Iraq War, Round Two

by Robert Dreyfuss
TomPaine.Com

Missing from the discussion over Iraq in the United States is the growing likelihood that the Bush administration will escalate, not de-escalate, the war. If they do, their goal will be to employ another round of "shock and awe" - namely, massive U.S. military air and ground" - in a desperate effort to tip the balance in Iraq in America's favor in advance of the 2006 elections. The failed war in Iraq is overwhelmingly the key factor driving down poll numbers for the president, vice president and the Republican Party in general.

It's by no means clear that Democrats will capture either or both houses of Congress in November, but if they do it will open the floodgates for a never-ending series of partisan investigations by congressional committees, not only into Iraq but the myriad other scandals plaguing the administration. That's a terrifying prospect for the Bush-Cheney team, and one they cannot allow at any cost.

The so-called "doves" in the Bush administration - who sometimes like to call themselves "realists" - have apparently settled on the idea of a slow drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq, combined with the stepped-up effort to cobble together a shaky government of national unity in Iraq that could take the lead in fighting the Sunni-led resistance. The idea behind that strategy is to convince American voters in advance of November, 2006, that Iraq is stabilizing, that the war is being won and that American troops are coming home. The fact that American troops will probably be in Iraq for a decade at least, if not far longer, is an ugly reality that the administration's doves hope will dawn on Americans after the election.

The same goes for the fact that Iraq is already engulfed in a civil war that no "national unity" regime can put an end to-particularly a regime made up of the same gaggle of exile leaders and warlords who, in succession, led the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003, the interim and transitional governments of 2004-2005 and the so-called "permanent" government of 2006.

Problem is, the Bush administration's hawks have a different idea, and there is no reason to think that they are not in control. As in 2003, the hawks are led by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the staffs of the office of the secretary of defense and the office of the vice president. And, as in 2003, President George W. Bush - stubborn to the point of being pig-headed and obsessed with the goal of "winning" the Global War on Terror - is likely to go along, no matter how strong the opposition from the realists. In 2003, the war in Iraq was opposed by virtually the entire professional class at the State Department, the CIA and the U.S. military, yet Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld launched their illegal, unilateral war anyway.

Against a backdrop of editorials from the Weekly Standard, the National Review, The Wall Street Journal and Commentary, along with predictable emanations from such thinktanks as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation all calling for the Bush to resist calls to reverse course in Iraq, there are at least two recent calls for a sweeping new U.S. offensive in Iraq to complete the objectives of the invasion of 2003.

The first comes from AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in The Wall Street Journal on April 3. Gerecht, a former CIA officer who in 2003 was among the strongest advocates for the shock-and-awe notion that force is the only language that Middle Easterners can understand, suggested in a lengthy opinion piece that U.S. tactics in 2006 must become far more bloody-minded than they have been so far-including a sweeping effort to retake the Iraqi capital. Gerecht wrote:

The Bush administration would be wise not to postpone any longer what