First the Generals denied it was a civil war, and then they admitted without remorse, "Yes, this is a civil war, but we'll fix it with more troops."  Just like they did in Vietnam, killing more than a million Vietnamese ... to save them.
 
When you read the following article, you will realize what people worldwide have realized.  The Iraq quagmire is in the image and likeness of Vietnam.  This realization compels the end to the killing, one way or another. 

The author of this excellent article, James Petras, is the author and editor of 67 books in 31 languages. His latest book is The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press). His writings can be found at www.petras.lahaine.org.

As this article reveals, It has become obvious that Iraq is virtually an instant replay of Vietnam.  This realization also sees the same rationale of war profiteers for attacking Iran as an instant replay of the deception -- non-existent WMD's -- that led to the attack on Iraq.  Why an instant replay if they learned anything?  Are they fools or are we fools for letting the neocons and Zionists wag the dog again?

The administration of George Bush must be stopped!  They have brought terror, corruption and dishonor upon the United States of America while they  have brought terror, corruption and dishonor upon the world at large. People worldwide have arrived at this same POINT OF TRUTH.  And believe me, history will not be kind to us if we don't stop this war mania soon.
 
Who is scripting this horror show anyway!  It's like a bad movie in which smooth-talking criminals take over the town's administration through bribery, extortion and threats of violence.

And how do we take our town back? If you're looking for real solutions, see comments following this article.  - Christopher

You are nearly my namesake -- having a Romanized version of my Hellenized name. You are dubbed a "warrior" or "counter-insurgency intellectual". I hold credentials as an "insurgency intellectual" or as Alex Cockburn calls it "a fifty-year membership in the class struggle".  Publicists have billed you as "America's last best hope for salvation (of the empire) in Iraq."

Predictably the Democrats in Congress led by Senator Clinton went down to their knees in praise and support of your professionalism and war record in Northern Iraq. So let it be recognized that you enjoy an advantage: the support of both parties, the White House, Congress and the mass media.  But still being an insurgent intellectual, I am not convinced that you will or should succeed in saving Iraq for the empire. Better still; I think you undoubtedly will fail, because your military assumptions and strategies are based on fundamentally flawed political analyses, which have profound military consequences.

Let us start with your much-vaunted military successes in North Iraq -- especially in Nineveh province. North Iraq, particularly, Nineveh, is dominated by the Kurdish military and tribal leaders and party bosses. The relative stability of the region has little or nothing to do with your counter-insurgency prowess and more to do with the high degree of Kurdish "independence" or "separatism" in the region. Put bluntly, the US and Israeli military and financial backing of Kurdish separatism has created a de facto independent Kurdish state, one based on the brutal ethnic purging of large concentrations of Turkmen and Arab citizens.

General Petraeus, by giving license to Kurdish irredentist aspirations for an ethnically purified "Greater Kurdistan", encroaching on Turkey, Iran and Syria, you secured the loyalty of the Kurdish militias and especially the deadly Peshmerga "special forces" in eliminating resistance to the US occupation in Nineveh.  Moreover, the Peshmerga has provided the US with special units to infiltrate the Iraqi resistance groups, to provoke intra-communal strife through incidents of terrorism against the civilian population. In other words, General Petreaus, "success" in Northern Iraq is not replicable in the rest of Iraq. In fact your very success in carving off Kurd-dominated Iraq has heightened hostilities in the rest of the country.

Your theory of "securing and holding" territory presumes a highly motivated and reliable military force capable of withstanding hostility from at least eighty percent of the colonized population. The fact of the matter is that the morale of US soldiers in Iraq and those scheduled to be sent to Iraq is very low. The ranks of those who are seeking a quick exit from military service now include career soldiers and non-commissioned officers -- the backbone of the military (Financial Times, March 3-4, 2007 p.2) Unauthorized absences (AWOLs) have shot up 14,000 between 2000-2005 (FT ibid). In March over a thousand active duty and reserve soldiers and marines petitioned Congress for a US withdrawal from Iraq.

