Pentagon won't make surge recommendation to Bush

I guess the president will have to take the blame or praise himself. It sounds also as if there is no wide consensus on what should be done.

Pentagon won't make surge recommendation to Bush
By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 email | print tool nameclose
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WASHINGTON — In a sign that top commanders are divided over what course to pursue in Iraq, the Pentagon said Wednesday that it won't make a single, unified recommendation to President Bush during next month's strategy assessment, but instead will allow top commanders to make individual presentations.

"Consensus is not the goal of the process," Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. "If there are differences, the president will hear them."

Military analysts called the move unusual for an institution that ordinarily does not air its differences in public, especially while its troops are deployed in combat.

"The professional military guys are going to the non-professional military guys and saying 'Resolve this,'" said Jeffrey White, a military analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "That's what it sounds like."

White said it suggests that the military commanders want to be able to distance themselves from Iraq strategy by making it clear that whatever course is followed is the president's decision, not what commanders agreed on.

Bush has said on several occasions that he will follow the recommendation of Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, but the Pentagon plan makes certain that other points of view are heard.

Morrell said the commanders will make their presentations to Bush at around the same time that Petraeus appears before Congress to assess progress in Iraq in mid September.

Morrell said that those making presentations to the president would include Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Fallon, the commander of U.S. Central Command, which has responsibility for U.S. military actions in the Middle East, Army Gen. George Casey, the chief of staff of the Army, and Petraeus. In addition, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will share his opinion with the president.

Pentagon commanders are known to be divided over how to proceed in Iraq.

Pentagon officials have told McClatchy Newspapers that Casey, who was the top commander in Iraq, wants the U.S. to draw down forces and focus on training the Iraqi forces, as it did during his tenure in Iraq, and worries about the strain the war is having on the Army.

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reported that Pace would recommend reducing the number of troops in Baghdad because the deployments are straining the military.

Petraeus, however, is expected to argue that the number of U.S. troops should be kept at their current levels, saying that the increase in U.S. forces this year is beginning to reduce sectarian violence.

Gates' position is not known, but he was a member of the Iraq Study Group, which advocated a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. The surge, which sent an additional 28,000 troops to Iraq between February and June, was crafted as the secretary took over the department in December, and it is not considered his plan.

The surge, which called for about 28,000 additional troops into Baghdad, has pushed the number of troops serving in Iraq to its highest level since Saddam Hussein's regime fell in April 2003.

The increase was intended to reduce violence so that Iraq's politicians would have time to broker deals on some of the country's most divisive issues. Instead, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's government is floundering and Iraq's various political and ethnic factions are battling for control of the country.

An assessment by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies last week foresaw little progress during the next 12 months in efforts to reconcile Iraq's warring ethnic groups. It also reported that civilian deaths and violence remained at high levels.

Morrell said that making individual presentations about Iraq policy rather than trying to reach a consensus before talking to the president will lead to a more honest discussion.

Gates is "looking for a way to sort of make sure that the normal bureaucratic massaging that sometimes eliminates the rough edges or the sharp differences between individuals does not victimize this process so that the president can get distinct — if that's the way it turns out to be — points of view on where we are and where we need to go," Morrell said.

At the same time, Morrell made it clear that the decision rests with the president, not the military.

"I think once [the president] receives the advice from Gen. Petraeus — and as I have outlined — and others, my understanding is that he has a decision to make," Morrell said.

McClatchy Newspapers 2007

The Numbers Surge

Tom Engelhardt almost always provides excellent articles on his website.
There is a wealth of numbers in this article that cumulatively give a good snapshot of the havoc in Iraq.

Tomgram: The Numbers Surge in Iraq


Iraq by the Numbers
Surging Past the Gates of Hell
By Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes, numbers can strip human beings of just about everything that makes us what we are. Numbers can silence pain, erase love, obliterate emotion, and blur individuality. But sometimes numbers can also tell a necessary story in ways nothing else can.

This January, President Bush announced his "surge" plan for Iraq, which he called his "new way forward." It was, when you think about it, all about numbers. Since then, 28,500 new American troops have surged into that country, mostly in and around Baghdad; and, according to the Washington Post, there has also been a hidden surge of private armed contractors -- hired guns, if you will -- who free up troops by taking over many mundane military positions from guarding convoys to guarding envoys. In the meantime, other telltale numbers in Iraq have surged as well.

