This Week Brings A Fresh Bush PR Effort On Iraq

As the senseless violence in Iraq continues, the Bush White House plans a week of fresh public relations efforts to shore up the lagging public support for the war.

But in reality, about the only real purpose that that the U.S. is serving at this point is preventing an an all-out Shiite militia war on Sunni citizens or a form of MidEast "ethnic cleansing".

With the failed hopes of Iraq becoming some shining beacon of MidEast democracy as an example to the region, instead the U.S. has destablized the state into more of the ethnic violence that has continued since 1922 when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the state. Of all the states in the MidEast, the heterogenous population of Iraq and this long history of ethnic conflict only insured that a frustrating chain of violence would be unleashed with any U.S. intervention in the state.

It is almost unthinkable that Mr. Bush can continue to justify the Iraq War as some sort of excellent example of U.S. foreign policy at it's best, in "bringing a better life" to people in a foreign land when all evidence is that the U.S. rid the state of Saddam Hussein only to set free wholesale urban violence.

But in another regard, the U.S. does now have a moral mission to act as a buffer against an all-out war of ethnic struggle between the Shiite and Sunni groups. And the world community also has a moral obligation to stand as a policeman against wholesale violence as well. No good policeman can walk away from crime or violence simply because it exists, although the prospects for a peaceful democracy in Iraq are farther and farther removed by the day.

Many, if not most person in Iraq are probably sick of the violence. Yet there are enough who continue it that it makes a world community role to police this violence while an Iraqi security force is trained.

Iraq will go down in the history books as one of the biggest foreign policy errors in our entire history. Just like the failed U.S. role in Vietnam, or the failed Soviet efforts in Afghanistan, a major power entry into a civil war or a developing world state in which foreign intervention by a major world state only meets with strong and continued resistance.