The opposition of retired and active Generals to Bush's escalation of troops percolates down the ranks to the "grunts" on the ground, especially among reservists on active duty whose tours of duty in Iraq have been repeatedly extended (the "backdoor draft"). Demoralizing prolonged stays or rapid rotation undermines any effort of "consolidating ties" between US and Iraqi officers and certainly undermines most efforts to win the confidence of the local population.

If the US troops are deeply troubled by the war in Iraq and increasingly subject to desertion and demoralization, how less reliable is the Iraqi mercenary army.  Iraqis recruited on the basis of hunger and unemployment (caused by the US war), with kinship, ethnic and national ties to a free and independent Iraq, do not make reliable soldiers. Every serious expert has concluded that the divisions in Iraqi society are reflected in the loyalties of the soldiers.

General Petraeus, count your troops everyday, because a few more will stray and perhaps in the future you will face an empty drill field or worse a barrack revolt. The continued high casualty rates among US soldiers and Iraqi civilians, during your first month as Commander suggests that "holding and securing" Baghdad failed to alter the overall situation.

Petraeus, your "rule book" prioritizes "security and task sharing as a means of empowering civilians and prompting national reconciliation." "Security" is elusive because what the US Commander considers "security" is the free movement of US troops and collaborators based on the insecurity of the colonized Iraqi majority. They are subject to arbitrary house-to-house searches, break-ins and humiliating searches and arrests. "Task Sharing" under a US General and his military forces is a euphemism for Iraqi collaboration in "administrating" your orders. "Sharing" involves a highly asymmetrical relation of power: the US orders and the Iraqis comply. The US defines the "task" as informing on insurgents and the population is supposed to provide "information" on their families, friends and compatriots, in other words betraying their own people. It reads more feasible in your manual than on the ground.

"Empowering civilians", as you argue, assumes that those who "empower" give up power to the "others".  In other words, the US military cedes territory, security, financial resource management and allocation to a colonized people. Yet it is precisely these people who protect and support insurgents and oppose the US occupation and its puppet regime. Otherwise, Commander, what you really mean is "empowering" a small minority of civilians who are willing collaborators of an occupying army. The civilian minority "empowered" by you will require heavy US military protection to withstand retaliation. So far nothing of the sort has occurred: no neighborhood civilian collaborators have been delegated real power and those who have, are dead, hiding or on the run.

Petraeus, your goal of "national reconciliation" presumes that Iraq exists as a free sovereign nation. That is a precondition for reconciliation between warring parties. But US colonization of Iraq is a blatant denial of the conditions for reconciliation. Only when Iraq frees itself of you, Commander Petraeus, and your army and the dictates of the White House can the warring parties negotiate and seek "conciliation". Only political groups who base themselves on Iraqi popular sovereignty can be part of that process. Otherwise what you are really writing about is the military imposition of "reconciliation" among warring collaborator groups with no legitimacy among the Iraqi electorate.

Former Clintonite, Sarah Sewall (ex-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Harvard-based "foreign affairs expert") was ecstatic over your appointment. She claims the "inadequate troop to task ratio" may undermine your strategy (Guardian March 6, 2007). The "troop to task ratio" forms the entire basis of Democratic Senators' Hilary Clinton and Charles Schumers' "critique" of Bush's Iraq policy. Their solution is "send more troops". This argument begs the question: Inadequate numbers of troops reflects the massiveness of popular opposition to the US occupation. The need to improve the "ratio" (greater number of troops) is due to the level of mass opposition, directly related to increasing neighborhood support for the Iraqi resistance. If the majority of the population and the resistance did not oppose the imperial armies, then any ratio would be adequate -- down to a few hundred soldiers hanging out in the Green Zone, the US Embassy or some local brothels.

