James Ridgeway: Bush on Iraq Surge: A Kissinger Ploy?

[seafan]

This appeared in Mother Jones last month. Henry Kissinger needs an invitation to give some testimony on Capitol Hill.


Bush on Iraq Surge: A Kissinger Ploy?

January 11, 2007
By James Ridgeway

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As usual, observers are grasping wildly for an explanations as to why Bush is doing what he's doing. No matter what one thinks of the President, when push comes to shove, it's hard to believe he really wants to drag out the war so it can be handed over to a successor in 2008; or that he is such a psycho he can't stop referring to defeat as victory. That's not the kind of stuff the Bush family legacy is made of.

There may well be a much more sinister game plan here, one that centers around the emergence of Henry Kissinger over the last year as an adviser to Bush and other top officials in Washington. Gareth Porter, the historian who ran the Indochina Resource Center in the early 70s, points out in a January 11 article in Asia Online that "although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi'ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the U.S. position in the war is actually weak and unstable."

Porter continues, "One of Kissinger's accomplishments was to sell the news media on the Nixon administration's propaganda line that the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi had so unnerved the North Vietnamese that it had allowed president Richard Nixon and Kissinger to achieve a diplomatic victory over the communists in the Paris Agreement. That line was a gross distortion of what actually happened before and after the bombing." Moreover, it was Kissinger who figured out how Ford could claim a Vietnam victory and blame the whole mess on the Democrats.

So, it's quite possible that Bush will plunge into a counterinsurgency operation in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, and then amidst mass civilian carnage, declare victory and announce negotiations -- which sooner or later will have to happen. But things may not work out that way, as the Haifa Street firefight Tuesday -- in which American troops found themselves in the middle of an ongoing ethnic cleansing operation by Shia militias -- made clear.

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Here is the Asia Times article by Gareth Porter that Ridgeway refers to in the preceding clip:


The perverse logic of Bush's war

By Gareth Porter
Jan 11, 2007

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It does not appear to be merely coincidental that the most influential outside adviser to Bush and his national-security team in the weeks before the Bush policy was leaked to the press was former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. McClatchy Newspaper reporters Warren P Strobel and Jonathan S Landay wrote in mid-December that Kissinger had met with Bush frequently and with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a half-dozen times in late 2006.
The sudden emergence of Kissinger as a key figure in Bush's Iraq policy deserves closer examination. Although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi'ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the US position in the war is actually weak and unstable. One of Kissinger's accomplishments was to sell the news media on the Nixon administration's propaganda line that the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi had so unnerved the North Vietnamese that it had allowed president Richard Nixon and Kissinger to achieve a diplomatic victory over the communists in the Paris Agreement. That line was a gross distortion of what actually happened before and after the bombing.


But Bush may be equally interested in Kissinger's experience in shifting the blame for defeat to the Democrats. That is exactly what he tried to do in spring 1975 when the South Vietnamese military regime fell apart under the pressure of the North Vietnamese offensive. Even though Kissinger had privately admitted at the time of the Paris Agreement that the regime of president Nguyen Van Thieu was unlikely to survive, he insisted that Nixon's successor, president Gerald Ford, go through the motions of asking for an additional US$722 million in military aid on April 11, less than three weeks before the final collapse.
In his account of the period, Without Honor, journalist Arnold Isaacs recalls how Kissinger wrote Ford's speech so that the blame for the defeat in Saigon was clearly placed on Congress and his own role in Vietnam policy was vindicated.
So when Kissinger, in an interview with CNN last December 14, said that "a surge capability would play a role , if only because it would show that the United States is not just running out", we can see the outlines of yet another Kissinger-inspired political strategy for an administration facing likely defeat.


Last week Senator Joseph Biden, Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he had "reached the tentative conclusion" that much of the administration, perhaps including Vice President Dick Cheney, already "believes Iraq is lost". He described the Bush administration strategy as one of simply trying to "keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy".

The Democratic leadership in Congress is now in a position to force an end to the US occupation, and both they and Bush know it. Kissinger's stab-in-the-back thesis was allowed to linger for decades without a decisive response from the Democrats.
But the political circumstances surrounding the current administration's Iraq debacle are far more difficult for Bush than the 1975 circumstances were for Kissinger. That ought to give the current Democratic leadership a clear shot at quashing Bush's effort to play cynical politics with the bloody mess in Iraq.

Congress, it's time to assert yourself. The People demand it.


(emphasis added)