Now, Americans are theoretically waiting for the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to "report" to Congress in September on the "progress" of the President's surge strategy. But there really is no reason to wait for September. An interim report -- "Iraq by the numbers" -- can be prepared now (as it could have been prepared last month, or last year). The trajectory of horror in Iraq has long been clear; the fact that the U.S. military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm has been no less clear for years now. So here is my own early version of the "September Report."

A caveat about numbers: In the bloody chaos that is Iraq, as tens of thousands die or are wounded, as millions uproot themselves or are uprooted, and as the influence of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's national government remains largely confined to the four-square mile fortified Green Zone in the Iraqi capital, numbers, even as they pour out of that hemorrhaging land, are eternally up for grabs. There is no way most of them can be accurate. They are, at best, a set of approximate notations in a nightmare that is beyond measurement.

Here, nonetheless, is an attempt to tell a little of the Iraqi story by those numbers:

Iraq is now widely considered # 1 -- when it comes to being the ideal jihadist training ground on the planet. "If Afghanistan was a Pandora's box which when opened created problems in many countries, Iraq is a much bigger box, and what's inside much more dangerous," comments Mohammed al-Masri, a researcher at Amman's Centre for Strategic Studies. CIA analysts predicted just this in a May 2005 report leaked to the press. ("A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.")

Iraq is # 2: It now ranks as the world's second most unstable country, ahead of war-ravaged or poverty-stricken nations like Somalia, Zimbabwe, the Congo, and North Korea, according to the 2007 Failed States Index, issued recently by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine. (Afghanistan, the site of our other little war, ranked 8th.) Last year and the year before Iraq held 4th place on the list. Next year, it could surge to number #1.

Number of American troops in Iraq, June 2007: Approximately 156,000.

Number of American troops in Iraq, May 1, 2003, the day President Bush declared "major combat operations" in that country "ended": Approximately 130,000.

Number of Sunni insurgents in Iraq, May 2007: At least 100,000, according to Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar on his most recent visit to the country.

American military dead in the surge months, February 1-June 26, 2007: 481.

American military dead, February-June 2006: 292.

Number of contractors killed in the first three months of 2007: At least 146, a significant surge over previous years. (Contractor deaths sometimes go unreported and so these figures are likely to be incomplete.)

Number of American troops Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilian strategists were convinced would be stationed in Iraq in August 2003, four months after Baghdad fell:): 30,000-40,000, according to Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks in his bestselling book Fiasco.

Number of armed "private contractors" now in Iraq: at least 20,000-30,000, according to the Washington Post. (Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestseller Blackwater, puts the figure for all private contractors in Iraq at 126,000.)

Number of attacks on U.S. troops and allied Iraqi forces, April 2007: 4,900.

Percentage of U.S. deaths from roadside bombs (IEDs): 70.9% in May 2007; 35% in February 2007 as the surge was beginning.

Percentage of registered U.S. supply convoys (guarded by private contractors) attacked: 14.7% in 2007 (through May 10); 9.1% in 2006; 5.4% in 2005.

Percentage of Baghdad not controlled by U.S. (and Iraqi) security forces more than four months into the surge: 60%, according to the U.S. military.

Number of attacks on the Green Zone, the fortified heart of Baghdad where the new $600 million American embassy is rising and the Iraqi government largely resides: More than 80 between March and the beginning of June, 2007, according to a UN report. (These attacks, by mortar or rocket, from "pacified" Red-Zone Baghdad, are on the rise and now occur nearly daily.)

Size of U.S. embassy staff in Baghdad: More than 1,000 Americans and 4,000 third-country nationals.

Staff U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker considers appropriate to the "diplomatic" job: The ambassador recently sent "an urgent plea" to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for more personnel. "The people here are heroic," he wrote. "I need more people, and that's the thing, not that the people who are here shouldn't be here or couldn't do it." According to the Washington Post, the Baghdad embassy, previously assigned 15 political officers, now will get 11 more; the economic staff will go from 9 to 21. This may involve "direct assignments" to Baghdad in which, against precedent, State Department officers, some reputedly against the war, will simply be ordered to take up "unaccompanied posts" (too dangerous for families to go along).