Your handbook's prescriptions borrow heavily from the Vietnam War era, especially General Creighton Abram's, "Clear and Hold" counter-insurgency doctrine. Abrams ordered a vast campaign of chemical warfare spraying thousands of hectares with the deadly "Agent Orange" to "clear" contested terrain.
[Now witness the parallel genocide with Depleted Uranium -CR]  Abram approved of the Phoenix Plan -- the systematic assassination of 25,000 village leaders to "clear" out local insurgents. Abrams implemented the program of "strategic hamlets", the forced re-location of millions of Vietnamese peasants into concentration camps. In the end Abram's plans to "clear and hold" failed because each measure extended and deepened popular hostility and increased the number of recruits to the Vietnamese national liberation army.

Petraeus, you are following the Abram's doctrine. Large-scale bombing of densely populated Sunni neighborhoods took place between March 5-7 (2007); mass arrests of suspected local leaders is accompanied by the tight military encirclement of entire neighborhoods while arbitrary, abusive house-to-house searches turn Baghdad into one big concentrations camp. Like your predecessor, General Creighton Abrams, you want to destroy Baghdad in order to save it. In fact your policy is merely punishing the civilians and deepening the hostility of the Baghdad population, while the insurgents blend into the population or into the surrounding provinces of Al-Anbar, Diyala, and Salah and Din. Petraeus, you forget that you can "hold" a people hostage with armored vehicles but you cannot rule with guns. The failure of General Creighton Abrams was not due to the lack of "political will" in the US, as he complained, but that "clearing" a region is temporary, because the insurgency is founded on its capacity to blend in with the people.

Your fundamental (and false) assumptions are that the "people" and the "insurgents" are two distinct and opposing groups, that your ground forces and Iraqi mercenaries can distinguish and exploit this divergence and "clear out" the insurgents and "hold" the people. The four-year history of the US invasion, occupation and imperial war provides ample evidence to the contrary. With upward of 140,000 US troops and close to 200,000 Iraqi and over 50,000 foreign mercenaries unable to defeat the insurgency for the entire four years of the colonial war, the evidence points to very strong, extensive and sustained civilian support for the insurgency.

The high ratio of civilian to insurgent killings by the combined US-mercenary armies suggests that your own troops have not been able to distinguish (nor are interested in the difference) between civilians and insurgents. The insurgency draws strong support from extended kin ties, neighborhood friends and neighbors, religious leaders, nationalists and patriots: these primary, secondary and tertiary ties bind the insurgency to the population in a way which can not be replicated by the US military or its puppet politicians.

General, you have already recognized after only one month as Commander that your plan to "protect and secure the civilian population" is failing. While you flood the streets of Baghdad with armored vehicles, you acknowledge that the "anti-government" forces are regrouping north of the capital?. You are condemned to play what Lt. General Robert Gaid un-poetically called "whack-a-mole": Insurgents will be suppressed in one area only to re-emerge somewhere else.

It is presumptuous to assume, General, that the Iraqi civilian population does not know that the "special operations" forces of the Occupation, with whom you are rather intimately connected, is responsible for much of the ethno-religious conflict.  Investigative reporter Max Fuller in his detailed examination of documents, stresses that the vast majority of atrocities -- attributed to "rogue" Shiite or Sunni militias -- were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos of "special forces", trained by the Americans, "advised" by Americans and "run largely by former CIA agents" (Chris Floyd "Ulster on the Euphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War", <http://www.truthout.org/docs>

Your attempt to play "Good Cop/Bad Cop" in order to "divide and rule" hasn't gone well, nor will it succeed now.

You have recognized the broader political context of the war! "There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq, to the insurgency. In Iraq, military action is necessary to help improve security -- but it is insufficient. There needs to be a political aspect" (BBC 3/8/2007). Yet the key "political aspect" as you put it, is the reduction, not escalation, of US troops, the ending of the endless assaults on civilian neighborhoods, the termination of the special operations and assassinations designed to foment ethnic-religious conflict, and above all a timetable to withdraw US troops and dismantle the chain of US military bases.

