Bush Adviser: “We are part of the solution in Iraq” October 24, 2006

As if anyone is still giving creedence to Bush Administration assessments of “how we are doing” in the Iraq War. CNN reported today an interview with Dan Bartlett, senior White House adviser. Mr. Bartlett, as the U.S. death toll in Iraq reached 86, the highest monthly total this year, stated that we should not set a timetable for a troop drawdown, and instead, that “[j]ust because we have taken some serious sacrifices this month and that the fighting has been remarkably violent, that doesn’t make it any less necessary for us to be there and make sure we prevail.”

Mr. Bartlett also said that “[m]ost people would argue we are part of the solution in Iraq, not part of the problem,” Bartlett said.

Oh really? (Or perhaps, O’Reilly?)

The quite progressive web journal Electronic Iraq.net, billing itself as “a supplementary news portal committed to providing a uniquely comprehensive look at Iraq and the violence that has engulfed it,” printed an article from yesterdays London Independent with a quite blunt title: “We have done as much harm to Iraqis as Saddam”.

In the article, columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown makes quite powerful — and audacious — statements:

As the land they say they freed runs red, Blair and Bush don’t notice the stain either. Besotted with themselves and each other, what these leaders have done to the people of Iraq is at least as bad as what Saddam Hussain did to his own citizens.

Whoa! Care to elaborate?

This month, our Army head, General Sir Richard Dannatt, expressed doubts about the mission;

• over 70 US soldiers were killed;

• the former US Secretary of State James Baker said the situation in Iraq is dire;
• a 43 per cent increase in attacks was reported in Baghdad;
• and Amara was vanquished by the Mahdi army of the Shia hardliner Muqtada al-Sadr.

Worst of all were the results of a survey in The Lancet which revealed that the death toll for Iraqis is over 600,000.

Not a single new hospital has been built since 1986. Thousands of children are dying of treatable diseases. Childhood morfrom 5.5 per thousand to 13.5 since the invasion. Foreign contractors are making millions when they do shoddy work or make off with precious Iraqi resources.

Ms. Alibhai-Brown quotes her co-writer Laurie King and adds, as a post-script, her indictment of war supporters, who she calls “warniks”:

Laurie King, of the website Electronic Iraq, writes: “Reality is starting to push through the resilient layers of denial, illusions, lies and wishful thinking that have insulated official Washington and London from the consequences of an illegal and immoral war.”

I hope she is right, but as the warniks wake up, it is already too late. Options have closed off. If we withdraw, civil war breaks out; if we stay, the country haemorrhages - and our credibility and the world’s security with it. Blair and Bush should to be in the dock in The Hague, answering for these crimes against all our futures. But that can’t happen in an unequal world which they own. So we watch helplessly as they storm into their next theatre of action.

She does not fit into Mr. Bartlett’s “most people” who think we are part of the “solution.” Nor do the 600,000 dead Iraqi civilians.

Good thing we didn’t say “stay the course”.