Omissions In the Iraq Study Group Report

by Stephen Lendman

Noted historian Eric Foner in a December 7 article on
OpEd News.com calls George Bush “the worst president
in US history….(who) in his first six years in
office….managed to combine the lapses of leadership,
misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed
predecessors.”  Equally noted historian Gabriel Kolko
agrees, and along with his other comments, calls the
Bush administration “the worst set of incompetents
ever to hold power in Washington.” And referring
specifically to the war in Iraq, Kolko colorfully
describes what former Reagan administration National
Security Agency (NSA) chief General William Odom calls
“....the worst strategic mistake in the history of the
United States” by saying the Bush administration
“shocked and awed….itself.”  Hard to say it better
than that.

Enter James Baker and the Iraq Study Group (ISG) that
reported its findings publicly on December 6 after
most of it was leaked well in advance making its
release and full-court corporate media press hyping
and griping anti-climactic as well as disappointing
and disturbing.  The ISG was formed in March with at
least four crucial aims:

—to avoid a perceived inevitable political and fiscal
train wreck caused by the disastrous Bush
administration policy over the past six years.

—to buy time for the failed and discredited Bush
administration attempting to save it along with the
family’s name and reputation. 

—to devise a scheme to assure US dominance in the
Middle East, fast slipping away, is restored and
maintained going forward so this country doesn’t lose
control over what a State Department spokesperson in
1945 called a “stupendous source of strategic power
and one of the greatest material prizes in world
history -(the region’s oil).”

—to be a (thinly-veiled) attempt to assuage public
anger over a war gone sour, that’s illegal, can’t be
won, is taking a terrible toll, and never should have
been waged. 

The ISG did it by proposing 79 recommendations
supposedly comprising a change of course strategy
that, in fact, amounts to little more than moving the
existing chess pieces around the Iraq board, ending up
almost where we are now - in a hopeless unresolvable
quagmire approaching an apocalypse with no possibility
of winning an unwinnable war and no high-level
policy-makers thinking we can save for a president
mired in a state of denial. 

He’s out of touch with reality, and according to
Capitol Hill Blue editor Doug Thompson from insider
reports he’s getting calling the president “a
dangerous cornered animal” he writes: Bush is a man
“living on the edge” growing “more sullen and moody
with each passing day….his paranoia….increasing to
manic levels as he launches into tirades about
traitors in his own party, in the press and among his
allies (and) feels betrayed by….James Baker (whose
ISG report he feels humiliated his administration).”
The president, hasn’t a clue that Jim Baker didn’t do
this.  George Bush did a very thorough job of it
himself.

What the ISG Should Have Addressed but Didn’t

That said and well reported, what’s most striking
about the ISG report isn’t what it says but what it
leaves out.  Beginning in 1991, the US conducted an
unending war of aggression in two phases, with a dozen
years of punishing and unjustifiable sanctions
sandwiched between them, against a country posing no
threat to us or its neighbors following its long and
costly war in the 1980s with Iran (that the US urged
Saddam to wage and supported him throughout) from
which it needed financial help to recover but hadn’t
gotten enough to make a significant difference.  It
began after Saddam misread US intentions regarding his
troubled relations with Kuwait, allowing himself to be
deceived by the first Bush administration into
believing we had no interest in how he chose to settle
his justifiable dispute which Washington had a hand in
creating. 

With US urging, Kuwait demanded repayment of $14
billion in outstanding loans incurred to help finance
Saddam’s war with Iran, it also helped keep oil prices
low when Iraq needed them higher to oblige, and it was
slant drilling into Iraqi territory and provokingly
refusing to negotiate a reasonable settlement to all
disputes.  Finally, Iraq took matters into its own
hands to do by invasion what it couldn’t achieve
through months of failed diplomacy but only with de
facto US approval it thought it got that proved not to
be.

Saddam fell into the trap, and the rest is history.
He’s now still in the dock after one conviction, was
sentenced to be hanged by the US-administered kangaroo
court after the first of his trials, his country is
occupied and in ruins, and his people are living in a
state of out-of-control violence and desparation
because of an illegal and brutal occupation that must
end unconditionally for them to have any hope for a
normal life again.

