Mumia Abu-Jamal: The Fall of Faith-Based Foreign Policy

[col.writ. 7/17/07] (c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal

With the news of the resurgence of Al-Qaeda has come the incredible claims by the Bush administration of the exact opposite: that 'Al-Qaeda is weaker.'

The Bush regime is in this profound state of denial because to agree with this assessment implies failure in Iraq, a fact that is patently obvious to all who possess sight.

For the Iraq debacle, begun with the spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, and to stop Saddam Hussein's support of terrorism, has unleashed the whirlwind in the country.

Before the war, Al-Qaeda was, if anything, persona non grata to the Baath Party secularists who ran the country: today, they are using Iraq as a live-fire training camp; a place to fight the Americans, not in practice, but for real!

If that ain't failure, what is?

The neo con, 'Zion con' forces that pushed at the inner offices of government for the Iraq war, on the promise of 'bringing democracy to the Middle East', have reaped a disaster of truly epic proportions.

Iraq, whether it remains one state, or is shattered into many, will never be the same. Its millions of refugees may wait a lifetime for the stability that allows homes to be established, businesses to function, and peace to reign.

And while the problem may have begun in Congress (in their ill-advised grant of war authority to the so-called 'War President'), it cannot resolve the problem, for it is now beyond their control.

Iraq is a hell on earth. Any dreams of using it as a demonstration project to influence the developments in the rest of the region is now in ashes.

But this is not merely my opinion. British journalist Jonathan Freedland, writing in a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, argued that Bush failed even under his own measures. Writes Freedland:

Judged even by the lights of Bush's own "war on terror" it has been a spectacular failure.

It took a country that had been free of Jihadist militants and turned it into their most fecund breeding ground;it took a country that posed no threat to the United States and made it into a place where thousands of Americans, not to mention tens, if not hundreds, of thousand of Iraqis, have been killed. And it diverted resources from the task that should have been

uppermost after September 11, namely the hunting down of Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, allowing them to slip out of reach.

What's more, Bush's "war on terror" did bin Laden's work for him. [Former US national security advisor [Zbigniew} Brzezinski is not alone in suggesting that it was a mistake to treat September !! as an act of war, rather than an outrageous crime: in so doing, the administration endowed a-qaeda with the status it craved. {Fr.: Freedland, J., "Bush's Amazing Achievement."

N. Y. Rev. of Books, June 14, '07, p.16]

Any president who assumes control next year, whether Democratic, Republican, or Green, will inherit the Iraq trap; for he or she may be able to mitigate problems, or even exacerbate them, but they cannot solve them. And they cannot ignore them.

Iraq will be with this country, one way or another, for at least a generation.

Ultimately, history will judge that this ill-advised adventure, will become tantamount to a war on the U.S.

No lame declaration, from Congress, or the White House, will mean its end.

--(c) '07 maj

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner in the United States, with what could be the final decision on his legal appeals possibly coming down this summer. That decision could give Mumia his freedom, life in prison, or execution. It is time to turn up the heat against this injustice. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

For more on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal read:

Top Ten “Fry Mumia” Myths Debunked

(Myth #1) “Five eyewitnesses saw Mumia shoot officer Faulkner.”

http://indybay.org/newsitems/2007/07/19/18436405.php