U.S. air strikes in Iraq during the surge months: Air Force planes are dropping bombs at more than twice the rate of a year ago, according to the Associated Press. "Close support missions" are up 30-40%. And this surge of air power seems, from recent news reports, still to be on the rise. In the early stages of the recent surge operation against the city of Baquba in Diyala province, for instance, Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times reported that "American forces.... fired more than 20 satellite-guided rockets into western Baquba," while Apache helicopters attacked "enemy fighters." ABC News recently reported that the Air Force has brought B-1 bombers in for missions on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Number of years Gen. Petraeus, commander of the surge operation, predicts that the U.S. will have to be engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq to have hopes of achieving success: 9-10 years. ("In fact, typically, I think historically, counterinsurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years.")

Number of years administration officials are now suggesting that 30,000-40,000 American troops might have to remain garrisoned at U.S. bases in Iraq: 54, according to the "Korea model" now being considered for that country. (American troops have garrisoned South Korea since the Korean War ended in 1953.)

Number of Iraqi police, trained by Americans, who were not on duty as of January 2007, just before the surge plan was put into operation: Approximately 32,000 out of a force of 188,000, according to the Associated Press. About one in six Iraqi policemen has been killed, wounded, deserted, or just disappeared. About 5,000 probably have deserted; and 7,000-8,000 are simply "unaccounted for." (Recall here the President's old jingle of 2005: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.")

Number of years before the Iraqi security forces are capable of taking charge of their country's security: "A couple of years," according to U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group.

Amount of "reconstruction" money invested in the CIA's key asset in the new Iraq, the Iraqi National Intelligence Service: $3 billion, according to Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar.

Number of Iraqi "Kit Carson scouts" being trained in the just-captured western part of Baquba: More than 100. (There were thousands of "Kit Carsons" in the Vietnam War -- former enemy fighters employed by U.S. forces.) In fact, Vietnam-era plans, ranging from Strategic Hamlets (dubbed, in the Iraqi urban context, "gated communities") to the "oil spot" counterinsurgency strategy, have been recycled for use in Iraq, as has an American penchant for applying names from our Indian Wars to counterinsurgency situations abroad, including, for instance, dubbing an embattled supply depot near Abu Ghraib, "Fort Apache."

Number of Iraqis who have fled their country since 2003: Estimated to be between 2 million and 2.2 million, or nearly one in ten Iraqis. According to independent reporter Dahr Jamail, at least 50,000 more refugees are fleeing the country every month.

Number of Iraqi refugees who have been accepted by the United States: Fewer than 500, according to Bob Woodruff of ABC News; 701, according to Agence France Presse. (Under international and congressional pressure, the Bush administration has finally agreed to admit another 7,000 Iraqis by year's end.)

Number of Iraqis who are now internal refugees in Iraq, largely due to sectarian violence since 2003: At least 1.9 million, according to the UN. (A recent Red Crescent Society report, based on a survey taken in Iraq, indicates that internal refugees have quadrupled since January 2007, and are up eight-fold since June 2006.)

Percentage of refugees, internal and external, under 12: 55%, according to the President of the Red Crescent Society.

Percentage of Baghdadi children, 3 to 10, exposed to a major traumatic event in the last two years: 47%, according to a World Health Organization survey of 600 children. 14% of them showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In another study of 1,090 adolescents in Mosul, that figure reached 30%.

Number of Iraqi doctors who have fled the country since 2003: An estimated 12,000 of the country's 34,000 registered doctors since 2003, according to the Iraqi Medical Association. The Association reports that another 2,000 doctors have been slain in those years.

Number of Iraqi refugees created since UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon declared a "humanitarian crisis" for Iraq in January 2007: An estimated 250,000.

Percentage of Iraqis now living on less than $1 a day, according to the UN: 54%.

Iraq's per-capita annual income: $3,600 in 1980; $860 in 2001 (after a decade of UN sanctions); $530 at the end of 2003, according to Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar, who estimates that the number may now have fallen below $400. Unemployment in Iraq is at around 60%.

Percentage of Iraqis who do not have regular access to clean water: 70%, according to the World Health Organization. (80% "lack effective sanitation.")

Rate of chronic child malnutrition: 21%, according to the World Health Organization. (Rates of child malnutrition had already nearly doubled by 2004, only 20 months after the U.S. invasion.) According to UNICEF, "about one in 10 children under five in Iraq are underweight."

Number of Iraqis held in American prisons in their own country: 17,000 by March 2007, almost 20,000 by May 2007 and surging.

Number of Iraqis detained in Baquba alone in one week in June in Operation Phantom Thunder: more than 700.

Average number of Iraqis who died violently each day in 2006: 100 -- and this is undoubtedly an underestimate, since not all deaths are reported.

