Progress Now Action

Appropos my previous post, below are excerpts from a column in today's (Sept 14 New York Times) by Paul Kruger. Can you connect the dots to determine Bush's real "strategy"? I've included the entire text of the column in the "Extended Post".


Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq,
President Bush declared that "America will hold the Iraqi government
to the benchmarks it has announced."

Near the top of his list was the promise that "to give every Iraqi
citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation
to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."

Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central
government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site
announced that the provincial government had signed a
production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that
seems to have been the last straw.

Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president
of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that,
Mr. Hunt is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board, a key oversight body.

New York Times

September 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Surge, and Then a Stab
By PAUL KRUGMAN


To understand what's really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money,
which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq,
President Bush declared that "America will hold the Iraqi government
to the benchmarks it has announced."

Near the top of his list was the promise that "to give every Iraqi
citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation
to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."

There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty
much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq's G.D.P.
and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector.
Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq,
just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.

Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on
Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

What's particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last
month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central
government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site
announced that the provincial government had signed a
production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that
seems to have been the last straw.

Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president
of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that,
Mr. Hunt is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a
businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining
U.S. policy. But that isn't all that surprising, given this
administration's history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing
business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member
of the "axis of evil."

No, what's interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt,
thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about
the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world
can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite
Baghdad's disapproval, he's essentially betting that the Iraqi
government -- which hasn't met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr.
Bush laid out in January -- won't get its act together. Indeed, he's
effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any
meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war
is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect
that most people in the Bush administration -- maybe even Mr. Bush
himself -- know this, too.

After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the
situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get
the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start
delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that
Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are
making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in
general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything
differently.

And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of
turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the
base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would
have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to
as many news media outlets as possible -- not granted an exclusive
appearance to Fox News on Monday night.

All in all, Mr. Bush's actions have not been those of a leader
seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you'd
expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16
months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame
for failure onto his successor.

In fact, that's my interpretation of something that startled many
people: Mr. Bush's decision last month, after spending years denying
that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly
embrace the parallel.

Here's how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to
replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing
eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George
Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had
victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks
back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she
tries to extricate us from Iraq -- and prevent the country's breakup
from turning into a regional war -- will have to deal with constant
sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost
the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for
their failures.