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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2006 - January 2007LeadBush-Cheney setback while Iraq still bleedsby Kevin Michaels George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were dealt a substantial setback by voters in the 2006 midterm election. The widely anticipated result of the election--which placed control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the hands of the Democratic Party for the first time since the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994--reflects real dissatisfaction with much of Bush's pro-business and socially conservative agenda. The overwhelming factor behind the defeat of the Republicans, however, was a rejection of Bush's stubborn prosecution of the disastrous war in Iraq. The outcome of several state ballot initiatives offers further evidence of an upsurge against the wish list of Bush and his religious allies. Most significantly, a sweeping anti-abortion law recently passed in South Dakota was overturned by the result of a ballot initiative there. Voters in Arizona rejected a proposal to limit marriage to heterosexual couples only and a Missouri ballot initiative ended in approval for making stem cell research legal. Initiatives in favor of raising the minimum wage also passed in six states. Yet the details of the anti-Bush momentum contain more than a few contradictions. Chief among them is the ascendancy of the new socially conservative Democratic politician, such as James Webb, the Senator elect from Virginia who narrowly won a high profile race, and Bob Casey, the Senator-elect from Pennsylvania, who defeated Republican and religious conservative Rick Santorum. These two men now join Nevadan Harry Reid, who will serve as the Senate majority leader, as nationally powerful Democratic politicians who oppose the right to abortion. Moreover in some cases it was not enough to simply oppose Bush's Iraq war to win the election. In two closely watched races, candidates who defined themselves by their position on the war failed to win. In Connecticut, Ned Lamont was unable to defeat incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman, despite having forced Lieberman to run as an independent by defeating him in a primary election for the Democratic nomination. In Illinois, disabled Iraq war veteran and Democratic candidate Tammy Duckworth was unable to win the seat in the House of Representatives left vacant by the retirement of the entrenched conservative Republican politician Henry Hyde. The Iraq war, however, was the predominant issue in this election and its outcome will in all likelihood represent a turning point in how the U.S. will continue to conduct the war. The first casualty of the Republican defeat was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld--perhaps the person most closely identified with the war after President Bush--was a major advocate of the invasion of Iraq as a response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. After he and his co-thinkers in the administration were successful in committing the U.S. to overthrowing Saddam Hussein, he forced military commanders to accept his vision of a relatively light commitment of troops to Iraq as integral to his effort to transform the armed forces through an emphasis on technology instead of the traditional heavy weapons systems developed for use against Russia. He managed to hold this line even as the anti-U.S. insurgency flared up and sectarian violence against Iraq's Sh'ia majority became endemic. Along with Bush and Cheney, he is also heavily responsible for the close integration of torture into the U.S. war effort in places like the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As the Bush administration's interpretation of events in Iraq diverged sharply from the reality of the situation on the ground, Rumsfeld became a focus of attention for critics. Democrats who had initially voted for the war found him to be a convenient target, and calling for his resignation became a respectable way for politicians of both parties to distance themselves from the President. Although Bush expressed support for Rumsfeld time after time, in the end it became clear that he was too much of a liability to keep around. The press conference in which Bush accepted Rumsfeld's resignation took place less than 24 hours after the day of the elections. THE WAR AFTER RUMSFELD The war in Iraq is going so badly for the U.S. that well before the election, Bush was forced by events to consider a serious change in strategy. One means to such a maneuver is the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan committee of policy experts led by Republican Party fixer James Baker and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton. James Baker, an influential former Treasury Secretary as well as former Secretary of State close to the Bush family, was last prevailed upon to influence the Florida election re-count of 2000 for the Bush campaign. The fact that Bush's candidate to replace Rumsfeld, former CIA Director Robert Gates, is a member of this group indicates that it is no lightweight advisory body. This group, which is scheduled to submit its recommendations to the President in early 2007, may offer him cover to undertake a change in direction in Iraq, perhaps involving even a reduction in the numbers of U.S. troops committed there. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, is also conducting an intensive reconsideration of U.S. operations. