On Iraq, the Patraeus Report, and the 2008 Elections: Three Things to Remember

One. How our Congressional reps. voted on the resolution giving Bush authority to invade Iraq is likely to come up (as it should) during the run-up to the next elections. When your candidates try to justify their vote by saying, "everyone thought Hussein had WMD's," please point out: that wasn't the issue (though it turned out he didn't have them). The issue was, was the threat that he'd use them against us not only so real but also so imminent that we could not afford even to let the U.N. inspectors complete their work? I mean, like, Hussein had to have had the ability and desire to drop a major WMD on us within months, not years.

Whatever the evidence of WMD's (and plenty of us recognized it as tenuous at best), no one ever presented credible evidence that Hussein would have the capability, let alone the desire, to deliver that kind of attack any time soon.

I supported Kerry in the last election, but since then I've realized, it simply is not plausible that he or other Dem leaders were actually hoodwinked by the Bush Admin. I don't know what they thought they were doing, but they failed in what may have been the most important decision of their career.

So for me, it's a litmus test: any candidate who voted for the authorization should be fired, and certainly should not be promoted. This alone disqualifies Biden, Clinton, Dodd, and Edwards.

Two. We will soon have General Patraeus's report on the results of the surge. No one expects the Admin. to admit it's not working. The alleged "success," such as it is, will be attributed in part to Petraeus's new strategy of trying to win over the hearts and minds of the Iraqis by showing them that we are there only to protect them from the insurgents (such insurgents being described by the General, as quoted in The New York Post, as "foreign" and "al Qaeda"). While this approach has to be better than what came before, I wonder how effective the implementation will be so long as we insist on controlling Iraqi oil.

A new Iraqi law being pushed through notwithstanding opposition from the majority of Iraqis "would transform Iraq's oil system from [the existing] nationalized model [, which is] all-but-closed to U.S. oil companies, to a commercialized model, all-but-fully privatized and opened to U.S. corporate control. . . . As a result of the invasion, . . . U.S. oil companies will emerge as the corporate front-runners in line for contracts giving them control over the vast majority of Iraq's oil under some of the most corporate-friendly terms in the world for twenty to thirty-five years" (per HuffPo).

Not to mention that under our watch, by the most conservative U.S. estimate as reported on May 12, 2007 in The New York Times, at least 146,000,000 barrels worth at least $7,300,000,000 have simply vanished, without any benefit to the Iraqis (not to mention the U.S. taxpayers, despite Bush Admin. suggestions that Iraqi oil would pay for this war).

Three. Whatever the report says, it'll also have to support the argument that we can't leave any time soon. But the fact is, we have no hope of "winning" in even the most limited sense unless we stay there at least ten more years. And by all accounts, our supply of soldiers is too broken to continue the job past this spring. Will they reinstitute the draft? They won't talk about any of that any sooner than we force them to.

Some say "the campaign to keep us in Iraq is . . . linked to the campaign to justify a war with Iran . . ."