Bush keeps silent about his responsibility for his lawless war

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

   In his final State of the Union address to Congress on January 28, U.S. President George W. Bush devoted much of his time to the Iraq issue and said that the deployment of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops last year brought a success to the military operation in Iraq. 

   While suggesting a drawdown of 20,000 troops, he in effect rejected calls from Iraq and the rest of the world for a withdrawal of all U.S. forces on the grounds that too fast a drawdown could result in a marked increase in violence. Obviously, maintaining 140,000 U.S. forces in Iraq to continue military operations will neither help to alleviate the Iraqi people’s opposition nor lead to improvement of the country’s situation in general.

Civilians are being killed

   In the last five years since President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, no weapons of mass destruction that the United States used as the pretext for the invasion were discovered in Iraq. No one can deny the fact that the war was lawless from the outset. The Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based organization devoted to investigative journalism, revealed that in the present U.S. administration President Bush alone lied 260 times and top officials in total lied 935 times.

   President Bush said that civilian deaths and sectarian killings are both down. True, the 160,000-strong U.S. forces appear to have succeeded in putting visible resistance under their control. It is also a fact that their military operations are giving rise to more resentment among the Iraqi people because many civilians are being killed in air strikes and other military actions.

   The Washington Post on January 17 reported that the U.S.-led coalition dropped 1,447 bombs on Iraq in 2007, an average of four a day, compared with 229 bombs, or about four each week, in 2006. On January 10, two B-1 strategic bombers and four fighter jets dropped 38 bombs on the rural area of Arab Jabour, southeast of Baghdad, killing many civilians.

   According to the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, more than 200 Iraqi people were killed in air strikes during nine months between April and December of 2007. Opinion Research Business, a British research organization, says its survey conducted last September found that 1.2 million Iraqi people are estimated to have been killed since the start of the war.

Begin withdrawal now!

   Spain and Italy have already pulled their troops out of the U.S.-led coalition force. Following this, Britain, the major U.S. ally, is moving to reduce the number of its troops in Iraq, and Australia has announced a plan to remove its troops from Iraq. In the United States, nearly 70 percent say they do not support the Iraq War.

   The Bush administration has undermined the U.N. Charter provisions that ban war and call for international disputes to be settled peacefully through diplomacy. President Bush must admit that the invasion and ensuing military occupation of Iraq has been a mistake and begin to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq.
- Akahata, January 30, 2008