Number of Iraqis who have died violently (based on the above average) since Ban Ki-Moon declared a "humanitarian crisis" for Iraq in January 2007: 15,000 -- again certainly an undercount.

Number of Iraqis who died (in what Juan Cole terms Iraq's "everyday apocalypse") during the week of June 17-23, 2007, according to the careful daily tally from media reports offered at the website Antiwar.com: 763 or an average of 109 media-reported deaths a day. (June 17: 74; June 18: 149; June 19: 169; June 20: 116; June 21: 58; June 22: 122; June 23: 75.)

Percentage of seriously wounded who don't survive in emergency rooms and intensive-care units, due to lack of drugs, equipment, and staff: Nearly 70%, according to the World Health Organization.

Number of university professors who have been killed since the invasion of 2003: More than 200, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education.

The value of an Iraqi life: A maximum of $2,500 in "consolation" or "solatia" payments made by the American military to Iraqi civilians who died "as a result of U.S. and coalition forces' actions during combat," according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. These payments imply no legal responsibility for the killings. For rare "extraordinary cases" (and let's not even imagine what these might be), payments of up to $10,000 were approved last year, with the authorization of a division commander. According to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, "[W]e are not talking big condolence payouts thus far. In 2005, the sums distributed in Iraq reached $21.5 million and -- with violence on the upswing -- dropped to $7.3 million last year, the GAO reported."

The value of an Iraqi car, destroyed by American forces: $2,500 would not be unusual, and conceivably the full value of the car, according to the same GAO report. A former Army judge advocate, who served in Iraq, has commented: "[T]he full market value may be paid for a Toyota run over by a tank in the course of a non-combat related accident, but only $2,500 may be paid for the death of a child shot in the crossfire."

Percentage of Americans who approve of the President's actions in Iraq: 23%, according to the latest post-surge Newsweek poll. The President's overall approval rating stood at 26% in this poll, just three points above those of only one president, Richard Nixon at his Watergate worst, and Bush's polling figures are threatening to head into that territory. In the latest, now two-week old NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 10% of Americans think the "surge" has made things better in Iraq, 54% worse.

The question is: What word best describes the situation these Iraqi numbers hint at? The answer would probably be: No such word exists. "Genocide" has been beaten into the ground and doesn't apply. "Civil war," which shifts all blame to the Iraqis (withdrawing Americans from a country its troops have not yet begun to leave), doesn't faintly cover the matter.

If anything catches the carnage and mayhem that was once the nation of Iraq, it might be a comment by the head of the Arab League, Amr Mussa, in 2004. He warned: "The gates of hell are open in Iraq." At the very least, the "gates of hell" should now officially be considered miles behind us on the half-destroyed, well-mined highway of Iraqi life. Who knows what IEDs lie ahead? We are, after all, in the underworld.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

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US army loses more than Iraqi army in March

No doubt this is the result of the US being more exposed and the Iraqis being risk-averse! The surge will put more US troops in danger. Perhaps a certain percentage of politicians and bureaucrats in the Green Zone should be enlisted to take part in the surge.


U.S. March toll nearly twice Iraq forces By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press Writer
Sat Mar 31, 7:28 PM ET



BAGHDAD - The U.S. military death toll in March, the first full month of the security crackdown, was nearly twice that of the Iraqi army, which American and Iraqi officials say is taking the leading role in the latest attempt to curb violence in the capital, surrounding cities and Anbar province, according to figures compiled on Saturday.

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The Associated Press count of U.S. military deaths for the month was 81, including a soldier who died from non-combat causes Friday. Figures compiled from officials in the Iraqi ministries of Defense, Health and Interior showed the Iraqi military toll was 44. The Iraqi figures showed that 165 Iraqi police were killed in March. Many of the police serve in paramilitary units.

According to the AP count 3,246 U.S. service members have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

At least 83 American forces died in January and 80 in February, according to the AP tabulation.

The Iraqi figures were gathered from officials who released them on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give out the numbers.

Additionally, the Iraqi ministry figures listed 1,872 Iraqi civilian deaths for the month, about 300 more than the AP tabulation, which is mainly gathered from daily police reports nationwide.

The civilian death toll for the month was down significantly from 2,172 in December, the highest month casualty figure since the AP began keeping records of civilian deaths in April 2005.

However, the number of civilians killed in March was in the same range as for the first two months of this year; 1,604 in January and 1,552 in February, according to the AP count.