The ISG report ignores this history and the reasons we
went to war with Iraq in the first place.  It began
with Saddam’s misguided invasion of Kuwait in August,
1990 with the US then claiming it would liberate the
country forcibly even though he was willing to
negotiate a settlement and pull out his forces.  But
once the trap was baited with Saddam in it, there was
no turning back from a war the US wanted.  Events were
unstoppable which was clear from GHW Bush’s
belligerent language saying “(Saddam’s) Naked
aggression will not stand” and refusing all his
overtures to negotiate and his willingness to remove
his occupying forces wanting only reasonable redress.

GWH Bush got the war he wanted, but the US plan wasn’t
to liberate Kuwait.  It was to remove or fatally
weaken a leader we couldn’t dominate and liberate his
nation’s oil and sovereignty from his control to ours.
It was also a way to accomplish what GHW Bush said at
war’s end six weeks after it began on January 17,
1991: “It’s a proud day for America - and, by God,
we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,”
but he failed to explain what he meant was this now
gave the US license to attack and invade another
country any time henceforth it could convince the
public a threat existed to justify it.  Given the
power and complicity of the corporate-controlled
media, that hasn’t been a problem since. 

So faced with the syndrome’s resurgence from the
disaster today in Iraq, the ISG is waging a frontal
attack to contain it deceiving the public to believe a
new course is at hand hoping to assuage its anger so
essentially the same failed policy can continue
unabated.  It’s also to buy enough time for George
Bush to get through the next two years, hold together
his failed administration slowly coming apart for lack
of public support, and keep the ship of state from
being wrecked on the shoals of the administration’s
ineptness and arrogance extreme enough for a growing
number of former adherents to walk away not wanting
the taint of it to tarnish them any more than it
already has.

It doesn’t matter what was proposed on December 6 or
that there’s no chance it can work any better than
current policy.  That’s for the next administration in
2009 to worry about.  What does matter is to convince
the public it’s a new course, even though it’s only
smoke and mirrors, and one sensible enough to work
that will end the US occupation and involvement in the
country but at an unspecified time left unstated
because there is none or any intention to leave the
country or give up control of its oil treasure.  Just
like in the run-up to the March, 2003 attack and
invasion, the public again has been had, and it
remains to be seen how long it will take for it to
catch on and continue opposing an illegal war of
aggression that never should have been waged in the
first place.

Other Omissions in the ISG Report

Start with its members and the interests they
represent.  Overall it’s an assemblage of high-level
elitists from past government service working with
their counterparts in the military and
ideologically-driven right wing think tank experts
brought together to find a way to assure the US
imperial agenda stays on track meaning despite what
its report said, the US is in Iraq to stay as long as
there’s enough oil in the region to make it worthwhile
as that’s why we came in the first place along with
neutering Saddam to remove Israel’s main obstacle to
its regional hegemony.

Jim Baker led the group along with his co-chair and
leading figure of the 9/11 commission whitewash,
former Democrat congressman Lee Hamilton, who’s
another long-standing loyal servant of empire and
serial abuser of the public trust.  They and the
others on the Commission share another dubious
attribute.  Like George Bush and his administration
co-conspirators, these figures, too, are war criminals
along with their other abuses of the public trust that
should have put them in the dock of justice and made
them be held to account along with George Bush, Dick
Cheney and their band of neocon rogues.  They never
will be in a nation ruled by victor’s justice meaning
none at all for the law-breakers and a whole lot of
injustice for its victims.

Jim Baker’s association with crime and scandal is
long-standing, but he’s always emerged unscatched, his
reputation, in fact, enhanced, with each new episode
of lawlessness he’s played a central role in while
navigating safely through each of them.  He’s done it
almost without breaking a sweat in his role as a man
at the center of power since the inception of the
Reagan administration in 1980. Outside the Bush
family, no one is closer or more important to the
president’s father and former president than Baker.
And no one has more influence with him or with other
major players in the nation’s power establishment, at
least on the dominant Republican side.  It’s why,
along with others of his status, he’s able to get away
with murder and most anything else.

From 1985 - 1988, he was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of
the Treasury after serving as the president’s
influential White House Chief of Staff from inception
(as part of the Baker, Ed Meese, Michael Deaver power
troika) till he took over the treasury post.  While
there, he, more than anyone else (but with a lot of
co-conspiratorial help), bore responsibility for the
grand theft of over $100 billion in the notorious
Savings and Loan scandal that allowed the looting of
deregulated banks to take place throughout the
country, especially in his home state of Texas where
anything goes as long as there’s a buck in it for the
power elite.  He then served as GHW Bush’s Secretary
of State from 1989 - 1992 playing a major role in
crafting administration policy leading to the Gulf war
and the unjustifiable sanctions of aggression at its
conclusion.

