefinite imprisonment, probably for life.

You can see the process going on with the four men charged with planning to blow up the fuel lines to JFK International Airport in New York. In the first place, it is common knowledge that if you blow up a fuel line, you will get an explosion and fire at one point. The claim that the whole pipeline would blow up for miles is nonsense, and the government knows that, but it threw that out to claim the plot endangered “thousands” of lives.

The real question is: Did these guys actually plan it or were they set up by the government’s federal informant? The federal government has a terrible record of using informants to entrap people. The whole tragedy of Ruby Ridge, which cost the lives of Randy Weaver’s wife and son, resulted from a federal informant who nagged Weaver into sawing off the barrels of a shotgun, something any kid can do with a vice and a hacksaw. The feds then arrested Weaver with the intention of forcing him to become an informant, and the tragic farce ensued.

So even though you haven’t felt the arbitrary and unjust power of the government, you should read Satanic Purses and find out just how much deception is involved in this war on terror. You’ll discover how often oil, diamonds, and big business play behind-the-scenes roles in this current so-called war.

As the German people discovered, once a government has unlimited power, it will eventually use that power against everyone.

Charley Reese writes for Lew Rockwell Syndicate. He has been a journalist for 50 years.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson

General David Petraeus, touted by the Bush administration as the potential savior of the Iraq debacle, is like a lot of officers these days: a four-star general with relatively little combat experience. He led the 101st Airborne Division during the initial invasion of Iraq and later was posted with it in the Kurdish area — by far the most peaceful area in Iraq. Other than that, his experience has all been peacetime duty, with a lot of that as an aide to various officers.

No doubt about it, Petraeus is a bright man. Courtesy of the taxpayers, he holds a master’s degree and also a doctorate from prestigious universities. He graduated from West Point. Lately, the press has credited him as the author of the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency. Actually, he co-authored it with Marine Lt. Gen. James Mattis.

Furthermore, Petraeus is unlucky. During a live-fire exercise, one of his soldiers tripped and accidentally shot Petraeus in the chest. Later, while sky diving, his parachute tangled, and he broke his pelvis. His other Iraq assignment was to reorganize and train the Iraqi army. Obviously, he didn’t do such a hot job, because three years later, it is still unable to defend the country.

Now as the top field commander, he’s in charge of what the Bush administration calls a “new strategy.” This consists of posting Americans with Iraqis in various little outposts around Baghdad. The idea is to provide security for what the Army calls the “good guys.” Problem is, to qualify as a good guy, you have to rat out your neighbors. Other Iraqis see these good guys as just traitors and collaborators.

Insurgents, as has been the case historically, will simply go underground while American forces are around and will cause mischief in other places. So when you hear Petraeus or the Bush administration brag about the surge strategy working, just remember the one question they’ve never answered is: “What happens when the U.S. forces leave?” The other unanswered question is: “How long do you intend to keep combat soldiers in Baghdad?”

In short, Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy is the same one we used in Vietnam, where it failed miserably. The only counterinsurgency campaign that I can recall being successful was one carried out by the British in Malaysia. That took about 10 years, and the British were aided by the fact that most of the insurgents were Chinese, who were not especially liked by the other citizens.

The insurgents in Iraq are mainly Iraqis. We are viewed as a foreign occupational army. The Iraqis want us out. Every time our guys kick in a door, shoot somebody, or arrest a “suspect,” we simply create more enemies. Polls taken by the University of Maryland consistently show that regardless of what sectarian or ethnic group is polled, a majority wants us out.

Interestingly enough, 144 members of the Iraqi parliament signed a petition demanding that the U.S. set a timetable for withdrawal. For some reason, American news organizations paid little attention to it. The man who made the announcement said that it will be presented to the speaker and then will be put up for a vote.

It also appears that conflict, at least within the parliament, is not between Shiites and Sunnis but between separatists, backed by the U.S., and nationalists, who want a strong central government in charge of Iraq’s plentiful oil supply. The separatists want us to stay, of course, while the nationalists want us out.

We should back the nationalists and get out.

Charley Reese writes for the Lew Rockwell sydicate. He has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic

A few reminders: Iraq is not our country. Our
invasion and occupation are illegal, being in violation of both
international law and our own traditions. We were lied into war. We are still being lied to. Both the Bush administration and the Democrats intend to maintain American troops in Iraq indefinitely.

The catchy little phrase “If you break it, you own it” might apply to unpurchased merchandise, but it definitely does not apply to nation-states. You don’t gain title to your neighbor’s house just because you blow it up. We definitely broke Iraq, but that only gives us the burden of sin. It does not entitle us to the country.

It’s easy to forget that when you listen to American politicians in both parties talk about what Iraq has to do or ought to do or should do. The Iraqi government does not have to do anything we tell it, and so far it hasn’t, despite promises to the contrary.

The phrase now being heard most often around Baghdad is “Iraq is finished.” That’s according to Pepe Escobar, a correspondent for Asia Times Online. I urgently recommend his piece “Baghdad: Up Close and Personal.” He and two Iraqi journalists toured the “Red Zone,” which is all of Baghdad except the heavily fortified Green Zone. Compare what he saw and heard with what you hear from the talking heads in Washington.

And, by the way, they traveled in a plain car without armored vehicles, troops, and helicopters hovering overhead, which is how American big shots travel. They got shot at and arrested but otherwise survived.

We need to get out of Iraq right now. This folly has already cost us 3,300 American lives, $500 billion in tax money, 30,000 wounded, and there is not so much as a faint glow at the end of the tunnel.

The reason I say both Democrats and Republicans intend a long-term military presence is because that’s what they say if you listen closely. The so-called withdrawal deadline of the Democrats stipulates some troops left in country. To quell an insurgency, if you can do it at all, usually requires about 10 years.

You can see by the casualty figures — overwhelmingly Iraqi — that we are not doing the main fighting. We lose people daily but so far in the single digits. And we will go on losing people no matter what tactics we employ as long as we stay there while the Iraqis fight a civil war. We can, with our sick devotion to legalese, say it is not an occupation, but the Iraqis call it an occupation, and they don’t like it worth a toot.

When American politicians say that if we leave, there will be chaos, it’s a joke. There is chaos there now. Another joke is that we can democratize the Middle East. Still another joke is the belief that we can deal with terrorism without solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

If I thought the people in Washington were smart enough, I’d say we intended to destroy the country and leave it in the wreck it is. I don’t think they’re that smart, though. I think they really believed we could waltz in, topple Saddam Hussein, and waltz out. That’s what happens when you let a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals from universities and think tanks set policy. Only people who have worn muddy boots and heard the sounds of gunfire should be consulted on the issues of war and peace. Such people are darned scarce in Washington these days, even at the Pentagon.

The present policy sins daily against the Iraqi people, wastes the lives of American military people, adds to the financial burden of future generations, and demonstrates to the world that we are a nation led by fools.

Charley Reese writes for King Features. He has been a journalist for 50 years.