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The perverse logic of Bush's war
By Gareth Porter

concerned mainly with being able to hand off the occupation to the next president in 2009.

This interpretation of Bush's escalation maneuver was given further credence on Sunday when the general Bush hand-picked to become the new commander of US combat forces in Iraq, Odierno, told reporters that it might take another "two or three


 
years" for US and Iraqi forces to make progress, or as the Times report put it, to "gain the upper hand in the war".

Two or three years, of course, would conveniently carry the policy into the next administration. The Times did not connect the dots, but few readers could have been unaware of the political significance of the time frame adopted by Bush's newly minted military team in Iraq.

It does not appear to be merely coincidental that the most influential outside adviser to Bush and his national-security team in the weeks before the Bush policy was leaked to the press was former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. McClatchy Newspaper reporters Warren P Strobel and Jonathan S Landay wrote in mid-December that Kissinger had met with Bush frequently and with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a half-dozen times in late 2006.

The sudden emergence of Kissinger as a key figure in Bush's Iraq policy deserves closer examination. 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 US position in the war is actually weak and unstable. 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.

But Bush may be equally interested in Kissinger's experience in shifting the blame for defeat to the Democrats. That is exactly what he tried to do in spring 1975 when the South Vietnamese military regime fell apart under the pressure of the North Vietnamese offensive. Even though Kissinger had privately admitted at the time of the Paris Agreement that the regime of president Nguyen Van Thieu was unlikely to survive, he insisted that Nixon's successor, president Gerald Ford, go through the motions of asking for an additional US$722 million in military aid on April 11, less than three weeks before the final collapse.

In his account of the period, Without Honor, journalist Arnold Isaacs recalls how Kissinger wrote Ford's speech so that the blame for the defeat in Saigon was clearly placed on Congress and his own role in Vietnam policy was vindicated.

So when Kissinger, in an interview with CNN last December 14, said that "a surge capability would play a role [in Iraq], if only because it would show that the United States is not just running out", we can see the outlines of yet another Kissinger-inspired political strategy for an administration facing likely defeat.

Last week Senator Joseph Biden, Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he had "reached the tentative conclusion" that much of the administration, perhaps including Vice President Dick Cheney, already "believes Iraq is lost". He described the Bush administration strategy as one of simply trying to "keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy".

The Democratic leadership in Congress is now in a position to force an end to the US occupation, and both they and Bush know it. Kissinger's stab-in-the-back thesis was allowed to linger for decades without a decisive response from the Democrats.

But the political circumstances surrounding the current administration's Iraq debacle are far more difficult for Bush than the 1975 circumstances were for Kissinger. That ought to give the current Democratic leadership a clear shot at quashing Bush's effort to play cynical politics with the bloody mess in Iraq.

Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His latest book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

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