Baker formed his own think tank in 1993 after leaving
the Bush administration, the James A. Baker III
Institute for Public Policy in Houston, where the
former president happens to live when he’s not at his
summer home in Maine.  It supports “oil and
petrodollar conquest” policies, played a major role in
post 9/11 policy and the fraudulent “war on terror”
making it possible, and is also a prominent attorney
connected with the notorious Carlyle Group that’s
profited enormously from all things connected to the
defense establishment and uses the services of GHW
Bush in the role of “senior consultant” and master
rainmaker/fixer-arranger at a very high price for his
services. 

Baker also engineered the theft of the 2000
presidential election for the younger Bush by assuring
he got the necessary 25 Florida electoral votes and
not Al Gore who won them and the presidency he never
got because George Bush was chosen for the role
regardless of the will of the electorate.  Five
complicit US Supreme Court justices went along with
the scheme to seal the deal and in so doing abrogated
their constitutional duty to uphold the law of the
land.  One of them was commission member Sandra Day
O’Connor, now rewarded for her participation in the
infamous judicial coup d’etat giving her an encore
performance as legal advisor and expert law
twister/subverter for the interests of wealth and
power she swears allegiance to like all the other
members of the “Gang of Ten” co-conspirators.

Baker is their leader and is presented as an respected
diplomat and elder statesman sent to rescue the ship
of state and Bush administration to keep it afloat and
him in the White House at least for another two years.
What he is, in fact, is a master
criminal/manipulator/schemer, a dangerous and ruthless
power broker deserving no public trust who should be
made to answer for his malfeasance according to the
law he doesn’t respect or acknowledge unless he can
twist it to serve his interests or those of his
clients.

More Omissions - Trashing International Law Including
the UN Charter and US Constitution to Wage An Illegal
War of Aggression

How could a nation born as a great democratic
experiment rebelling against the divine right of
monarchs become instead now one worshipping the divine
right of capital and capable of being even more
repressive.  Ben Franklin warned about this early on
saying “(The US Constitution) is likely to be
administered for a course of years and then end in
despotism….when the people shall become so corrupted
as to need (or not be vigilant enough to prevent)
despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

Much earlier, Roman historian Tacitus explained what
then happens: “They (pillage) the world.  When the
land has nothing left for men who ravage everything,
they scour the sea.  They….are greedy….they crave
glory….They covet wealth….They plunder, they
butcher, they ravish, and call it….‘empire.’  They
make a desert and call it peace.”  Today they pillage,
destroy and enslave in serfdom and call it democracy.
They believe it’s their right, divine or otherwise,
and their cause is just.  They lead this nation, and
the rest of the world trembles and suffers dearly as
long as they rule.  The Iraq conflict is just their
latest excursion to satisfy their insatiable lust for
more wealth, power and glory.

The initial Bush-led “shock and awe” attack against
that afflicted country didn’t start on March 18, 2003.
It began in small, incremental steps continuing the
intermittent harassing mostly below-the-radar strikes
that went on throughout the 1990s and picked up again
after 9/11 as violence in the so-called No-Fly Zone
increased and the Washington anti-Saddam demonization
rhetoric was rolled out prepping the public for the
Iraq war the Bush administration wanted as soon as it
came to town. 

It only reached full fury in the opening days of the
war that began in mid-March, 2003.  It’s now gone on
longer than WW II with no resolution in sight, despite
all the lofty disingenuous talk and one over-hyped
commission practicing the Sun Tzu Art of War deception
on the US public in its cooked up reworked version of
the same failed policy of aggressive war and permanent
occupation.  It has no chance to end the resistance to
it unless or until all our forces are unconditionally
withdrawn, something this country won’t ever agree to
but, in the end, will be forced to do just like it had
to acknowledge defeat and leave Southeast Asia in
1975.  History has a way of repeating for those
failing to learn its lessons. This time the price
being paid looks a lot stiffer and more painful than
the last misadventure, but the full amount won’t be
known until the current exercise in futility finally
ends.

Unstated in any part of the ISG report or in any
Washington or mainstream commentary on Iraq policy
since the confrontation with Saddam began in January,
1991, is that the US planned and carried out a war of
illegal aggression now near completing its 16th year.
Early on, this country got some UN-cover by dint of
its high-pressure to shape Security Council policy to
fit its own.  That process, however, broke down in the
run-up to the current conflict beginning in March,
2003 when the US pretext for war was so outrageous,
enough countries with clout and Security Council veto
power opposed us forcing Washington to go it alone
with an embarrassing “coalition of the willing.” Those
countries in it became shameless co-conspirators by
agreeing to join in partnership with the US defiantly
flaunting international laws and norms as participants
in this exercise of lawlessness.

