Bush on Iraq Surge: A Kissinger Ploy?

Let’s assume for a moment the president does have a plan: It might not be what you think.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Everyone knew what Bush was going to say before he made his address last night. And the “surge” that Democrats hoped to block had already begun, with advance elements of the 82nd Airborne in Baghdad to arrange for arrivals of 17,500 more troops. “If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home,” Bush said.

What Bush proposed was a straightforward pacification program in Baghdad, made possible by an intensified American occupation — a facade of Iraqis, to be sure, but with Americans running the show, just as GIs ended up running the show in a massive gun battle on Baghdad’s Haifa Street Tuesday.

As Bush has said in the past, Americans know what the word victory means, So, whatever happens, and no matter what anyone says, America must win: “Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.”

As usual, observers are grasping wildly for an explanations as to why Bush is doing what he’s doing. No matter what one thinks of the President, when push comes to shove, it’s hard to believe he really wants to drag out the war so it can be handed over to a successor in 2008; or that he is such a psycho he can’t stop referring to defeat as victory. That’s not the kind of stuff the Bush family legacy is made of.

There may well be a much more sinister game plan here, one that centers around the emergence of Henry Kissinger over the last year as an adviser to Bush and other top officials in Washington. Gareth Porter, the historian who ran the Indochina Resource Center in the early 70s, points out in a January 11 article in Asia Online that “although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi’ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the U.S. position in the war is actually weak and unstable.”

Porter continues, “One of Kissinger’s accomplishments was to sell the news media on the Nixon administration’s propaganda line that the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi had so unnerved the North Vietnamese that it had allowed president Richard Nixon and Kissinger to achieve a diplomatic victory over the communists in the Paris Agreement. That line was a gross distortion of what actually happened before and after the bombing.” Moreover, it was Kissinger who figured out how Ford could claim a Vietnam victory and blame the whole mess on the Democrats.

So, it’s quite possible that Bush will plunge into a counterinsurgency operation in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, and then amidst mass civilian carnage, declare victory and announce negotiations — which sooner or later will have to happen. But things may not work out that way, as the Haifa Street firefight Tuesday — in which American troops found themselves in the middle of an ongoing ethnic cleansing operation by Shia militias — made clear.

GIs call Haifa Street “grenade alley.” As Juan Cole points out, Haifa Street has become a fixture of the civil war, twisting and turning in one pacification effort after another. In July 2004, U.S. commanders deployed 3,000 troops in a mini-surge called Operation Haifa Street. A police station got blown up in a major bombing there. In March 2005, reports had things calming down a bit, and some said the tide had turned. Today Haifa Street is once again considered a terrorist stronghold — thus the U.S. operation — but things are getting ever more complicated, with at least one report in Arabic claiming Shia invaded the area Sunday, killed residents, and threw their bodies into the street. “In this context, some Sunni Arabs see the U.S. as having been duped by the Shiites to join in the ethnic cleansing of the Karkh district,” says Cole. And now there are reports that Shia militias are worming their way into the Green Zone, a feat long attempted unsuccessfully by Sunni insurgents. So is the Bush administration simply throwing in its lot with one set of death squads over another? It wouldn’t be the first time.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate