Bush, Democrats back protracted war in Iraq

The bipartisan campaign in support of the war was summed up by back-to-back statements from Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) and President Bush, both of them proclaiming a “strategy for victory” in Iraq.

Lieberman’s comments appeared in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, while Bush delivered his in a speech to a captive audience of Naval Academy midshipmen the following day. Both made claims of success for US policy that are wildly at odds with the grim realities in Iraq.

The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, have been thrown into political crisis by the growing realization among broad layers of the American population that the government deliberately dragged the country into a war of aggression based on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction and bogus links between Baghdad and terrorism.

The sea-change in attitudes towards the war has been fueled by the mounting death toll of American troops—now standing at 2,110—as well as the exposure of the Bush administration’s criminality, from its indifference to the victims of Hurricane Katrina to the CIA leak case and the expanding web of corruption scandals engulfing the Republican Party.

Opposition to the war has grown as well within the officer corps, which fears that the occupation and counterinsurgency campaign are threatening the US military with disintegration.

This dissension within the top ranks of the military gave rise to the call earlier this month by Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a retired Marine colonel and longtime supporter of the Pentagon, for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq within six months. The proposal, coming from someone who had supported every US military action since Vietnam, threw the White House into crisis and prompted the latest public relations campaign.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/bush-d01.shtml