You won’t find any of that hinted at in the ISG
report.  It’s not mentioned that this country began by
violating Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution
that gives the power to declare war solely to the
Congress, although it hasn’t exercised it since it
declared war against the Axis powers in WW II.  It
also ignores our violating what the Nuremberg Tribunal
trying Nazi war criminals called the “supreme
international crime” stating: “To initiate a war of
aggression….is not only an international crime, it
is the supreme crime, differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole.”  And it doesn’t
mention this country violated the UN Charter that’s
international law this country is bound by.  It allows
a nation the right to use force in its self-defense
only under two conditions: when authorized to do it by
the Security Council or under Article 51 that permits
the “right of individual or collective self-defense if
an armed attack occurs against a Member….until the
Security council has taken measures to maintain
international peace and security.”

By attacking Iraq without provocation and with no
Security Council authorization for it prior to March,
2003, the US violated this sacred covenant it’s a
signatory to.  It also violated the US Constitution
that says….“all Treaties made, or which shall be
made, under the Authority of the United States, shall
be the supreme Law of the Land.”  The Bush
administration flaunts that law, but the ISG is
unperturbed, allows this elephant in our face to go
unmentioned, by its silence supports its continuance,
and is unwilling to act responsibly to assure going
forward this country abides by all laws and standards
as a first prerequisite to resolving the conflict in
Iraq and most important to preventing future ones. 

It can’t do it, because if it does it would then have
to acknowledge this country attacked, invaded and now
occupies Iraq in violation of international laws and
norms, must now end its illegal occupation, and those
responsible must be held to account for what they’ve
done in the world and national bodies established to
deal with these type crimes of war and against
humanity.  It would also have to acknowledge that all
the commission members have their own closets filled
with disturbing skeletons including, of course, the
former High Court justice exposed above whose judicial
act of infamy allowed this holocaust to happen and
never spoke out publicly against it indicating she
finds mass slaughter and destruction quite acceptable
by her legal and moral standards - the same rogue
standards all commission members and those in the Bush
administration endorse so they act co-conspiratorially
to cover for each other.

The ISG also ignored other international laws this
country is legally bound to obey but didn’t and won’t
ever under a Bush administration that mocks them.
Nonetheless, the US can’t hide its use of banned
chemical and poisonous depleted uranium weapons
outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Convention Gas Protocol
and various succeeding Geneva Conventions banning the
use of chemical and biological weapons in any form for
any reason in war.  In addition, under various UN
Conventions and Covenants that are binding
international law for its signatories, the use of any
weapons that cause harm after the battle including
away from the battlefield, harm the environment, or
kill, wound or cause harm inhumanely are illegal and
banned.

In the Gulf war and thereafter, the US military
routinely used illegal weapons including depleted
uranium munitions for 16 years in Iraq that spread
deadly toxic irremediable radiation over a vast area
of the country.  These weapons are poisonous under
international law and violate all the above
conditions.  The Pentagon also willfully violated
international statutes by using an array of banned and
questionable weapons with no restraint including
against non-military civilian targets as a tactical
strategy, a practice prohibited by these codes of law.

By its silence, the ISG tacitly endorses these
practices as well as the administration’s use of
torture outlawed by various binding international
statutes including the significant 1984 UN Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading
Treatment or Punishment (CAT) that includes rape and
the kinds of sexual abuse routinely used in
US-administered prisons in Iraq as part of the
interrogation, dehumanizing and terror-inducing social
control process authorized by the December 18
departing Secretary of Defense and unindicted war
criminal Donald Rumsfeld. 

Jim Baker and the other commission members also are
comfortable with the way the US military treats the
thousands of prisoners it holds even though they’re
denied all rights guaranteed them under the Third
Geneva Convention of 1949 (GCIII) that provides for
humane treatment including an array of services like
enough proper food and medical care and prohibits the
kinds of abusive practices the US routinely engages
in.  The ISG report also ignores any change of policy
regarding the rights of civilians guaranteed under the
Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 (GCIV) that covers a
range of protections routinely denied them as another
part of the Bush administration’s flaunting of all
international laws that prohibit whatever practices it
wishes to engage in, law or no law.  No problem for
Jim Baker and his “Gang of Ten” including the former
High Court justice member who understands the law and
was sworn to uphold it while on the bench, domestic
and international that’s binding US law under the
Constitution.

