A Surge, and Then a Stab

September 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Surge, and Then a Stab
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/pau lkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per
To understand what's really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which
already knows that the surge has failed.
Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President
Bush declared that "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks
it has announced."
Near the top of his list was the promise that "to give every Iraqi citizen a
stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil
revenues among all Iraqis."
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the
only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq's G.D.P. and almost all
its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system
for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs
fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday
attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.
What's particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the
provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed
its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial
government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of
Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt
Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a
member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key
oversight body.
Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman
with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that
isn't all that surprising, given this administration's history. Remember,
Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush
declared Iran a member of the "axis of evil."
No, what's interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to
his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state
of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his
money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad's disapproval, he's
essentially betting that the Iraqi government - which hasn't met a single
one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January - won't get its act
together. Indeed, he's effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a
nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is
lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most
people in the Bush administration - maybe even Mr. Bush himself - know this,
too.
After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the
situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the
government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on
some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut
off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing
Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki
government no incentive to do anything differently.
And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning
public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to
keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David
Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets
as possible - not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday
night.
All in all, Mr. Bush's actions have not been those of a leader seriously
trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you'd expect from a man
whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the
cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his
successor.
In fact, that's my interpretation of something that startled many people:
Mr. Bush's decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq
war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.
Here's how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying
the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually
achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud,
convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their
grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to
extricate us from Iraq - and prevent the country's breakup from turning into
a regional war - will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who
lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will
never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.