Van Auken Tells It Like It Is

Iraq Study Group: a bipartisan coverup of Washington’s war crimes
By Bill Van Auken
Dec 9, 2006, 13:02

A striking feature of the Iraq Study Group report is that its belated admission of the military-political debacle and catastrophic conditions created by the US intervention in Iraq excludes any assessment of how the “grave and deteriorating” situation in that country came to pass, and who bears political responsibility for it.

Instead, the document includes multiple denunciations of the Iraqi government for failing to provide essential services, create a functioning judiciary or foster economic progress. That the country was laid to waste by a US war and remains under military occupation—making Washington fully responsible for all of these failures—is simply passed over in silence.

As one member of the group, Democratic power broker Vernon Jordan, put it, the bipartisan panel made no effort to determine “how the house got on fire.”

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The Iraq war was not a mistaken policy that can be set right by adopting the Iraq Study Group’s 79-point plan. It was a premeditated crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.

The patent aim of the panel’s proposals is to continue this crime and, under the mantle of bipartisanship, pursue the original objectives of the war—conquering a country with the world’s second-largest oil reserves as part of a strategy of using US military superiority to establish the global hegemony of American capitalism.

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It is necessary not only to halt this war, but also to ensure that all those who conspired to carry it out be held politically and criminally responsible. Trying the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others for war crimes is necessary both to achieve a real accounting for the bloody and tragic debacle in Iraq and to prevent the launching of further and even more catastrophic wars of aggression.

Read all of the article here.