Omissions About the Human Cost in Iraq

The few ISG findings deserving mention and discussion
have largely been ignored in the corporate-controlled
media because doing so would be embarrassing to the
Bush administration trying to cover them up as further
evidence of its failure in Iraq that can only be
characterized as criminal, disastrous and hopeless
short of a full and unconditional US withdrawal not in
the cards.

One of them at the end of the long report mentions a
“significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq.”
It’s part of the cover-up from the White House and
Department of Defense the commission says acts “as a
filter to keep events out of reports and databases (to
distort) events on the ground.”  It cites an example
that last July the Pentagon report of 93 attacks one
day was distorted to hide the reality that “a careful
review of the reports….brought to light 1,100 acts
of violence (on that day, or a slight 11-fold greater
amount of it).” 

Noting that is fine as far as it goes, but it’s not
near enough as the ISG’s mini-revelation hides the
greater truth about the US-inflicted holocaust against
the Iraqi people that began in January, 1991,
continues unabated and won’t end until the occupation
does.  That’s the key “reality” the ISG report
suppresses as does the corporate-controlled media
including parts buried deep in it they’re silent on.

For 16 years, the US created a living hell in Iraq.
It willfully and illegally destroyed essential
infrastructure like power generating stations and
clean water and sanitation facilities vital to health,
welfare and public safety. It wantonly targeted and
slaughtered many thousands of civilians.  It
unjustifiably imposed a dozen years of punishing
economic sanctions causing the deaths of as many as
1.5 million innocent Iraqis two UN heads of
humanitarian relief resigned in protest over, being
unwilling to participate in a US-imposed policy one of
them characterized as “genocide.”

Even today, little, if anything meaningful, has been
done to ameliorate a hopeless situation on the ground
in most of the country.  The ISG report ignores US war
crimes in destroying a once prosperous nation, leaving
in its wake a surreal lawless armed camp wasteland
with few or no essential services by design including
electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel and most
everything else needed for sustenance and survival.

The commission report is also silent on the shocking
2006 Lancet study that accurately assessed the human
toll of the war since 2003 using statistically
reliable random household “cluster sampled” personal
interviews with death certificate verifications in
most cases.  It estimated 655,000 violent deaths since
March, 2003 attributable to the war stating the true
number might be as high as 900,000 as interviewers
were unable to survey the most violent parts of the
country like Fallujah and Ramadi in al Anbar province
(comprising one-third of the country) where mass
killing still goes on daily as well as to include in
the study the thousands of families in which all its
members were killed.  By its silence, the ISG is
willfully participating in the cover-up of this
massive crime against humanity and by its failure to
offer redress is co-conspiratorially part of it.

The ISG also ignores the true cost to US forces in
Iraq that began in the Gulf war and continues today.
One-third or more of the 696,841 military personnel
who served in the Gulf from August 2, 1990 to July 31,
1991 have filed claims for or have been reported by
the Veteran’s Administration (VA) to be on some form
of disability in 2004, most likely from the deadly
effects of depleted uranium (DU) or other toxic
poisoning the Pentagon tries to suppress and deny. 

Today the situation is far worse, but it’ll be years
before the final human toll is known.  The effects of
DU poisoning alone may be much more devastating now
than in the Gulf war.  In this conflict, the DU used
in munitions is much more toxic than the kind used
earlier.  In addition to U-238 used earlier, today’s
DU weapons contain plutonium (the most toxic of all
known substances), neptunium, and the highly
radioactive uranium isotope U-236.  According to a
1991 study by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, these
elements are 100,000 times more dangerous than the
U-238 in DU.  It takes only the most minute, nearly
unmeasurable, amount of this substance in one’s body
(that can easily be inhaled or otherwise ingested) to
be fatal.

Further, the situation today is exacerbated by the
current war having been ongoing for over three and
one-half years (longer now than WW II) compared to the
earlier six week one in 1991.  Also, twice as many US
forces have been engaged in this toxic environment for
extended multiple tours of duty setting up the
possibility for an enormous human calamity in years
ahead as more of them return home, their bodies
poisoned, and their lives and future health put
seriously at risk.

