Once again Washington's neo-conservatives have shown the world they are still in command, holding US foreign policy hostage. After years of failure in the Middle East and other parts of the world, the neo-cons have not relaxed their grip on power given the strategy on Iraq which President Bush announced earlier this week. The new strategy, almost indistinguishable from the old one, digs the Iraqi morass yet deeper. The US is going to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq, though everyone knows that the current crisis in Iraq will only be resolved through politics, not force. The US has over 130,000 troops in Iraq. There are also an estimated 200,000 Iraqi servicemen. These hundreds of thousands of troops are fighting a few thousands so- called insurgents. Yet the latter have been inflicting heavy losses on the occupation forces. One has to conclude, therefore, that the problem is not numbers of troops or the type of weaponry, but in the policy itself. President Bush promised to make an effort to co-opt Sunnis and Baathists, the core of armed resistance in Iraq, but this is something one achieves through talks, not gimmicks and empty promises. Bush has totally ignored the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report calling for dialogue with Iran and Syria. In his speech, the US president was belligerent in referring to both Tehran and Damascus, a tactic that seems guaranteed to escalate tensions in the region. The only way to explain Bush's new strategy is that the US administration is still hoping to redraw the map of the Middle East, regardless of the cost in life and limb to the inhabitants of the region. Bush and his neo-con aides are trying to use Palestine as a fig leaf to hide the obscenity of their new strategy. But the US administration does not seem to bring any new ideas into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Bush administration is still siding with Israel and hoping to settle all political disputes through force. The Bush administration is fuelling rather than defusing sectarianism, which is why this administration has lost the support of everyone, including the American public. President Bush has tried to blackmail Arab countries. A US defeat in Iraq, he has warned, poses a grave threat to all countries in the region. The only response to Bush's new strategy is for the region to find its own voice and develop its own strategy on Iraq and other crises. Arab countries should defend their own interests and stop accommodating Washington's divisive schemes. It is, after all, this US administration that has drowned Iraq in blood and turmoil. The new US strategy offers no exit from the current crisis. Rather, it is almost guaranteed to exacerbate the situation in Iraq and the region. President Bush is entitled to his own views, and he has the right to ignore the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report. The rest of the world, though, is not bound to humour him. We have our own interests, and it's high time we acted independent of US follies.
