KERRY'S 'SOLEMN OBLIGATION' TO WIN IN IRAQ

By Jack A. Smith

Over the last several weeks, as the John F. Kerry's standing in the opinion polls has fallen, the Democratic candidate for president has intensified his criticism of President George W. Bush's unjust war against Iraq. He has not, however, changed his basic position — that is, he insists Bush's failure is in mishandling a required war, and that only he, a man of strength, can win it.

By campaigning in favor of winning the war, instead of against the war, where Bush is most vulnerable, Kerry must convince the electorate that his plan for victory is sound. So far, however, he has not articulated a plan of any kind, except to avoid Bush's pitfalls if possible as he pursues his opponent's objectives. This is one reason why he might lose in November to a blundering and failed incumbent.

Kerry will retain most of his core constituency, though its large liberal antiwar sector — those who are voting against the certifiably dangerous Bush by supporting the only candidate who might defeat him — is displeased by the Democratic challenger's centrist politics and pro-war stance. But whether Kerry is able to attract the undecided voters and disillusioned Republicans needed for victory is another matter. His tactic of out-Bushing Bush has yet to prove effective. Some progressive analysts maintain a clear antiwar approach to Bush' war would have been far more successful.

The Massachusetts senator's war policy has made it difficult for him to seriously take Bush to task for the developing debacle in Iraq. Since he agrees with the invasion, the occupation, and the goal of winning, rather than ending the war and bringing the troops home, he can only attack the president for his secondary failings.

This dilemma is evident in Kerry's most extreme criticism of the White House war to date — his speech in New York City Sept. 20 that the New York Times described as Kerry's "harshest critique" of Bush's Iraq policy. According to the Democratic Party support group MoveOn, the following paragraph best summarizes Kerry's four main criticisms:

(1) The war on Iraq was a mistake. . . because the inspections were working. Iraq was a distraction from the war on terrorism. (2) President Bush misled the American people about the reasons for the war before it occurred. (3) Bush is still misleading people about Iraq, painting an optimistic picture directly contradicted by his own intelligence officials. (4) Bush went to war for ideological reasons and consistently misjudged the situation on the ground.

All antiwar critics agree with Kerry's obvious points, and could easily add a dozen or two more. What is astonishing is that despite what Kerry terms Bush's ideologically driven mistakes, distractions, misleadership, and misjudgments, the Democratic candidate still refuses to demand an end to this aberrant and unnecessary war.

Indeed, Kerry's "harshest critique" hasn't caused him to budge from this statement on his website: "Whatever we thought of the Bush administration's decisions and mistakes, especially in Iraq, we now have a solemn obligation to complete the mission, in that country and Afghanistan. Iraq is now a major magnet and center for terror," presumably referring the guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation. "We must stay in Iraq until the job is finished."

Why must "we" stay? Is it fear that what Kerry calls "premature" withdrawal will humiliate the mighty United States? Frankly, the United States already has been humiliated by the exposure of Bush's cynical lies to justify a war of aggression, by his administration's ineptitude, and by the incredible resistance waged by the Iraqi people. Withdrawal and generosity toward a truly independent new Iraq would not result in humiliation but the restoration of a certain credibility to Washington.

Or must "we" stay for the "good of the Iraqi people," as some apologists suggest, because chaos will ensue if the army of occupation is withdrawn? Chaos already has ensued, starting the moment American bombs burst in the night sky over Baghdad, capital of an ancient and great civilization that has caused the U.S. no harm. Yes, there could be a civil war, and political dislocation, and attempted secessions, and the defeat of secularism — all of which are possible with or without the army of occupation, as a consequence of the Bush administration's decision to convert Iraq into a "democratic" neocolony by the most violent of means.

And lastly, is the real reason "we" must stay because it is America's valid mission to utilize any means possible to rule the world and to "change" regimes and "reorganize" societies and destroy "failed states" which do not meet with Washington's lordly approval? This is the rationale of militarism and imperialism, but who could possibly suggest that the likes of George Bush or John Kerry would pursue so dastardly a course? We just did.

And now the Democratic candidate for president, a long-time advocate of "regime change" in Baghdad, tells us "the job must be finished." The controversial and unpopular war must go on until he can win it, regardless of mounting losses in life and treasure and the approbation of the majority of peoples and nations of the world.

Given that Kerry has insured that there is no chance the next American government will change policy in Iraq, even the ever-cautious United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has been obliged to speak up, bravely so because U.S. enmity could eventually cost him his job, as it did his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. At long last on Sept. 15 Annan publicly declared that the U.S. adventure in Iraq is illegal according to the UN Charter and all international laws, just as the antiwar movement has been arguing since before the war started, and as Bush and Kerry are certainly aware.

Annan elaborated upon his critique in a speech to the UN Sept. 21, while President Bush sat in the audience. The UN leader pointedly declared, in obvious reference to Washington's bipartisan war: "Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it, and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it. . . . Every nation that proclaims the rule of law at home must respect it abroad, and every nation that insists on it abroad must enforce it at home."

