Bush, Democrats back protracted war in Iraq

[Karmadillo]

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

With a substantial majority of the population supporting a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the Bush administration and its Democratic allies have joined forces in an attempt to intimidate the American people into accepting a protracted and bloody colonial war.

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.

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The nature of such a presence was spelled out in detail this week in an article by Seymour Hersh published by the New Yorker. Quoting current and former Pentagon and intelligence officials, Hersh writes that plans for a reduction in the number of US troops deployed in Iraq have been coupled with proposals for a more intensive use of American airpower against Iraqi resistance—in other words, a campaign to bomb the Iraqi people into submission.

Already, US warplanes have dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives on Iraqi cities and towns in attacks that are responsible for a large share of the more than 100,000 civilian deaths since the March 2003 invasion.

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