Note: This is the last of a three-part series
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Omissions on the Domestic Front

Domestic and foreign affairs are inextricably linked, and when the nation goes to war, or is planning to, everything is fair game on the home front, but don't expect it will serve the public interest. Ordinary people always pay dearly and gain nothing beyond the right to make the weapons and pay the bills that in the current conflict are huge enough at the least to put an enormous strain on the economy and over time as the out-control costs mount may endanger the nation's economic health. The ISG report doesn't address this reckless endangerment that Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz believes may have an eventual price tag of well over $2 trillion exacerbating already massive budget deficits far higher ($760 billion in 2005, not the "official" $318.5 billion) than the phony numbers reported to hide how bad things really are and on top of an alarming current account deficit now in the range of $800 billion a year and climbing.

It also is unperturbed by the grim picture economist Laurence Kotlikoff presented in a recent detailed report for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in which he stated, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt and unable to pay its creditors. Professor Kotlikoff believes US fiscal policy is so out-of-control, including for the reckless spending for wars, that the country's debt is rising exponentially and will reach an incomprehensible and unmanageable $65.9 trillion creating a fiscal calamity forcing the nation to default on its debt obligations. He later updated his figures and now believes the country's future overall liability may reach the $80 trillion level that will trigger an inevitable economic meltdown if it happens.

Spending hundreds of billions annually and rising for "defense" including all the off-the-books (but out of taxpayers' pockets) allocations for Iraq will only speed up the pace to the future apocalypse Kotlikoff potentially foresees ahead. No problem for the Baker collective who operate with tunnel vision, and like those three monkeys, hear no, see no, and neither speak nor write anything beyond their re-flavored stay the course agenda for Iraq disguised to look like a new drawdown policy it isn't.

Other Domestic Front Omissions - The Destruction of Democracy and Loss of Personal Freedoms

The ISG was formed to serve US imperial interests including its wars of aggression for wealth and power. It doesn't matter how destructive they are to the public welfare or how they're allowing the nation to pass from a republic to tyranny. For every blow the US military strikes against the people of Iraq (and Afghanistan), the political establishment here and its "homeland security" enforcers inflict a similar amount of damage in kind against the body politic at home, not through the barrel of a gun (yet) but by the destruction of our civil liberties and human rights that stand in the way of the grandiose schemes people like Jim Baker and his "Gang of Ten" allies hope to pull off - to gain total imperial control over planet earth and the heavens above it with ordinary working people everywhere just more commodity inputs for their production meat grinder to be chewed up for profit and then discarded.

So for Baker and the ISG team, keeping mum about the war at home is part of the scheme to let it go on largely under the radar until the time comes to strip off the mask and send the jackboots and tanks to the streets making them look like the ones in Baghdad and with some of the same horrific fallout as things get ugly. For their plan to work, they must crush the last remnants of a free society and create the Orwellian vision he described saying: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." The ISG is trying to do with guile and deceit what George Bush already did in the new legislation he signed into law on October 17 giving himself what noted British journalist John Pilger calls "the power of unrestricted lawlessness" with scant public awareness it even happened.

On that day, with ISG tacit blessing and approval by its silence, Bush signed into law the infamous Military Commissions Act effectively giving himself the power to subvert the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The bill authorizes the use of torture and allows the president the right to call anyone an enemy of the state on his say alone with no corroborating evidence and strips the accused of all constitutional rights. It means anyone can be arrested, interrogated, tortured and incarcerated in a secret prison anywhere in the world, subject to the justice of a military tribunal like in Iraq or Guantanamo, with no competent defense or habeas right of appeal. It makes everyone an "enemy combatant" subject to the will of a man willing to use his power recklessly with no concern for its consequences.

George Bush went further that day privately and quietly signing into law a provision revising the Insurrection Act of 1807 that along with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the use of federal and National Guard troops for law enforcement inside the country except as allowed by the Constitution or expressly authorized by Congress in times of a national emergency like an insurrection.