General Petraeus, you are not willing or in a position to implement or design the appropriate political context for ending the conflict. Your reference to the "need to engage in talks with some groups of insurgents" will fall on deaf ears, or be seen as a continuation of the divide and conquer (or "salami") tactics, which have thus far failed to attract any sector of the insurgency. Contrary to your impeccable Princeton/West Point academic counter-insurgency credentials, you are mainly a tactician, wise on technique, but rather mediocre in coming to grips with the "decolonization" political framework in which your tactics might work.

Commander Petraeus, you are quick to grasp the difficulty of your colonial mission. Just a month after taking command, you are engaging in the same sophistry and double discourse of any "bush" colonel. To keep the flow of funds and troops from Washington you talk of the "reduction of killings and discontent in Baghdad", cleverly omitting the increase of civilian and US deaths elsewhere. You mention "a few encouraging signs" but also admit that it is "too early to discern significant trends" (Aljazeera 3/8/2007). In other words the "encouraging signs" are of no importance!

Already you have given yourself an open-ended mission by extending the time frame for your Baghdad security crackdown from days and weeks to "months" (and beyond?). Isn't that a coy way to prepare US politicians for prolonged warfare with few positive results? There is nothing wrong with a philosopher warrior covering his ass in anticipation of failure.

General, I am sure as a military intellectual you have read George Orwell's "1984" because you are so fluent in double-speak. In one breath you speak of "no immediate need to request more US troops to be sent to Iraq" (other than the 21,500 on their way): On the other hand you request an extra 2,200 military policemen to deal with the forthcoming massive incarceration of Baghdad civilian suspects.

By "honest talk", about troop numbers in the present tense for your war, you prepare the ground for a greater escalation in the proximate future. "Right now we do not see other requests (for troops) looming out there. That's not to say that some emerging mission or emerging task will not require that, and if it does then we will ask for that." (my emphasis) (AlJazeera, 3/8/2006). First there's a "surge" then there is an "emerging mission" and before we know it, there are another fifty thousand troops on the ground in the meat-grinder that is Iraq.

Yes, General, you are a fine master of "double speak" but beyond that you are, with your colleagues in the White House and Congress, doomed to go down the same road of political-military defeat as your predecessors in Indo-China. Your military police will jail thousands of civilians and perhaps many more. They will be interrogated, tortured and perhaps some will be "broken". But many more will take their place. Your policy of security through intimidation will "hold" only as long as the armored cars in each neighborhood point their cannons at every building. But how long can you sustain it? As soon as you move, the insurgents will return: they can continue for months and years because they live and work there. You can't. You run a costly colonial army, which suffers endless casualties. Sooner or later, the folks back home will force you to leave.

Your ambitions, General Petraeus, exceed your abilities. Best start preparing your farewell to arms and look toward a higher post in Washington. Remember your chances are slim: Only winning generals or draft dodgers are elected President. There is always a professorship at the Kennedy School at Harvard for the "warrior intellectual" who is good at the books but a failure in the field.

###

FINAL COMMENTS BY CR:

This last week I read the shocking news that Israel has warned it's citizens not to travel in almost 40 countries due to their intent to attack Iran this next month with nuclear weapons.  Read it for yourself at www.heartcom.org/NukeWar.htm .  Whether that happens, and whether that triggers a nuclear war of global dimensions, may well be determined by whether U.S. Congressmen get some backbone.
 

We are indeed condemned to repeat history if we don't learn how the war profiteers have a contempt for life and liberty. The article above by James Petras portrays an exact parallel between the Vietnam quagmire and what is happening in Iraq.  I assume that "military Intelligence" can't be this oxymoronic, and that the surge in troops is really intended for Iran just as the "exit strategy" -- after the 9-11 retaliation "get bin Laden" campaign failed in Afghanistan -- was to move the bulk of troops into Iraq to get those non-existent WMD's. 
 