In addition, daily life on the ground has been
difficult to unbearable for US forces.  Many have been
ill-equipped with weapons, vehicles, ordinance, body
armor and most everything else being consumed and not
replaced. It’s even worse for Forward Operating Bases
often unable to get enough drinking water and other
necessities such as proper food, clean clothes, a
daily shower and a comfortable bed to sleep in.  The
effects of conflict and conditions on the ground have
taken a devastating toll already with many there
increasingly stressed and terrified out of their minds
from physical and/or psychological trauma often
ignored by commanders.

Most disturbing is the cover-up of the true death and
injury toll already that’s far higher than the
published figures that are phony to avoid likely
public anger if they were known.  One incident
suppressed happened on October 10, 2006 when Forward
Base Falcon was attacked by mortars and rockets
causing huge stocks of fuel and ammunition to explode
most of the night killing or wounding hundreds of the
3,000 troops based there.  Pictures gotten out show
how extensive the damage was that leveled buildings to
the ground explaining why the Pentagon wanted none of
this to get out.  It did but not in the major media
and not in the ISG report.

Despite public disclosures, more accurate data overall
is quietly coming out of the Pentagon, unreported in
the corporate media, and unmentioned in the ISG report
that shows the number of US forces killed is about
four times the “official” total, and the number
wounded may be about twice the official figure.
Almost never mentioned is that many injuries include
loss of limbs, brain and severe psychological damage
and pain and other debilitations that will scar those
affected and their families for the rest of their
lives if after treatment and recovery they even
survive. 

None of this bothers the “Gang of Ten” commission
members whose families are safe from this carnage and
whose verdict rendered in their report effectively is
to let the war go on without end, the enormous and
rising human toll on Iraqis and Americans
notwithstanding.  For them, it’s a price worth paying
as it serves the interests of empire in which human
beings are just another commodity to extract value
from and then discard when no longer of further use.
That’s how the Bush administration and ISG members
think and act.

Omissions on the Domestic Front Related to the Iraq
War and the “War on Terror” Allowing It to Happen

Domestic and foreign affairs are inextricably linked,
and when the nation goes to war, or is planning to,
everything is fair game on the home front, but don’t
expect it will serve the public interest.  Ordinary
people always pay dearly and gain nothing beyond the
right to make the weapons and pay the bills that in
the current conflict are huge enough at the least to
put an enormous strain on the economy and over time as
the out-control costs mount may endanger the nation’s
economic health.  The ISG report doesn’t address this
reckless endangerment that Nobel laureate economist
Joseph Stiglitz believes may have an eventual price
tag of well over $2 trillion exacerbating already
massive budget deficits far higher ($760 billion in
2005, not the “official” $318.5 billion) than the
phony numbers reported to hide how bad things really
are and on top of an alarming current account deficit
now in the range of $800 billion a year and climbing.

It also is unperturbed by the grim picture economist
Laurence Kotlikoff presented in a recent detailed
report for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in
which he stated, by some measures, the US is already
bankrupt and unable to pay its creditors.  Professor
Kotlikoff believes US fiscal policy is so
out-of-control, including for the reckless spending
for wars, that the country’s debt is rising
exponentially and will reach an incomprehensible and
unmanageable $65.9 trillion creating a fiscal calamity
forcing the nation to default on its debt obligations.
He later updated his figures and now believes the
country’s future overall liability may reach the $80
trillion level that will trigger an inevitable
economic meltdown if it happens. 

Spending hundreds of billions annually and rising for
“defense” including all the off-the-books (but out of
taxpayers’ pockets) allocations for Iraq will only
speed up the pace to the future apocalypse Kotlikoff
potentially foresees ahead.  No problem for the Baker
collective who operate with tunnel vision, and like
those three monkeys, hear no, see no, and neither
speak nor write anything beyond their re-flavored stay
the course agenda for Iraq disguised to look like a
new drawdown policy it isn’t.

Other Domestic Front Omissions - The Destruction of
Democracy and Loss of Personal Freedoms

The ISG was formed to serve US imperial interests
including its wars of aggression for wealth and power.
It doesn’t matter how destructive they are to the
public welfare or how they’re allowing the nation to
pass from a republic to tyranny.  For every blow the
US military strikes against the people of Iraq (and
Afghanistan), the political establishment here and its
“homeland security” enforcers inflict a similar amount
of damage in kind against the body politic at home,
not through the barrel of a gun (yet) but by the
destruction of our civil liberties and human rights
that stand in the way of the grandiose schemes people
like Jim Baker and his “Gang of Ten” allies hope to
pull off - to gain total imperial control over planet
earth and the heavens above it with ordinary working
people everywhere just more commodity inputs for their
production meat grinder to be chewed up for profit and
then discarded.

