Regretting Bush Junior and his Administration

War, any war, is supposed to end with a victorious side and a defeated one, yet there are exceptions to such a rule throughout history, the most famous being perhaps one of the earliest recorded. The Greek King Pyrrhus of Epirus defeated the Romans in Heraclea in 280 BC, then in Asculum a year later, but his army suffered tremendous losses. He is claimed to have said “another such victory and I come back to Epirus alone”, and also “if we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined”. We are today one month away from the withdrawal of invasion forces from Iraq, and the war has not ended with the United States being destroyed like Pyrrhus’s kingdom. Yet it has certainly ended with two defeats. Indeed, Iraq as we know it has been destroyed, and from its inhabitants around a million people have been killed, along with five thousand Americans. Moreover, the US economy has collapsed for numerous reasons, the most significant being the war on Iraq where the Bush Administration squandered a trillion dollars, with the Obama Administration still paying its bills. And if there is a victor, then it is the side that did not fight, i.e. Iran, which has come to have the broadest influence in Iraq. That is if Iraq is still Iraq. Indeed, one hears everyday demands of secession or autonomy in the provinces, as if all Iraqis had become like Iraqi Kurdistan. As for the Neoconservatives, today they say that Iran has won, and then they blame Barack Obama, not themselves. The Neoconservatives, or the pro-Israeli American Likudniks, led “their country” to war for oil-related and Israeli reasons. And instead of Barack Obama putting them on trial, especially as there is proof that they falsified the reasons for the war which any tribunal would accept, he announced after entering the White House that he was looking forward not backwards. This made the leaders of the war gang continue to lie and incite for another war, against Iran or Syria, or any Arab or Muslim country that would provide them with an excuse – this instead of being incarcerated in Guantanamo in place of the other detainees there, for whose release verdicts have been issued and have not been implemented. For the sake of reminding readers, Barack Obama the presidential candidate had promised to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and did not. Instead, he continued to prosecute the detainees before military commissions, despite his other promise to ban those trials in a speech which today condemns him. I shall choose for condemnation an opinion other than mine, so that I may not in turn become accused myself. I therefore rely on the brave words of Colonel Morris Davis, the former Chief Prosecutor in Guantanamo, who said that “[his manhood] fell off the President after Election Day”. The truth is that the expression he used speaks of self-castration, but I did not find it appropriate to quote him verbatim in an Arab newspaper. The President’s weakness and his retraction of promises (as he did when he led the campaign against Palestine’s full membership at the United Nations this year, after he had said in his speech on its podium last year that he hopes for Palestine to become a member within a year) have encouraged the Neoconservatives to further political depravity, of Israeli Likudnik proportions. A prominent figure from among those who had called for the war on Iraq, Max Boot, described the US decision to withdraw as “a shameful failure of American foreign policy” and one that threatens to bring to failure “all the gains” achieved by the invasion and by continued American military presence in Iraq. Who failed? What are the gains? Are they the deaths of Iraqis or the deaths of Americans? Or are they the collapse of the US economy? Or perhaps handing over Iraq on a silver platter to the Ayatollahs in Qom? Faust sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for worldly pleasures, and I maintain today an opinion I had previously voiced, which is that Obama has sold his soul to the Israeli Devil because he wants to win a second term next year. But the Likudniks do not trust him, and I have before me an article from one of their websites entitled “Obama Continues His War on Israel”, the reason for this being that his Administration opposed Israel’s continued building of settlements in and around Jerusalem. Israel is a fascist occupying state that has no right to exist on the Palestinians’ lands, and it is illegal in its entirety, not in its settlements alone. Moreover, the truth negates the claims of the Israeli crime gang, and the truth is that US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro visited Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai, of the extremist religious Shas party, and told him that the Obama Administration was opposed to settlement-building, but that it would in any case vote against Palestine at the United Nations… In other words, the Jewish American Ambassador gave the Israelis a blank check to continue building settlements without any sanctions or obstacles from the US. I believe that Barack Obama will be a different president if he returns in a second term, but he is today making me regret Bush Junior and his Administration. khazen@alhayat.com