When Denial Goes Pathological

From CounterPunch, an essay from former Reagan administration assistant Treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts:

The president of the United States is so deep into denial that he is no longer among the sane.

Delusion still rules Bush three weeks after the American people repudiated him and his catastrophic war in elections that delivered both House and Senate to the Democrats in the hope that control over Congress would give the opposition party the strength to oppose the mad occupant of the White House.

On November 28 Bush insisted that US troops would not be withdrawn from Iraq until he had completed his mission of building a stable Iraqi democracy capable of spreading democratic change in the Middle East.

Bush made this astonishing statement the day after NBC News, a major television network, declared Iraq to be in the midst of a civil war, a judgment with which former Secretary of State Colin Powell concurs.

The same day that Bush reaffirmed his commitment to building a stable Iraqi democracy, a secret US Marine Corps intelligence report was leaked. According to the Washington Post, the report concludes: "the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point that US and Iraqi troops are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar province."

Click here for the rest.

So, even though it's clear that we can't simply leave Iraq high and dry, a point of view that I've signed onto recently because of some of my buddy Matt's writings over at Caffeinated, I think it likely that stability will never happen as long as US troops are part of the mix. That is, our presence literally allows the insurgency and civil war to continue. It's obvious as to why US troops promote the insurgency, but less obvious is how we fan the flames of civil war. As long as we back the corrupt puppet regime we put in place, Sunnis and Shiites, neither of whom really accept Iraq's new government, are never going to get if figured out. US forces create an unbalancing and artificial power dynamic that essentially keeps the two rival factions in check: neither side can win outright, nor is there much incentive for them to truly negotiate, but they can kill each other, and us, repeatedly. That's going to continue for as long as we're there.

The only way out of this, as Henry Kissinger recently asserted, is to bring in the UN and regional powers to broker a cease-fire and then move on from there, completely abandoning the governmental structure we've already set up. I think the US can probably be a voice in the negotiations, but we cannot be the muscle, nor can we have the final say. But then, what am I saying? We'll never leave. Bush won't leave, and his replacement, neither Democrat nor Republican, isn't likely to give up the greatest imperial prize in national history.

We'll have troops there twenty years from now.

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