So for Baker and the ISG team, keeping mum about the
war at home is part of the scheme to let it go on
largely under the radar until the time comes to strip
off the mask and send the jackboots and tanks to the
streets making them look like the ones in Baghdad and
with some of the same horrific fallout as things get
ugly.  For their plan to work, they must crush the
last remnants of a free society and create the
Orwellian vision he described saying: “If you want a
vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a
human face - forever.”  The ISG is trying to do with
guile and deceit what George Bush already did in the
new legislation he signed into law on October 17
giving himself what noted British journalist John
Pilger calls “the power of unrestricted lawlessness”
with scant public awareness it even happened.

On that day, with ISG tacit blessing and approval by
its silence, Bush signed into law the infamous
Military Commissions Act effectively giving himself
the power to subvert the Constitution and Bill of
Rights.  The bill authorizes the use of torture and
allows the president the right to call anyone an enemy
of the state on his say alone with no corroborating
evidence and strips the accused of all constitutional
rights.  It means anyone can be arrested,
interrogated, tortured and incarcerated in a secret
prison anywhere in the world, subject to the justice
of a military tribunal like in Iraq or Guantanamo,
with no competent defense or habeas right of appeal.
It makes everyone an “enemy combatant” subject to the
will of a man willing to use his power recklessly with
no concern for its consequences.

George Bush went further that day privately and
quietly signing into law a provision revising the
Insurrection Act of 1807 that along with the Posse
Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the use of federal
and National Guard troops for law enforcement inside
the country except as allowed by the Constitution or
expressly authorized by Congress in times of a
national emergency like an insurrection. 

No longer.  The new Public Law 109-364 (HR 5122)
allows the president the right to claim a public
emergency, effectively declare martial law on his say
alone, and send the jackboots to the streets to
suppress whatever he calls public disorder that may
include peaceful protests to redeem our constitutional
rights now lost. 

These new repressive laws add to the ones already on
the books including infamous repressive Patriot Acts I
and II and the National ID Act that will enable the
government to track and control everyone in the
country in the “Big Brother” fashion George Orwell
foresaw in his dystopian book Nineteen Eighty-Four
depicting a totalitarian national security police
state society the US has now become.  This act alone
legalizes tyranny, but it’s only one among others
including the president having given himself unlimited
power by designating himself a “unitary executive”
with the right to circumvent the law in the name of
national security on his say alone that a threat
exists, with no evidence needed to warrant it or
congressional approval.

The Congress approves, and again silence from the ISG
members plotting their own schemes while watching the
country’s founding principles being destroyed making
it all the easier for them to pull off their heist of
the republic to go along with controlling Iraq and the
rest of the Middle East and its oil treasure they’ll
go to any lengths to hold onto - and that’s only for
starters.

What Chance for ISG Success

The Commission members believe their plan can succeed,
but don’t be deceived by their (thin) veneer of
confidence.  Other insiders aren’t so sure, and
according to the New York Times on December 9 the
report “exposed deep fissures among Republicans over
how to manage a war that many fear will haunt their
party - and the nation - for years to come.”  From the
hard right, critics call the ISG report a shameful
retreat while moderate party voices expressed hope
George Bush would adopt the Commission’s principle
recommendations and “begin a process of disengagement
from the long and costly war.”  In the middle, White
House officials concluded their own initial assessment
of Baker’s work saying many of its proposals are
“impractical or unrealistic.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page had its own
ideologically-driven say.  As expected, it wants no
part of engaging Iran and Syria and supports the
Israel Lobby position instead.  It called the report
“a bipartisan strategic muddle ginned up for domestic
political purposes.”  The Journal editorial writers do
have a way with words leaving nothing to their
readers’ imagination.

Unmentioned in the Times story is the unreported view
from the Pentagon high command that apparently is much
different from its public stance agreeing with the
blunt mid-October assessment of Britain’s Army Chief
of Staff General Richard Dannatt who stated (in
contradiction to the Blair government) the presence of
UK forces in Iraq “exacerbates the security problems
(and they should) get out some time soon” - meaning as
soon as possible.

