The following statement was issued by the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) following President George Bush’s Jan. 10, 2007 speech announcing the Pentagon’s widening war campaign in Iraq and the Middle East.
Unwilling to accept the failure of his war of aggression in Iraq, his “war of choice,” Bush announced tonight a plan that will succeed only in sending thousands of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers to their graves in the next year.
What Bush is really proposing is using thousands of additional U.S. soldiers in a planned reign of terror in the streets and neighborhoods of Baghdad against those who want the United States to leave. Bush chose to use a euphemism about the planned reign of terror when he stated that one of the past “mistakes” of the U.S. military operation in Baghdad was that “there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.”
The blood will flow just as Bush promises, but this plan will fail just as badly as every announced initiative since Bush arrogantly taunted the Iraqi resistance with his infamous “Bring ‘em on” speech back in 2003.
Bush gave the people of the United States a warning that they should expect the coming year will be “bloody and violent,” with “television screens filled with images of death and suffering.” He tried to inoculate himself from responsibility for this carnage although his plan makes it inevitable.
Bush’s aspiration to salvage his “legacy” and his place in history isn’t worth one more life. Every mother and father of a U.S. soldier, every person who has a loved one in the U.S. armed forces, should make it clear that the lives of their family members are too precious to be sacrificed for such an ignoble cause.
For the last six years, Bush has provided huge tax breaks for the billionaires and multimillionaires of this country. But it will not be their children who will be sent to fight and die in Iraq. The privileged ultra-rich, Bush’s real “base,” are shielded from the horrors of the war.
The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis since March 2003 (see the October 2006 Lancet medical journal) proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Bush’s claim that his invasion was for the liberation of the Iraqi people is a complete and utter lie.
“Clearing and holding neighborhoods in Iraq” is not the duty or right of members of the U.S. military. The people who live in those neighborhoods lived in peace before the arrival of the occupation forces. The occupation is illegal and the order to stiffen the occupation is illegal too. U.S. soldiers have the right and duty to disobey illegal orders.
Neither one more Iraqi nor one more soldier should die so that the politicians, who inaugurated a criminal “pre-emptive” invasion of a country that posed zero threat to the people of the United States, can postpone the verdict of history.
For their part, the Democrats in Congress are involved in a slightly more complicated dance. They want to posture as opponents of Bush’s escalation and so-called surge without taking responsibility for bringing the war to a close. They could cut funding for the war, which is their exclusive Constitutional prerogative. But they will absolutely refuse to take this responsibility. They are merely posturing for the 2008 elections, hoping to take advantage of the well-deserved public disgust for Bush and the Iraq war.
The issue right now for the anti-war movement cannot simply be opposition to a surge or an escalation. The issue is the war itself. The troops must be brought home now. As in Vietnam, that is the only solution. Those who initiated the war and who funded the war should be held accountable for one of the great crimes of the modern era.
Everything that Bush has said about the Iraq war has proved to be a lie. This was always a war for empire in a strategic area that possesses two-thirds of the world’s oil supply. He proclaimed, “Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.” If Bush fails in Iraq, the people of the United States lose nothing. It is not our empire.
On March 17, 2007, the anniversary of the start of the criminal invasion of Iraq, tens of thousands of people from around the country will descend on the Pentagon in a mass demonstration to demand: U.S. Out of Iraq Now! 2007 is the 40th anniversary of the historic 1967 anti-war march to the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. The message of the 1967 march was “From Protest to Resistance,” and it marked a turning point in the development of a countrywide mass movement.
Bush plan means intensified war, occupation. Here, Baghdad, December 2006
Photo: Wissam Al-Okali/AFP/Getty Images