When Bush spoke he defended the war and denied it was illegal. Earlier, Secretary of State Colin Powell disputed Annan's remark, characterizing it as "not a very useful statement to make at this point," further appending this ludicrous comment: "What does it gain anyone? We should all be gathering around the idea of helping the Iraqis, not getting into these kinds of side issues."

At this writing, Kerry has not commented on Annan's bombshell, but it seems doubtful he will agree since that would officially define the war he plans to win as illegal, but ambiguity often serves him well at such moments.

Kerry has been demanding victory in Iraq ever since he won the Democratic primary in early March and no longer required a vaguely antiwar persona. By April 14 he was declaring, to the consternation of many liberals who plan to vote for him in November, "I think the vast majority of the American people understand that it's important to not just cut and run. I don't believe in a cut-and-run philosophy."

In his "harshest critique" speech Sept. 20, Kerry also put forward recommendations "for fixing our Iraq strategy" — evidently the outline of his oddly meager plan for Iraq. Here is his proposal: (1) "The president has to get the promised international support so our men and women in uniform don't have to go it alone. (2) The president must get serious about training Iraqi security forces. (3) The president must carry out a reconstruction plan that finally brings tangible benefits to the Iraqi people. (4) the president must take immediate, urgent, essential steps to guarantee the promised elections can be held next year."

It will be useful to deconstruct these recommendations. In his first suggestion, the centerpiece of the plan, Kerry is quite misleading. He has been suggesting for months that the reason President Bush has obtained so little support from several important U.S. allies is because he is a unilateralist who is indifferent to the need for international support for his Iraq adventure. In reality, Bush begged, bribed and bullied every country in the world to join him in this war. Although Britain, Italy, Spain, Pakistan and a number of countries joined the "Coalition of the Willing," most refused on principle. They correctly thought the war Bush proposed was wrong, and some knew it could not be won. Is Kerry so naïve that he believes he need only speak to Germany, France and other reluctant allies in alluring, multilateralist tones to convince them to invest billions of dollars and tens of thousands of troops to bail the U.S. out of a contretemps of its own making in Iraq? In any event, Bush and Kerry are both multilateralists but they have quite different views about the nature and purpose of tactical and strategic alliances.

This is not to say Bush's arrogant attitude on many issues hasn't weakened Washington's alliance with "Old Europe" and other allies. It definitely has, and the U.S. may soon regret the outcome because it needs strong allied backing to certify its world leadership.

However, there's much more to Bush's "unilateral" invasion than meets the eye, including the question of who shall control and profit from Iraq's immense petroleum reserves. At this point, it's certainly not going to be France, Germany, Russia and China — big powers all, who not only opposed the war but who before the invasion were intent upon negotiating oil rights from the former Baghdad government of Saddam Hussein as soon as the U.S. dropped its sanctions. Bush seized Baghdad first and ended sanctions later, thus winning in the traditional intra-capitalist competition for resources and markets, at least so far. If the U.S. is forced to relinquish its objective of controlling the flow of Iraqi oil (selecting the oil companies who will profit from the venture and determining where the oil will be sent), the competition will resume. This, of course, is one reason for "staying the course."

Kerry's remaining three recommendations — about training Iraqi soldiers, the need for reconstruction and the importance of elections — actually are tasks Bush's has been working on all year in order to isolate the insurgency. It's largely the resistance that has been disrupting U.S. efforts. The forces seeking to expel the foreign invaders believe it is a correct and so far successful strategy.

The new Iraqi army and police force Bush and Kerry are anxious to build amount to nothing but Pentagon cannon fodder to be deployed against the popular resistance, thus sparing American lives during the many years of military occupation required to fulfill Washington's objectives. Reconstruction, so necessary after the U.S. destroyed the Iraqi civil infrastructure twice in the last 13 years, is a stopgap gesture to pacify an outraged population and to profit selected U.S. corporations. The scheduled election is the "democratic" instrument the U.S. will exploit to insure that a permanent Iraqi government composed of Quislings and conservatives remains obedient to Washington's designs in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

Kerry is entirely correct about the Bush administration's serious errors after the swift collapse of the Baghdad government. The White House did not foresee the Iraqi government's apparent decision to retreat in the face of overwhelming power in order to emerge on the more advantageous battlefield of urban guerrilla warfare; nor did it anticipate the spontaneous formation of fighting groups independent of, and often in opposition to, the former Ba'athist regime.

The White House, evidently beguiled by the hubris, self-righteousness and overconfidence peculiar to wealth and power, believed its own propaganda about he prospect of being greeted by the masses with flowers for their "liberators." Staged photo-ops in the first weeks of the invasion seemed to confirm this illusion. Toy soldier Bush with his "Bring-'em-on" bravado, had no idea that the Iraqi people would fight ferociously to preserve their independence and national sovereignty against foreign invaders, even if many had objections to their own government. Washington was unprepared for the chaos that ensued and was dumbstruck by the growing guerrilla struggle.