Are we blind to the fact that the U.S. has afflicted a far worse fate on the Iraqi people than Sadaam ever did?  Are we blind to how a morally corrupt administration is supporting and creating terrorism with the U.S. proxy State of Israel?  Is this the real agenda of ethical infants who strut the world stage as though great leaders?  If they intended to discredit and destroy the U.S. on the road to a New World Order of totalitarian tyranny, perhaps this is exactly how they would dismantle the once-strong bastion of Constitutional integrity... by orchestrating terror, corruption and dishonor.
 

By now, most enlightened global Netizens know that the neocons' war for oil and the Zionists' war for "Greater Israel" are hand-in-hand going after Iran simply because they want to own and control the physical and human resources of this geopolitical nexus.  All while the fundamentalist evangelicals cheer on this Armageddon scenario as though some sort of apocalyptic salvation formula.  I would laugh if it weren't such a crying shame wrapped in religious and patriotic insanity.
 

Some would say that the entire Mid-East war campaign is the fruit of godless materialism and quasi-religious Belief Systems that betray Christ-like virtue for Old Testament eye-for-an-eye revenge and retaliation.  If you don't believe that virtual mind control propaganda in the mainstream Zionist media is behind this, ask yourself, why are we NOT told that a half-million Iraqi women and children have already died from Depleted Uranium? (not to mention thousand of our Vets).  Gulf Wars I and II have already gone "nuclear" and the conspiracy of cover-up in the Zionist media is setting us up for a nuclear attack on Iran.

 

People of conscience rightfully ask, "How do we stop this insanity?"
 

One thing for sure, the plot of hell that fomented terror in the U.S. with 9-11 was not instigated by Muslims.  It was an inside job by the same neocons and Zionists who have been terrorizing and scapegoating Arab Muslims since the U.N.'s creation of that small strip of land called Israel.  Those who feed into the scapegoating and warmongering are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
 

That's why I've decided to speak for the "invisible government" that will check an balance the invisible government of war profiteers who have hijacked the Bush Administration.  It's time to raise the flag of victory with the valor of virtue that represents a VISION for healing this mess.  Since this "campaign" is for universal LOVE -- in frequency and form -- the standard bearers worldwide will MAKE A STAND.
 

My platform for this invisible governing spirit of, by and for ALL global Netizens is SIMPLE:  It's time for all people of conscience to demand that their government representatives MAKE A STAND for (1) withdrawal from the Mid-East, (2) utilization of suppressed free energy technologies, (3) utilization of suppressed technologies for healing the sick health care system.  Read those links to see how the solutions are at hand.
 

Call the Capitol Hill switchboard with this toll free number -- 1-877-242-0100 -- to connect to any senator or congressman's office.  Get their e-mail address and please forward this letter to them.  What YOU do with this information is an opportunity.  What your reps do with it will be their "judgment" -- whether they stand for healing of our sick world... or not. 
 

Truth was the 1st victim of the terror war.  Network the truth of global healing for its Net worth. 
 

Someone has to do it:)
 

- Christopher

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS."  -- “Mahatma” (Great Soul) Gandhi

PSS:  The international "banksters" and war profiteers have been behind every major war of the last 200 years. Now they are punishing Iran economically with the same hubris and chutzpah that has manipulated world economies to the point of COLLAPSE of the oxymoronic "economics of scarcity".  In other words, an extraordinary ABUNDANCE of virtually free energy power and healing wisdom -- cultured by an abundance of LOVE at the heart of our instant-everywhere-interactive Internet connection -- is now READY to transform and transcend the "end game" of scarcity economics, providing the abundant life that is our rightful inheritance and divine destiny.  It is time for a Golden Age cultured by the Golden Rule/Law Language of, by and for the "angels or our better nature". -CR

[BEWARE THE PORTENTS OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE AND WWIII]

Asian, European Stocks Plunge
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031407B.shtml
Asian stocks plunged Wednesday and European shares opened sharply lower after Wall Street chalked its second-biggest point drop in four years and rattled already nervous markets worldwide. <cut>