Title: Is Bush Doomed by the Neocons?
Source: Newsmax
URL Source: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/arti...6/222106.shtml
Published: Jan 17, 2004
Author: Paul Craig Roberts


Fear must be coursing through President Bush's veins as he realizes the
Iraqi trap into which the neocons have placed him. Bush is caught between an
Iraqi civil war and a wider insurgency.

Desperate to extricate himself from the weekly carnage well before the
November election, Bush can neither deliver on his promise of democracy via
direct elections nor impose his plan for an Iraqi assembly elected
indirectly by caucuses.

If Bush delivers on his democracy promise, the Shi'ites with 60 percent of
the population will be elected, and the country will break out in civil war.
If he tries to water down Shi'ite representation with his plan for an
assembly elected indirectly by caucuses, the so-far-peaceful Shi'ites are
likely to join the violence.

If the Shi'ites become violent, the insurgency would be too large to be
contained by our present occupying force. Moreover, the outbreak of a
general rebellion in Iraq would spill over throughout the Middle East, where
unpopular secular rulers are sitting on a smoldering Islam. Our puppet in
Pakistan would likely bite the dust. Israel would then face countervailing
Muslim nukes.

If you think more U.S. troops are needed now in Iraq, imagine how many more
would be required to deal with a wider conflagration. Where would they come
from? The U.S. military is already so thinly stretched that soon 40 percent
of the occupying troops will be drawn from the National Guard and
reservists, resulting in tremendous disruption in the affairs of tens of
thousands of families.

Pilots and troops are shunning the cash bonuses offered for re-enlistments.
The troops recognize a quagmire even if their neocon overlords cannot. The
only source of troops is the draft.

A Shi'ite insurgency that brought back the draft would deprive Bush of
re-election. A civil war with the prospect of a Kurdish state would bring in
the Turks. On Jan. 14 Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said that Turkey will
intervene in the event of Iraq's disintegration.

The Shi'ites and the Turks are forming an alliance as both have the same
interest in maintaining the geographical integrity of the Iraqi state. The
U.S. could come dangerously close to military conflict with a NATO ally.

All of this was perfectly clear well in advance of the ill-considered
invasion. If Bush wasn't smart enough to see it, why didn't his national
security adviser or his secretary of state see it? How did a handful of
neocon ideologues hijack U.S. foreign policy?

Bush did not campaign on a neocon policy of conquest in the Middle East.
There was no public debate over this policy. The invasion of Iraq was the
private agenda of the neocons.

Why have the neocons not been held responsible for their treason in abusing
their presidential appointments to substitute their personal agenda for
America's agenda?

Bush has been the neocons' puppet for so long that he is now stuck with
responsibility for their horrible mistake. With no way of his own to get out
of his trap, his arrogance toward the "irrelevant" U.N. and our doubting
allies has disappeared. Come bail me out, he pleads.

Bush, desperate to be extricated before doom strikes him, is experiencing a
reality totally different from the chest-thumping of neocon megalomaniacs
such as Charles Krauthammer, who declared the U.S. so powerful as to be able
to "reshape, indeed remake, reality on its own."

Bush now knows that he lacks the power to deal with the reality of Iraq.
Indeed, Bush cannot even deal with his own appointees.

Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy,
Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and
Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the
U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of "The Tyranny of Good Intentions."