The resistance is an extraordinary manifestation of national spirit under the most trying circumstances. These fighters have no foreign allied countries to lend support, no reliable rear areas, no jungle cover or mountainous hideouts, no heavy weapons or aircraft, and apparently no single or central leadership. But they clearly have the support of the Iraqi people. How could they function without it? Outnumbered and outgunned by the most powerful armed forces in the world, these disparate and in some cases autonomous guerrilla units are using every tactic imaginable to strike back at the enemy, and they are succeeding in undermining the occupation.

This overall struggle for national independence, in our view, is legitimate and deserves support. From time to time one or another insurgent group resorts to shock tactics such as beheadings, or bombings that only cause the deaths of innocent Iraqis. Understandably, our antiwar movement deplores such tactics. Of course the resistance will never come remotely close to the up to 30,000 Iraqi civilians that may have been killed as a result of American firepower so far. When the invasion and occupation end, so will the occasional excesses of insurgency. That is how it works, in Iraq or, for that matter, Israel.

It is this resistance to foreign invasion that John Kerry is pledging to crush in the name of "democratization" in order to transform Iraq and eventually the entire Middle East into dependencies of the caliphate ruled from Washington.

Intermixed with his somewhat bolder criticism of Bush, Kerry has also been making statements that clearly enervate his liberal antiwar supporters, who are backing him as the "lesser evil."

In mid-August, Kerry famously declared he would still have voted to grant Bush the authority to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq even had he known in October 2002 what he knows now — that Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction and had no connection to al-Qaeda, with whom he and the Ba'athist regime had antagonistic ideological disagreements.

This outraged many antiwar liberals. Probably speaking for many of them, Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive Magazine, told Between the Lines Aug. 24 that it was a "deplorable statement" and "a real slap in the face to liberal Democrats, progressive Democrats, peace activists who were on the Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich bandwagon, or who voted for Ralph Nader last time and decided to fold their principles and put them into Kerry's pocket, only to see him. . . rip them up."

Kerry routinely makes revealing remarks of this nature. Earlier in August, for example, he sounded like a West Point professor when he told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes that Donald Rumsfeld's shock-and-awe bombings and the swift capture of Baghdad amounted to "a brilliant military strategy which we all supported."

His only demurral was that "they didn't have a plan to win the peace," that is, there should have been more troops, more sophisticated weapons, more body armor and better shielding for troop carriers. The candidate assured the military newspaper that he would "do a better job of helping our troops. I'll make sure that they have state-of-the-art equipment. I will make sure we can actually grow the military. I'm going to create two new active divisions in the Army. I'm going to double the number of special forces troops we have to fight terror."

It almost appears that "Anybody but Bush" and "lesser-evil" sentiments are so embedded not only in the in the liberal community but among many Greens and some socialists that Kerry would have to declare his intention to "nuke" Falluja before they broke ranks.

Even the two Democratic primary entrants with large antiwar constituencies — Howard Dean and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, are now campaigning for Kerry and warning liberals against gravitating to the antiwar candidacy of Ralph Nader. Kucinich, the progressive leader in the House of Representatives, sought to convince the Democratic Party to adopt a peace platform for the July convention in Boston, but he was brushed aside. As he turned his antiwar followers over to pro-war Kerry, he declared: "Unity is essential to bring change in November. Unity is essential to repair America. Unity is essential to set America on a new path." Kucinich is a good man who will surely fight another day, but he must realize by now that the political centrists who control the Democratic Party have no use for liberalism.

A majority of Democratic voters (well over 50%) and a huge majority of the delegates to the Boston convention (a CBS-Times poll said 90%) were opposed to the Iraq war to one degree or another. This raises the question of why the party leaders devoted all their influence to boost the candidacy of a politician who supports the war.

The decisively influential Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which is hardly antiwar, knows it is because Kerry fits the description of a "New Democrat" — a centrist politician (despite one-time liberal leanings) in the mold of highly successful Bill Clinton, a who bested the Republicans for two terms.

The DLC says Kerry was selected because the party now understands that the only candidate who can win in today's United States must project a centrist political perspective, including "strength" on military and security matters, and a "muscular" foreign policy, as well as being conservative in economic matters and moderate" in domestic affairs.

In addition, the conservative Democrats well understand that the multitude of liberals who vote Democratic have no other place to go in our two-party system if they want to defeat the evil Republicans. Having a GOP opponent as outstandingly unfit for the office as George Bush seals the bargain.

So the war goes on — illegally according to the UN, unjustly according to moral theology, unacceptably according to multitudes of Americans and people around the world — and even though it is the most critical issue facing the electorate today, its legality, justness and acceptability are not even topics for debate between the two candidates.