Nearly a third of the Iraqi civilian deaths, more than 500 people, where killed in three big bomb attacks in the last week of the month and revenge killings of Sunni men in Tal Afar the night after a Shiite market was bomb in the northwest Iraqi city

Juan Cole on the Surge in Iraq

The whole article is available here.
This contrasts with the rosy assessments routinely presented in much of the media and of course as official Bush releases. It will be interesting to see if Maliki survives his cabinet shuffle and attempt to jail some MPs.


Is the Bush surge already failing?
The president just gave a rosy assessment of his plan, but insurgents have adapted and Iraqis continue to be slaughtered.
By Juan Cole

Mar. 08, 2007 | On Tuesday, President Bush said that "even at this early hour, there are some encouraging signs" that the so-called surge is working in Iraq. In fact, three weeks into what the president refers to as the "surge" and what Iraqis call the "new security plan," it's already clear that Bush's last-gasp bid for victory faces challenges that can't necessarily be surmounted by a few thousand additional troops.

With plenty of warning of the U.S. escalation, the Shiite Mahdi Army is lying low. Meanwhile, the Iraqi army and the much better equipped and trained U.S. military have made no appreciable progress against the real drivers of the country's civil war, Sunni Arab guerrillas, who have so far adapted successfully to the new deployments. And perhaps most important, a new spate of massive and deadly bombings has spread insecurity and further compromised the Iraqi government.

The neo-Baathists, Iraqi nationalists and Muslim fundamentalists who make up the insurgency have responded in several ways to the U.S. decision to put extra troops into Anbar Province and Baghdad. First, they have stood their ground, refusing to cede these two pieces of territory to the Americans or the Iraqi government, and they have changed their military tactics.

The Sunni Arab fighters appear to have made a tactical decision to target U.S. helicopters, and perhaps they have recently gotten hold, in the shadowy global arms market, of more sophisticated shoulder-held missile launchers. They have shot down eight U.S. helicopters in the past two months, several of them after the new security plan began. This tactic has made it more difficult for the U.S. to give American and Iraqi troops close air support, and has forced the U.S. to deploy bombers from greater altitudes against suspected guerrilla safe houses. In turn, bombing from a distance increases the likelihood that the U.S. will make a mistake and hit a house full of civilians, providing Iraqi, Arab and European media with heartbreaking footage of children being dug out of the rubble.

The guerrillas have not ceased their attacks in Anbar Province, a key focus of the escalation, where the U.S. military is adding some 4,000 extra troops. Guerrillas have bombed police stations and other sites in major cities like Ramadi and Tikrit on more than one occasion, sometimes killing and wounding dozens of people at a time. On Feb. 24 in Habbaniya, another town in Anbar, guerrillas used a truck bomb to attack a Sunni mosque that was cooperating with the Americans, killing 45 and wounding 110. They have killed a number of U.S. soldiers and Marines.

At the same time that some cells have refused to fall silent or go underground in Baghdad and Anbar, the Sunni Arab guerrillas have shifted some of their attacks to Diyala and Ninevah Provinces, which have Sunni Arab majorities but are not included in the new security arrangements. On Monday, they used a roadside bomb to kill six U.S. troops in Salahuddin Province, and another three in Diyala Province. In February, attacks on U.S. troops were up 70 percent in Diyala, according to the Associated Press. Diyala has a Sunni Arab majority, but because the Sunnis boycotted the last provincial elections, the provincial government, the police and the federal troops are all predominantly Shiite. Locally, American forces are seen primarily as enablers of the Shiite fundamentalist Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. It is not just Diyala. Guerrillas in recent months have driven thousands of Kurds from the large northern city of Mosul, and they have resorted to death squad tactics, often leaving half a dozen bodies in the street at night.

In attempting to suppress the Sunni militants, American troops are not receiving much help from the Iraqi army. The Iraqi brass have had trouble just convincing their troops to come to Baghdad from the provinces to fight. Several battalions have arrived at less than full strength, some of them only 42 percent filled. If troops will not obey a simple order to deploy several hundred miles away from their hometowns, it is difficult to see in what way they can defend the government in Baghdad. Nor had the units from the largely Shiite south managed to establish security in their home regions. As for the two Kurdish units, their deployment against the Arabs of Baghdad is controversial and likely to exacerbate ethnic tensions in the north.

