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米上院外交委員会の共和党委員長がブッシュ一味を叱責とか欧米体制本流が911以来の経過に急制動の情報しきり。
http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/sperry/
Monday, May 26, 2003
Steve Perry
Trouble in the Hinterlands
The permanent war in its first throes of crisis
Now we begin to see what synergy is all about. There's badnews for the Bush administration from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel.
Late last weekRichard Lugar, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, publiclyscolded the Bushmen and warned them that their victory in Iraq was "at risk." ButLugar pulled what might have been his most effective punch when herather delicately pointed out that continued failure in Iraq would create "an incubator for terrorist cells and
activity."
The incubator Lugar alludes to is more like a factory, and it has beenpumping out product since the invasion of Afghanistan. You have only to look to the waves of foreign volunteers who streamed into Iraq to wage jihad against the Americansat the outset of thewar--more than 10,000, according to the European press. And events since then have no doubt galvanized countless more.
Lugar is promising an investigation of the Bush administration's planning
for post-war Iraq. We'll see. Lugar is one of the few people in the entire
government who could singlehandedly do serious damage to Bush next year, but only at the cost of making himself a lifelong pariah in Republican circles.
He's really not the type. Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch, an expert in all
things Hoosier, says this of him:
Privately Lugar is said to have thought that Bush bungled diplomacy and that the war on Iraq was unnecessary and detracted from the hunt for al-Qaeda. He is often at odds with the neo-cons camped in the Bush inner sanctum and has a particular hatred of Rumsfeld. Lugar has bit his tongue for the last two years, but now that the Iraq war is over and his former staffer Mitch Daniels has left the administration to run for governor in Indiana, Lugar feels freer to speak out openly. But he's a fixer, not a revolutionary. He'll be the public voice of Colin Powell's agenda.
As I've written before, I believe the US entered Iraq with the sole
intention of staying as long as possible and insinuating itself as deeply as
possible in the fabric of the economy and of such government as exists
there. So in that sense the Bushmen's current predicamentcannot be
altogether a surprise to them. Buteven if this was their "plan," there's no question that they did a wretched job of thinking through the contingencies.
There is no sense in which it's in the administration's interest to have
this level of anarchy in Baghdad, and yet they are only now awakening to the fact that it's probably not a good idea to occupy the city with combat troops. A larger force will be required in any case, and meanwhile
Britainhas beenquietly and steadily withdrawingtroops from the occupation force.
Bush and his people are now more than everat the mercy of events
beyondtheir control, though it's clear they don't see it that way. Their
latest response to the growing fiasco in Iraq is to fire yet another warning
shot inIran's direction.Even as things sour around him, Bush, like Osama,
remains anxious to carry the war on terror forward. The pretext need not be substantial (what followsis from the WashPost article linked in this
paragraph):
A senior administration official who is skeptical of the Pentagon's
arguments said most of the al Qaeda members -- fewer than a dozen -- appear to be located in an isolated area of northeastern Iran, near the border with Afghanistan. He described the area as a drug-smuggling terrorist haven that is tolerated by key members of the Revolutionary Guards in part because they skim money off some of the activities there. It is not clear how much control the central Iranian government has over this area, he said.
"I don't think the elected government knows much about it," he said. "Why should you punish the rest of Iran," he asked, just because the government cannot act in this area?
Perhaps it's because the war on terror is not really a war on terror, as our
failure to do anything about Saudi Arabia attests.
Tomorrow--assuming, as always, that nothing else blows up in the
meantime--I'll try to post something about a few other key players in the
current drama: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, North Korea.
# -- Posted 5/26/03; 2:36:11 PM