Can't win, won't win. posted by Richard Seymour

According to a majority of the American public, the US cannot win the war in Iraq . A majority in another poll says Bush deliberately misled the public on weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the US labor movement has demanded the "rapid withdrawal" of US troops from Iraq - this after a lengthy tour of the US by various Iraqi unions, including the IFTU whose love for the occupation dared not speak its name.

All of which could be somehow connected to the decision to withdraw a number of troops from Iraq. The Iraqi Puppet Minister has announced that he would like the US to withdraw "speedily" - about as speedily as next Spring. He did so, of course, just as a US commander was talking about beginning to withdraw troops next Spring . While both the US and Jaffari have insisted that this depends on a reduction of insurgent activity between now and then - surely that will come after the US withdraws - paradoxically, there is an admission that it is highly unlikely that the insurgency will have abated in any way by that point. US military analysts say that while the bulk of suicide bombings can be accounted for by the minority of 'foreign fighters' in Iraq, the armed resistance is gaining an increasing ability to "kill at all levels" . Much as this may involve a deliberate distortion of the reality on the ground (see passim ), it is undoubtedly the case that both the Salafist elements and the nationalist resistance are gaining in efficacy . And current troop levels, so the news reports, are below what would be necessary to successfully fight the resistance.

Dissent at home, losing in Iraq, troops being reduced from an apparently perilously low level, the withdrawal from Saudi Arabia ... I'm almost tempted to suggest that the US is trying to appease Al Qaeda. But but but. The troop withdrawals on the US side ae conceivably a well-timed concession to reality, but they are not the beginning of a process of disengagement: as I've suggested before , a large number of US troops are likely to stay until kicked out, otherwise several huge permanent military bases are going to go to waste. The gesture is of course desgined to address dissent in the US military and at home. The other thing is, the withdrawal from Saudi Arabia is of course designed to help the Saudi regime pacify internal dissent, not satisfy Al Qaeda's demands, since the latter have always phrased their demand in terms of the Arabian peninsula - according to author Robert Pape, moving them to Iraq or Qatar is a distinction without a difference for them, since the national boundaries referred to were created by the British Empire.

However, there is a shift in rhetoric coterminous with a declared alteration of strategy for the US. The phrase "war on terror" is to be abandoned , apparently, in favour of "global struggle against violent extremism". That's a significant hostage to fortune, since the neoconservative White House is the global leader in violent extremism. The point of the change, apparently, is that it underlines the case that armed groups who use terrorism cannot be defeated by purely military means - rather, the social, political and economic causes of terrorism must be addressed. There is to be a general 'struggle' with global extremism, one that involves exertion at all levels. Washington's cause, once strictly a military crusade, is now a jihad in Christian drag. And its wars of terror are beginning to look as much like suicide as murder.