Serial Denial and the Permanent War System

[unhappycamper]

Serial Denial and the Permanent War System
by Gareth Porter
Published on Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Two months ago, I wrote that the Obama administration and the U.S. command in Afghanistan faced an "Iraq 2006 moment" in the second half of 2010 - a collapse of domestic political support for a failed war paralleling the political crisis in Bush's Iraq War in 2006. Now comes Republican Congressman Frank Wolf to make that parallel with 2006 eerily precise.

Wolf published a letter to President Obama last week calling for the immediate establishment of an "Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group". It would be the son of the Iraq Study Group. Wolf is the Congressman who authored the legislation in 2005 creating the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group to come up with fresh ideas for that failing war. The Wolf proposal came nearly a year after American public had turned against the war decisively in January 2005, when support for the war fell to 39 percent.

The U.S. public had withdrawn its support because it had become obvious that the war was a failure. The Bush administration had overthrown the Saddam Hussein regime only to unleash a violent Sunni-Shi'a sectarian power struggle that the U.S. military couldn't control. Even worse, the U.S. military presence was objectively supporting one side in that power struggle by building up a clearly sectarian military and police sector, even as it pretended by the honest broker between Sunni and Shi'a.

By 2006 it had become apparent even to the political elite that the war was failing and that something had to be done. But for war supporters like Wolf, the idea was not to find a way out of a criminally stupid war but to tweak the war strategy so that the administration could rebuild public support for it.

The problem with the Baker-Hamilton group was not that it didn't have the information it needed to call for end to the U.S. war. Bob Woodward's The War Within reveals that the commander of all U.S. ground forces in Iraq, Pete Chiarelli, told the Iraq Study Group that the sectarian character of the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi government was the primary problem. And the officer in charge of training the Iraqi army, Gen. Martin Dempsey, told the group that, without Sunni-Shi'a reconciliation, "(T)here are not enough troops in the world to provide security."