by Matthew Chavez
Daily Lobo columnist
Five months have passed since President Bush announced the New Way Forward in Iraq, a misnomer perversely contrary to Iraqi and United States public opinion.
The escalation is commonly referred to as a "final push," a "surge" or, as Colin Powell elucidated, a "heavier lid on this boiling pot of civil war stew." These characterizations obscure what has, in fact, been a consistently expanding war of aggression - the supreme crime in international law. The current escalation resumes after a two-month interlude, when its forerunner ended last autumn. The New Way Forward, neither new nor a way forward, is rather the current variant of a clumsy chronology of aggression - old wine, new bottle.
The last "final push," launched in Baghdad last year, ended in "disheartening" disarray, produced a 22 percent increase in guerilla attacks and neither secured Baghdad nor achieved a "reduction in the levels of violence," according to the Pentagon.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The current "final push" has produced comparable results. While violence in Baghdad has declined slightly, overall violence remains high relative to earlier periods in the occupation. According to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, "there is no evidence that ethnic cleansing has declined significantly from its pre-surge level of roughly 100,000 persons displaced per month." Brookings' analysis offers few hopeful signs. "Perhaps worst of all," it states, "the Iraqi political system fails to deliver any real progress on the core
issues dividing Sunni from Shia from Kurd."
The marginal ebb in Baghdad's sectarian violence since January appears trivial adjacent the bigger picture: More than half a million Iraqis have died since 2003; thousands of U.S. soldiers have died, tens of thousands seriously debilitated; conservative estimates project the total cost of the war at $2 trillion; and the integrity of the state itself is threatened - Iraq now ranks second on Foreign Policy magazine's Failed States Index, sandwiched between Sudan and Somalia. The conflict has also created about 4 million internal and external Iraqi refugees, "the largest long-term population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948," according to U.N. authorities.
A decent government would respond to this by pursuing the obvious justice accorded to the victims of supreme international crime: deoccupation, reparations and charges brought against the perpetrators. But the Bush administration, heir to a primitive tradition of insubordination to the public will, instead revised, relabeled and expanded the assault. To herald these majestic achievements, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice unveiled a new foreign policy doctrine on June 7. Couched in the usual platitudes about democracy and liberty, Rice attempted to situate the Bush administration's foreign policies on the vanguard of a 100-year tradition that seeks to "make the world better than it is. More free. More just. More peaceful." President Theodore Roosevelt fathered this "uniquely American realism," Rice explained, a tradition that stands for "something greater, something nobler."
She could not have summoned a more fitting forebear; Roosevelt's thirst for war rivaled that of the Bush administration itself.
A year before the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt confided to a friend, "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." Roosevelt got his war, boasting to a friend from the front lines in Cuba, "Did I tell you that I killed a Spaniard with my own hands?"
More importantly, Roosevelt is credited with transforming the U.S. presidency into an imperial institution, assigning the U.S. government "international police power," a doctrine invoked by successive U.S. presidents in a campaign of U.S. aggression and terror throughout Latin America during the first third of the 20th century.
The belligerent expansionism of Roosevelt's day gave rise to an anti-imperialist tradition whose strength continues today. Carl Schurz, a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League, warned that an empowered Roosevelt would bring to the United States an "imperialism which in its effects upon the character and the durability of the Republic" would prove "as pernicious as slavery itself."
The anti-imperialist tradition has since expanded, but so has the threat of military expansionism. At each phase in the slow collapse of U.S. policy in Iraq, the administration imposes a new "final push" that edges us closer to the precipice, the "supreme triumph of war" Roosevelt longed for.
The more U.S. occupation fails, the more reactionary and invasive U.S. aggression grows. The Bush administration suggested last month plans to institutionalize the Iraq occupation on the model of the 50-year U.S. military presence in South Korea. While widely condemned, the plan reflects a commitment to perpetual war that only a historic anti-imperialist effort will avert.
Matthew Chavez is a political science major with a focus on international relations and a minor in Middle Eastern studies.
