1-17-07, 10:20 a.m.

'You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.' --Eisenhower



There's a glaring contradiction looming in the way of Bush's planned escalation of his Iraq occupation which must be apparent to everyone except the decider-in-chief. Bush is mobilizing our soldiers for a new assault on the very Iraqis he's claiming to be liberating with his continuing occupation. In that counterproductive effort, Bush is looking to draw even more Iraqis into a new round of violent suppression against Bush's perceived 'enemies'; using our nation's defenses to intimidate and eliminate anyone in Iraq who would actively resist the U.S. fostered Maliki regime.

For this latest wave of assaults on Iraqis, Bush has invited the Kurds to come and join in the bloodbath of Iraq's civil war. He's encouraging them to join our soldiers as they muckrake through the Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, Sadr City, and elsewhere; picking a fight with the same Shia militias Bush once was encouraging to violence against Sunnis to suppress their influence in the formation of the new puppet authority.

In fact, Bush expects those very Shia-dominated police and military forces he's trained and equipped - the same Shia forces which gave birth to the death-squad militias - to turn against their own and destroy their heart and soul to accomplish the only possible solution to his necrotic Iraq strategy. Not surprisingly, they're balking at Bush's self-serving suggestion that they pluck their own eyes out to avoid offending his crusade against whoever in Iraq he decides is a 'terrorist' or an 'extremist'.

Bush is set to escalate his Iraq occupation to, amazingly, have our troops take down the very power structure our soldiers fought and died to support and defend for the almost four years of his shifting justifications for committing them there. He's admitted Tuesday, in a NewsHour interview, that he decided to go forward with his new Iraq escalation because his policy was failing.

'I had a choice to make,' Bush told Jim Lehrer. 'Do what we're doing -- and one could define that maybe a slow failure. Secondly, withdraw out of Baghdad and hope for the best. I think that would be expedited failure,' he said.

Slow or expedited, Bush must be the last person on the face of the earth who hasn't yet recognized the failure of his Iraq fiasco in addressing any of his original reasons for invading, or in achieving any of the invented goals he used to justify the continuing occupation. Having already admitted to the failure of his war of choice, Bush is hoping he can restart the meter of judgment and have the nation and the world begin to gauge his military mission in Iraq from the conception and introduction of his new 'plan'.

The Plan would redraw the lines of aggression to separate his ambitions there from his initial enabling embrace of the new Shiite-dominated regime, to direct the force of our military to carry out his original ambition to commandeer Iraq as a wedge against Iran. To accomplish this new phase of his Iraq occupation - the corrective phase - Bush apparently intends to stir the warring factions into a new frenzy of chaos and killing. There's no room in his Plan for reconciliation or compromise; only his contention that 'failure is not an option. 'We must defend the new Iraqi government' he created,' Bush says . . . even if to succeed he has to destroy it.

'If the United States does not step up to help the Iraqis secure Baghdad... if we don't crack this now the violence will spiral out of control,' he said in his NewsHour interview.

Apparently, Iraqis should disregard his own aggression, or be intimidated by it as he demands they put aside their own violence . . . or encouraged to fight on as he urges them to even more armed confrontations against their neighbors. The end result of Bush's meddling will be a escalation of killing in Iraq. Everyone there suffers from Bush's determination to substitute his own false judgment for that of the Iraqis as he continues his suppressive military offensive against the population. Everyone suffers and sacrifices for his Plan except for our presidential pretender.

Bush's Iraq is a circle of dominoes with its tiles collapsed against one another; not completely unbroken, but their original scheme thoroughly undone. Now he wants to reset the game, wanting us to imagine achieving a different result. Just how many more times are we to allow him to cause Iraq to fall?



--Ron Fullwood, is an activist from Columbia, Md. and the author of the book 'Power of Mischief' : Military Industry Executives are Making Bush Policy and the Country is Paying the Price.

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