The other problem with Bush's talk of "encouraging signs" is the steep increase in civilian casualties. Since the security plan began, the guerrillas have pulled off a whole series of horrific bombings right in downtown Baghdad, within spitting distance of the Green Zone, where the U.S. and the Iraqi government planned out the new security arrangements.

On Tuesday, the same day Bush gave his rosy assessment of the surge, Sunni Arab guerrillas bombed processions of Shiite pilgrims commemorating the martyrdom of the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, al-Husayn. They killed some 115 pilgrims. News of the pilgrims' deaths undermined the American claims to be able to provide security, and will certainly eventually result in reprisal killings. Many Shiites believe that the Mahdi Army did a much better job of providing security for the religious processions, and that for the U.S to disarm them this year was a deadly mistake. Since these attempts to target the pilgrims were predictable, it is difficult to understand why the al-Maliki government and the U.S. did not forestall them.

Analysis of voting on resolution opposing the surge

Some of the comments by Democrats are even less impressive than some of the Republican remarks about opposing the resolution actually supporting Al Qaeda. Pelosi claims that withdrawing troops would not be supporting them. Huh. Bringing the troops back to the US puts them in harms way but leaving them and more of them in Iraq does not?

WSWS : News & Analysis : North America

After House vote on non-binding resolution: Democrats won’t cut Iraq war funding
By Patrick Martin
17 February 2007


The US House of Representatives voted by 246 to 182 Friday in favor of a resolution opposing President Bush’s decision to send an additional 21,500 troops into the war in Iraq. Although Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed, “The passage of this legislation will signal a change in direction in Iraq that will end the fighting and bring our troops home safely and soon,” the vote is not a step towards ending the war.

The resolution and the three days of debate that preceded its passage are a further demonstration that the Democratic Party shares the imperialist goals of the Bush administration in Iraq, and that its criticisms are entirely on the level of tactics. In a literal sense, the resolution is not an antiwar measure at all, but merely a statement of disagreement with the method chosen by the White House to continue and escalate the war.

The resolution devotes half its 97 words to declaring support for US troops currently occupying Iraq, while stating that Congress “disapproves” of Bush’s decision to escalate the war. The resolution neither condemns the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, nor the initial decision to invade and conquer the country. If implemented—rather than contemptuously ignored by the White House—it would leave American policy in Iraq exactly where it was on January 9, the day before Bush ordered the “surge” of additional troops.

The three days of speeches on the House floor included remarks by more than three quarters of the 434 representatives. These comments give a glimpse of the relatively narrow range of opinion within the two big business parties in relation to the Iraq war.

The Republican speech-making was a mixture of McCarthy-style terror-baiting (those voting for the non-binding resolution were supposedly guilty of encouraging Al Qaeda and demoralizing US troops), and taunts against the Democrats for their unwillingness to put forward legislation that would actually compel an end to the war by cutting off funding. Adam Putnam, chairman of the House Republican Conference, noted that the resolution “does nothing to help win the war” and “doesn’t do anything to help stop it, either.”

Few Republican speakers actually defended the latest White House policy, following the guidelines for the debate spelled out in a leadership memorandum that was leaked to the press. This document was remarkably blunt in conceding the deep unpopularity of the war and the Bush administration: “The debate should not be about the surge or its details. This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made, or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose.”

Instead of discussing the war, much of the Republican response consisted of hysterical abuse. House Minority Leader John Boehner said passage of the resolution would mean that “every drop of blood that’s been spilled in defense of liberty and freedom from the American Revolution to this very for moment is for nothing.” Sam Johnson of Texas revisited every US military failure of the past 50 years, declaring, “We cannot leave a job undone like we left in Korea, like we left in Vietnam, like we left in Somalia.” Virgil Goode of Virginia wallowed in anti-Muslim bigotry, suggesting that the result of the Democratic policy would be to replace the words “In God We Trust” on US currency with “In Mohammed We Trust.”

The Democratic speeches were far more restrained, giving little expression to the passionate antiwar sentiments of the millions of voters who went to the polls last November to remove the Republicans from power in Congress. Not a single Democrat accused the Bush administration of waging a war for control of oil resources, or suggested that the White House was guilty of a war of aggression Only a handful made any reference to the lies about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-Al Qaeda ties that were employed to “sell” the war to the American people as retaliation for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Instead, the Democrats largely opposed the surge on the grounds that it was unlikely to be successful, while declaring that American troops should not be engaged in policing a civil war in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites. The quagmire in Iraq was diverting military resources required for other tasks, they argued, whether the “war on terror” with Al Qaeda, propping up the US-backed regime in Afghanistan, or confronting Iran, Syria, North Korea, China and other potential antagonists of American imperialism.

