Mayday Mission Deconstructed – GWOT morphs into the “GWOB”

In a bitter irony, the Democratic Congress will present President Bush a new war funding bill – which he has promised to veto – on the fourth anniversary of his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech of May 1, 2003. Meanwhile the American public is screaming, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” because President Bush is surging troops four years after he had declared “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

After tolerating four years of incompetence, the American people had clearly expressed their desire in the 2006 mid-term elections – to change the status quo ante in Iraq. Nevertheless, President Bush persists with a military “surge” strategy that defies the will of a majority of the people. Tragically, the Associated Press reported today that “U.S. Military Deaths Toll Rises Above 100 for Month, Making April Deadliest of 2007 So Far” and it also confirmed that April “has been the deadliest month for British forces in Iraq since the first month of the war.” In a weird twist of fate, the United States has gone from being a purveyor of “shock and awe” to becoming its hapless witness – as is evidenced in the ever-increasing carnage wrought by Iraq’s warring sectarian factions.

It thus seemed even more ironical that on the same day that we learned about the death of former Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, we also read about the American military building the equivalent of the “Great Wall of Baghdad (GWOB).” One might recall the big bear from Moscow climbing atop a tank to defend Russia’s fledgling democracy in 1991– an action that came to symbolize the tipping point in the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Exactly twenty months and ten days after the Berlin Wall fell, the great wall of totalitarianism surrounding the “evil empire” had also been irrevocably ruptured.

Given the significance of walls in political history, it was rather distressing to find out that the world’s greatest democracy had sanctioned the erection of the GWOB in the darkest traditions of Berlin and Belfast. Could the U.S. have emulated a worse symbol of authoritarian occupation in Iraq than through a Soviet-style balkanization of the Iraqi people? The Global War on Terror (GWOT) has just morphed into what could become its defining symbol – the GWOB. So much for bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East – yet another of the Bush Administration’s ever-changing Iraq objectives has been turned on its head.

Finally, with their reported attempts to appoint a war czar at home, it is apparent that the Bush Administration is no longer in a state of denial – they are clearly trying to finesse a war situation that is going from bad to worse. President Bush has surely seen the writing on the wall – but it is not the graffiti on the GWOB going up in Iraq. No, I suspect that he has finally foreseen the fate of his GWOT policy of preemption, a.k.a. the Bush Doctrine. No one should be surprised if there is a “Roving” hand behind this final preemptive strike – to appoint a fall guy to manage the chaos as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” heads for the exit on the greatest disaster in American foreign policy in history.