Iraq - Bush's fatuous fundamentalist folly

After President Bush announced his teflon-ised* intention to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq (against the wishes of both sides of Congress & the American public and even Iraqi , and to the dismay of European and Arab allies), he stated his parallel intention to attack Iran and Syria to stop their support of insurgents. His troops even busted into and ransacked an Iranian consulate in northern Iraq.

* by placing the onus of success for his policy on Iraqi leaders

Remember what I blogged in my earlier posting Bush's goy-ish strategy for Iraq, and who he has gone amok for with his latest policy for Iraq? Well, here we go again, with his plans to whack the two bêtes noires of a certain country.

You have heard of Bush’s so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea. I now believe that the true ‘Axis of Evil’ for Bush (at the urging of certain members of his original Administration) was Iraq, Iran and Syria.

North Korea was thrown in as a red herring to make it less obvious 'whose' interests dumbo Bush was serving – one hint, it’s not the USA’s.

Japan of course had a mild orgasm when North Korea was included among Bush’s evil triad, but Nippon could never ever stand anywhere near as important as you-know-who in the eyes of Bush Administration. Syria has always been a US 'target'.

Just prior to the invasion of Iraq, I recall reading a ding-dong war of correspondence in malaysiakini between the news portal’s associated ‘resident’ blogger (not Jeff Ooi but someone before him) and a reader on the issue of the ‘Axis of Evil’. That blogger was pro-US through and through.

In a way, reading those exchanges, especially the arguments from the malaysiakini linked blogger, was rather humorous. If my memory hasn’t failed me, the reader challenged the blogger as to the illogic of the US planning to attack and invade Iraq on the mere ‘suspicion’ of WMD while ignoring North Korea which had actually exploded and therefore possessed N-device or devices.

In fact, the reader went on to accuse the US of using the argument of neutralising Saddam Hussein's WMDs to overlay its covert and real aim of attacking and invading Iraq for oil, Israeli interests and deceiving the American public that Bush had somehow punished (in part) the perpetrators of 9/11.

The blogger responded in defence of the US that, words to the effect, North Korea (remember, the one who had conducted a N-test) would be akin to a threatening man with a gun while Iraq (recall, the one with WMDs but based solely on US suspicion) was a menace with a baseball bat, and the US was right to get the latter, the one with the baseball bat rather than the one with the gun.

I am not sure till today whether the blogger was so utterly thick as to offer such a argument, or he was just blindly or obsequiously loyal to Uncle Sam, but I do recall the reader writing back to say he (the blogger) had just ‘shot himself in the foot’ with that (lack of) argument.

The point of this recalling is not to bash that blogger but to illustrate, through the illogical US military action against Iraq, that the Bush Administration’s true intentions was not about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD but rather for the interests of a certain Middle-East country.

But even with those exposed WMD lies, 3,000 US service personnel killed and tens of thousand others maimed in Iraq, losing both Houses of Congress for his party, and overwhelming disapproval by Americaan for his latest policy for Iraq, Bush is still continuing pell-mell down his nose-led charge.

He has sent Condoleezza Rice to the Middle-East to slow-talk Arab States into supporting his new Iraqi policy, and shoring up support (political, military and financial) for Palestinian Fatah against Palestinian Hamas, but of course only she had flown to Israel first to consult its foreign minister.

Rice said of the US intention to back Abbas and his Fatah party: "It is a time when extremist forces are attempting to make it impossible to have the kind of Middle East in which Israelis and Palestinians and other people of the Middle East can live in peace, and in which democracy can make progress."

"We are determined to resist their efforts, but also to strengthen the hands of those who wish to resist their efforts."

The ‘extremist force’ she referred to would previously have been Fatah (with Israel covertly supporting Hamas to undermine president Yasser Arafat), but today is Hamas (with Israel openly supporting Fatah to undermine elected prime minister Ismail Haniyah).

Who then is the “extremist forces ... attempting to make it impossible to have the kind of Middle East in which Israelis and Palestinians and other people of the Middle East can live in peace”?

And as for Rice’s hypocritical blasphemous claim of the US wanting to ensure “democracy can make progress” in the Middle-East, why has the US been undermining the democratically-elected Hamas by unashamedly boosting up the Fatah party the loser of the Palestinian general election, with political, financial and military aid?

Why does the so-called paragon of 'democracy' demand that the Palestinian people shall vote a party to Israel's approval, or the financial account of the Palestinian Authority would be embargoed? Why must the US make Palestinian Statehood totally dependent on the approval of Israel, its irreconcilable nemesis?

If these blatant US insulting inconsistencies, intervenions and interference in Palestinian affairs, and the needless sacrifice of 3000 dead young Americans and several tens of thousands maimed, weren't and aren’t for Israel, who then was the beneficiary of such reckless adventurism by the Bush Administration?