Bush on Iraq Surge: A Kissinger Ploy? - Washington Dispatch at Mother Jones

[applegrove]

Bush on Iraq Surge: A Kissinger Ploy?

Washington Dispatch: Let's assume for a moment the president does have a plan: It might not be what you think.
January 11, 2007
Washington Dispatch
at Mother Jones


"Everyone knew what Bush was going to say before he made his address last night. And the "surge" that Democrats hoped to block had already begun, with advance elements of the 82nd Airborne in Baghdad to arrange for arrivals of 17,500 more troops. "If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home," Bush said.

................... SKIP

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.

............SNIP"

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/01/kissinger_ploy.html

[aquart]

1. Aww. Someone thinks Caligula is sane and in control.

That's one opinion.

[applegrove]

2. One can only hope redeployment will occur right after the surge. I'm

allowed to hold onto some hope. Otherwise I could not take it day in and day out.

Worst case scenario would be if Bush doesn't redeploy till a Dem President gets elected in 2008...then said President is left negotiating in mayhem just as troops have finally run out and must be on leave. I hope that is not what the * WH has as a plan. They are evil..but are they that evil? That they would purposely exhaust the troops for an incoming President?

[Missy M]

3. I believe Bush IS such a psycho he can't stop.....

thinking he is winning. I would also like to know what "kind of stuff the Bush family legacy is made of".

[applegrove]

4. I thought that Bush family legacy thingy is a little weird too. Would not

have mattered who was President...the Soviet empire collapsed under its own weight. A groundhog could have been President and peace would have broken out in 1998.

[acmavm]

5. Kissenger's act is pretty worn now. He has no new rabbits to

pull out of a hat. Everyone knows that anything Henry's connected to involves lying and dying.

The horrible old ghoul has to be careful when he travels, or so I understand. He's known to be what he is, the man responsible for a lot of innocent people's deaths.

[Dover]

6. Kissinger said, on Charlie Rose recently, that the U.S. cannot tolerate

a nuclear Iran nor allow it to have a disproportionate economic or military power in that region. He suggested diplomacy and an attempt to help Iran feel secure by some means other than nuclear technology, and that was the position he/US would not budge on. No nuclear/powerful Iran.

So I think this buildup of troops is related to Iran, rather than to Iraq. Iraq is the excuse but not the reason for the buildup.

[applegrove]

7. Thanks for the info.