We! The People Webzine: Forecasting Near Term by Richard Burk

by Richard Burk
January 4, 2007

My thoughts on Bush's control of the troops. The troops will stay throughout his faux presidency.

Per impeachment, he will not be impeached. He will not resign. He won't be impeached because the Dems in leadership want to use him as their motivating force to improve on their control in Congress and potentially taking the Whitehouse. The only way impeachment would work is by impeaching Cheney first, denying the appointment of a replacement while then impeaching Bush. This would put Nancy Pelosi as President. I don't see this happening. The Bush administration will fight it tooth and nail and if they should ultimately lose, Hillary would go ballistic in order to keep Bush in office which is the only way to motivate her supporters. If Bush isn't in office, would Hillary have a chance?

They only thing that we can be assured of at the moment is that the constitution will not be amended to allow a naturalized citizen to become president (California's governator) and that Bush will not receive constitutional permission to take a third term of office.

However, there is nothing that prevents him from declaring martial law as he has done in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. He just needs another major disaster, natural or otherwise to occur. This would be the only way to pull the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Keep in mind that the US has about 2 million volunteer troops around the world including National Guard. His administration has not allowed many to leave the military since becoming president. He has also pulled back into service many that thought that they were done but apparently did not properly fill out paperwork, thus giving the Bush administration the ability to recall them back to duty. There are others that are on IRR that have also been pulled back into duty, but to my knowledge remaining on IRR, those individuals knew what they were doing, that being recalled was a possibility. So the troops are there. Call it indentured servitude or something else, but Bush doesn't need Congress to keep the troops there unless of course Congress revokes the power they granted to him back in 2001/2002.

Even then it is questionable whether Congress can pull the troops back. Congress holds the purse strings but where do you think the Pentagon has put the over 1 trillion dollars that is unaccounted for? I am sure that they spent some of it, but I doubt that it is all spent. Let's say that the Pentagon doesn't have a slush account and is dependent upon congress for funds. Do you honestly believe that Congress would deny the money for soldiers? I am sure that the Bush administration and the Pentagon would do so in order to keep their programs alive, contractors paid. The soldiers would rate last. If Congress denies payment then how do the troops get fed and how do they return?

The only way the troops could return is by Congress providing each person in the military with a one-way airplane ticket or boat ride home. The logistics of that with a defiant administration and military would prevent any such program from working effectively.

Bush will get a surge but only enough to piss everybody off which is consensus in the Bush administration. It will piss off those that want the troops home now. It will piss off those that think there are enough troops. It will piss off those that want a surge because in order to win (whatever that means) they will want many more troops than Bush will provide/allow. Nobody will be happy and it won't fix a thing other than to say that he provided a surge and it didn't work.

What I do expect is that there will be a significantly large event which Bush will use to either dictate stay or go. Whatever his friends feel will net them the most money is what Bush will do.

By purposefully not focusing on terrorism prevention before 9/11, he was (un)intentionally inviting known terrorist organizations to attack the US mainland so that it could be used as a significant event to enact the plans of PNAC (Project for a New American Century).

This way Bush could take revenge on Saddam for trying to assassinate his daddy, Rumsfeld could eliminate Saddam because he single-handedly put Saddam in the position of power in Iraq and supplied him with the weapons of mass destruction and technology, for Big Oil to have US bases (the real reason to be there) from which to safely pump and export oil, provide essentially cheap oil from Iraq and Iran rather than Saudi Arabia because they are good family friends and can't be screwed without major repercussions (given the terrorists were mostly Saudi), move Israel's agenda forward, and many other sub-plots and side-effects.

If the war were about getting rid of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction or about getting Saddam then we already won. No weapons and Saddam is dead. But it is really about the US Bases and Big Oil.