Typical were the remarks of newly elected Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, a retired admiral who commanded an aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf. He criticized “the continuing use of our national treasure in what is an inconclusive, open-ended involvement within a country where the long-term benefits do not match what we need to reap.”

Iraq war veteran Patrick Murphy, a former captain in the 82nd Airborne Division, is a newly elected Democratic congressman from the Philadelphia suburbs. He was one of the first speakers in the debate, saying, “Walking in my own combat boots, I saw firsthand this administration’s failed policy. It is immoral to send young Americans to fight and die in a conflict without a real strategy for success.” Presumably, by this formulation, a more successful military strategy would have justified the sacrifice of American (and Iraqi) lives.

The real position of the congressional Democrats is expressed in their flat rejection of any cutoff of funding for the war (to say nothing of filing articles of impeachment against Bush for launching an illegal war on the basis of lies). Speaker Pelosi was adamant that no such measure would be proposed, claiming that to do so would harm the troops now deployed in Iraq.

In a question-and-answer piece published in the New York Times Friday, Pelosi declared her impotence in the face of Bush’s determination to continue and escalate the war. Asked whether the nonbinding resolution would have any effect, she replied, “I don’t know that the president can completely ignore us.” Asked if the House debate had moved Bush, she said, “To be honest, I don’t know if the president is moveable in terms of the course of action he wants to take militarily.”

Most significant was her response to the next question, about demands for “an urgent end to the Iraq war and asking Congress to cut the funding immediately. Is that a bad idea?”

“Why would it be a bad idea not to support our troops?” she said—rephrasing a funding cutoff as an attack on the soldiers. “They are in harm’s way,” she continued. “We have to protect them.”

It is a demonstration of the entirely artificial and false character of “official” US politics that sending hundreds if not thousands more soldiers to their deaths is hailed as “support,” while removing them from the battlefield and returning them safely to their families is denounced as “undermining the troops.”

Equally unreal was the policy outlined Thursday by Congressman John Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations military subcommittee and a leading spokesman for the Democrats on the war. At a press announcement co-sponsored by the liberal group Move-on.org, Murtha announced he would seek to attach amendments to an upcoming Pentagon funding bill to require that all troops sent to Iraq be certified by the military as fully equipped and trained for urban counterinsurgency warfare, and that all soldiers have at least one year stateside in between each deployment to a war zone. In other words, Bush is free to continue sending these soldiers to their deaths. He is merely required to get a rubberstamp from the Pentagon.

The US mass media is portraying the House vote as the first step in a titanic confrontation between the Democratic-controlled Congress and the Republican president. The purpose of such brazen distortions of reality is to maintain the credibility of an increasingly discredited and unpopular political system, in which both of the two official parties represent the financial aristocracy and defend its interests, both at home and abroad.

It is certainly true that the Democrats gained control of Congress because of mass antiwar sentiment. But the Democratic Party is not an antiwar party. It is a pro-war party that has significant tactical differences with the Bush White House.

These differences may well spark serious conflict in Washington, particularly as the Bush administration ratchets up its rhetoric and its provocations against Iran, openly threatening to launch a military strike that would vastly expand the Middle East battlefield, with incalculable consequences. But a dispute over what methods to pursue to best achieve the interests of corporate America is by no means the same thing as a rejection of imperialist foreign policy.

There is an unbridgeable gulf between the opposition to the war in Iraq on the part of millions of working people—who instinctively recognize that the war is being waged in the interests of big business—and the criticism of Bush’s lack of “success” in Iraq by Democrats like Pelosi, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama.

This gulf is symbolized by Obama’s hasty apology this week after he blurted out that Bush administration had “wasted” the lives of the 3,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq. For any genuine opponent of the war in Iraq, “wasted” is the least that can be said of the tragic loss of life among Americans and Iraqis alike. Those responsible for launching the war of aggression in Iraq—including Democrats like Clinton as well as the Republican cabal around Bush and Cheney—are guilty of the same crime for which the Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg.

The struggle against the war in Iraq can only be conducted through an open political struggle against both the war parties—the Democrats as well as the Republicans—and the building of an independent mass political movement based on the working clas