In simple terms, General Dannett and the Pentagon
brass believe what most every honest observer
understands - that the presence of an occupying force
in Iraq is the cause of the problem, not its solution.
The longer it remains, the more unstable and
intolerable conditions will become.  Increasing the
force size and/or reshuffling the deck with fewer
combat troops and more trainer/advisors will only
increase the level of Iraqi resistance against them
and ultimately elevate public opposition at home once
people catch on and realize they’ve again been had and
the Baker plan is just another scheme to keep our
forces in Iraq in perpetuity to maintain the country
as a colony and the region’s oil under US control. 

Middle East expert and scholar Gilbert Achcar states
in his new book Perilous Power, co-authored with Noam
Chomsky, that the longer US forces remain in the
region, the worse things will get, no matter what role
they adopt that’s just cover for the US to maintain
tight control.  Achcar says the Bush administration
since March, 2003 has been “stupid” and “will go down
in history….as the undertaker of US interests in the
region.”  It doesn’t get any clearer, stronger, or
more on the mark than that, and it goes to the heart
of the problem the ISG was formed to deal with -
maintaining US control over Middle East oil now in
jeopardy and getting the US public to go along.

If the US occupation of Iraq ever ends without a
reliable client state government in place, it will
create the possibility of Washington’s worst
nightmare - a majority Shiite ruled Iraq allied with
Shiite Iran that might link with the Saudi Shias
located in the bordering oil-rich part of the kingdom.
If that Tripartite Shia Middle East alliance forms,
it will control most of the world’s oil supply.  It
might then choose to align with the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) formed to compete with
the US for control of Central Asia’s huge energy
reserves and whose core members are China and Russia
giving those countries a chance for a leg up on the US
at least for access to Middle East oil.  The ISG and
Bush administration will do all in its power to
prevent this from happening, but the US has lost so
much credibility in the region, they face a daunting
task and long odds for success.

The ISG report mentions none of this, but does stress
the importance of Iraq’s oil by mentioning it 63 times
and calling for the US to help Iraq privatize its
state-owned oil industry, opening it up to Big Oil
foreign exploitive investment and the profits from it.
If or when the US ends its occupation without leaving
a reliable client state in place, it would be hard to
imagine Iraq will quickly forgive and forget and be
willing to conduct business as usual with oil or other
corporations from the country that laid waste to it
and only left in humiliation and defeat.

It shows how hard it will be for the US to get out of
this mess, and it’s likely to prove more than Jim
Baker, his high-powered team, and “all the king’s
horses and men” are up to.  They stand virtually no
chance to implement a coherent, workable plan for
success short of the only operable one they’ll never
agree to until they no longer have a choice - a full
and unconditional withdrawal.  It only remains to be
seen how long it will take for them and whatever
administration is in power in Washington to draw that
conclusion and how much time the public’s willing to
give them, the Bush administration and the majority
Democrats in the Congress elected to chart a new
course they’ve so far indicated no intention of doing.

It all adds up to an exercise in deception and
futility, but in the end things will end up where they
all began in 1990 before the long US assault against
Iraq started.  When it does, that country will again
be free from a foreign occupier but will face a long,
expensive and painful struggle to mend and rebuild.
As happened when the US left Vietnam, this country
will leave it to the Iraqis to recover and regenerate
from the carnage and misery on their own that may take
a generation or more to achieve and that for most now
alive may never be possible.

This will be the legacy of the US invasion and
occupation and tainted presidency of George Bush and
his corrupted notion of moral superiority, claiming to
have brought democracy, liberation and the benefits of
western civilization to this blighted country but
having to do it through the barrel of a gun.  This
time things unraveled faster than usual, but it only
showed the people of Iraq reject what too many at home
still believe - that the US is a benevolent democratic
republic serving the will and needs of its people and
supporting the rights and sovereignty of free people
everywhere to live in peace and security.  It’s an
illusion understood by most others around the world
and gaining recognition at home as being just as
hollow here as on the streets of Baghdad and Kabul. 

It remains to be seen how long it will take for a mass
awakening to occur to arouse the public at home, as it
did in Iraq and Afghanistan, making them no longer
willing to put up with the kind of abuse and neglect
they’ve so far failed to resist.  If history is a
guide, it will happen, and when it does it may signal
the denouement of another repressive imperial state
succumbing to the arrogance of its own overreach,
excess, hubris and disregard for the needs of its own
people demanding redress.  It can’t come soon enough
for the many around the world oppressed by it crying
out “freedom now” and beginning to do something about
getting it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).  Also, visit his blog
site at sjlendman.blogspot.com