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq drags on. The conflict there has a dual character: simultaneously an insurgency against the U.S. military and a bloody civil war between Sunni religious extremists and remnants of the old regime on one side and the Shi'a majority of Iraq, long oppressed by Saddam and despised by both elements of the insurgency, on the other. THE TORTURE PRESIDENT This complicated reality gave Bush enormous latitude in manipulating the American public into tolerating the more than three-year-old war as part of the larger effort he and Cheney call the "war on terror," even to the point of virtually ignoring revelations about atrocities such as the Haditha massacre of November 2005 and the horrific rape and murder in March of 2006 of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and her family. The relatively small number of American troops in Iraq and the relatively low number of U.S. fatalities allowed Bush to keep opponents of the war on the defensive. Things changed, however, as the tempo of the civil war aspect of the conflict began to intensify after the February 2006 bombing of a revered Shi'a shrine in the city of Samarra. The pace of outright sectarian murder picked up and Bush's claim that the Iraqi government represented the unified and democratic will of the people became difficult to maintain when it began to be clear that partisan Shi'a militias were conducting revenge operations from positions within powerful ministries of the government itself. The pressure that the U.S. exerted through Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to restrain the militias in turn caused resentment on the part of the Shi'a parties that the sectarian violence of the Sunni groups was being ignored by the Americans in the interest of holding the government together. When the U.S. troops were recently ordered to impose a blockade on the large and impoverished Shi'a neighborhood known as Sadr City--a power base of influential cleric Moktada Sadr and his militia, the Madi Army--in an attempt to find a kidnapped soldier, a crisis developed. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki had to implore the U.S. to lift the oppressive blockade in order to prevent a rebellion by Sadr's political forces and a return to the period in 2004 when Sadr's militia twice fought pitched battles with U.S. troops. This prospect of open conflict between the Shi'a parties and the U.S. has always represented the greatest threat to the American undertaking in Iraq. ENTER RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES With the exception of Moktada Sadr, the leaders of the Shi'a parties spent much of the period of Saddam's rule in exile in Iran or Syria and are as unknown to most of Iraq's population as the Western-oriented figures the U.S. hoped to install in the wake of the invasion. Their parties, however, have benefited from the solidification of sectarian identity throughout Iraq. The savage anti-Shi'a violence of the insurgency created an environment in which people look to the militias connected to the parties for protection. The political dominance of the Shi'a parties resulting from the elections of 2005 has allowed them to impose their conservative religious agendas on Iraqi society at the same time as elements of their militias have begun to involve themselves in kidnapping for profit and other crimes. One of the biggest militias, the Madi Army, is said to be escaping from Moktada Sadr's control and disintegrating into small bands led by local strongmen. The same thing is occurring on the other side of the sectarian divide. The Sunnis hate and fear the new Iraqi army and police and look to their armed groups for protection. All of this is contributing to a situation in which, whatever the wishes of the Bush administration or the new Democratic Congressional majority, the U.S. is left with few options. Leaving the troops in place will result in more U.S. fatalities. Withdrawing support from the Shi'a parties and leaning towards an authoritarian figure will outrage the majority of the population. Simply removing the U.S. troops from Iraq may contribute to the hastening of a civil war reminiscent of Lebanon's recent past, with the possibility of Iran standing in for the role Syria played in that conflict. HUMAN TOLL OF WAR AND OCCUPATION The impact on the ongoing American presence in Iraq is staggering. THE LANCET, a highly regarded British medical journal, published a recent article that estimates there have been 654,965 "excess Iraqi deaths" since March 2003, over and above the pre-invasion mortality rate. The Iraqi Health Ministry cites a figure of between 100,000 to 150,000 deaths, but whatever the true number, the society of Iraq has been devastated. The U.S. never carried through with its promises of mass reconstruction aid and much of what money was spent was dissipated through corruption and lack of oversight. Now the Bush administration has not only halted all reconstruction efforts, but even plans to close down the office responsible for investigating the many instances of projects derailed by corruption. Second only to the outright loss of life resulting from the sectarian attacks on civilians, has been the pervasive institutionalization of the sectarian religious divide between Shi'a and Sunni citizens of Iraq. Thousands of people have been driven from their homes in mixed neighborhoods into areas of exclusively one religious persuasion or the other. This divide--which was exacerbated by every action the U.S. took--has debilitated Iraq's future and heavily influenced the contours of politics in the Middle East for decades to come. The sectarian gulf also has ominous implications for demands for an exit strategy of the U.S. Some politicians--like Democratic Senator Joseph Biden--and some commentators--former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith among them--openly call for the partition of Iraq into three states as a solution to the crisis. This proposal to forcibly divide Iraq among Sunnis, Shi'as and Kurds would represent the worst possible end to the U.S. invasion and occupation by setting in stone the sectarian principle that the U.S. is responsible for intensifying. A partition imposed by outside powers should be strongly opposed by all who seek to solidarize with the people of Iraq. The outcome of the U.S. elections represents a rejection of much of what George W. Bush has achieved during the years of his administration. Without a doubt, a turning point in the Iraq war has been reached. Although pressure on President Bush to dramatically change course is likely to force him to commit to modifying his strategy, the reality is that he has little room to maneuver. Whatever he does, the dire situation of the population of Iraq--a situation caused by the U.S.--is not likely to change for the forseeable future. |
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