No longer. The new Public Law 109-364 (HR 5122) allows the president the right to claim a public emergency, effectively declare martial law on his say alone, and send the jackboots to the streets to suppress whatever he calls public disorder that may include peaceful protests to redeem our constitutional rights now lost.

These new repressive laws add to the ones already on the books including infamous repressive Patriot Acts I and II and the National ID Act that will enable the government to track and control everyone in the country in the "Big Brother" fashion George Orwell foresaw in his dystopian book Nineteen Eighty-Four depicting a totalitarian national security police state society the US has now become. This act alone legalizes tyranny, but it's only one among others including the president having given himself unlimited power by designating himself a "unitary executive" with the right to circumvent the law in the name of national security on his say alone that a threat exists, with no evidence needed to warrant it or congressional approval.

The Congress approves, and again silence from the ISG members plotting their own schemes while watching the country's founding principles being destroyed making it all the easier for them to pull off their heist of the republic to go along with controlling Iraq and the rest of the Middle East and its oil treasure they'll go to any lengths to hold onto - and that's only for starters.

(Article Continues Below)

What Chance for ISG Success

The Commission members believe their plan can succeed, but don't be deceived by their (thin) veneer of confidence. Other insiders aren't so sure, and according to the New York Times on December 9 the report "exposed deep fissures among Republicans over how to manage a war that many fear will haunt their party - and the nation - for years to come." From the hard right, critics call the ISG report a shameful retreat while moderate party voices expressed hope George Bush would adopt the Commission's principle recommendations and "begin a process of disengagement from the long and costly war." In the middle, White House officials concluded their own initial assessment of Baker's work saying many of its proposals are "impractical or unrealistic."

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page had its own ideologically-driven say. As expected, it wants no part of engaging Iran and Syria and supports the Israel Lobby position instead. It called the report "a bipartisan strategic muddle ginned up for domestic political purposes." The Journal editorial writers do have a way with words leaving nothing to their readers' imagination.

Unmentioned in the Times story is the unreported view from the Pentagon high command that apparently is much different from its public stance agreeing with the blunt mid-October assessment of Britain's Army Chief of Staff General Richard Dannatt who stated (in contradiction to the Blair government) the presence of UK forces in Iraq "exacerbates the security problems (and they should) get out some time soon" - meaning as soon as possible.

In simple terms, General Dannett and the Pentagon brass believe what most every honest observer understands - that the presence of an occupying force in Iraq is the cause of the problem, not its solution. The longer it remains, the more unstable and intolerable conditions will become. Increasing the force size and/or reshuffling the deck with fewer combat troops and more trainer/advisors will only increase the level of Iraqi resistance against them and ultimately elevate public opposition at home once people catch on and realize they've again been had and the Baker plan is just another scheme to keep our forces in Iraq in perpetuity to maintain the country as a colony and the region's oil under US control.

Middle East expert and scholar Gilbert Achcar states in his new book Perilous Power, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, that the longer US forces remain in the region, the worse things will get, no matter what role they adopt that's just cover for the US to maintain tight control. Achcar says the Bush administration since March, 2003 has been "stupid" and "will go down in history....as the undertaker of US interests in the region." It doesn't get any clearer, stronger, or more on the mark than that, and it goes to the heart of the problem the ISG was formed to deal with - maintaining US control over Middle East oil now in jeopardy and getting the US public to go along.

If the US occupation of Iraq ever ends without a reliable client state government in place, it will create the possibility of Washington's worst nightmare - a majority Shiite ruled Iraq allied with Shiite Iran that might link with the Saudi Shias located in the bordering oil-rich part of the kingdom. If that Tripartite Shia Middle East alliance forms, it will control most of the world's oil supply. It might then choose to align with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) formed to compete with the US for control of Central Asia's huge energy reserves and whose core members are China and Russia giving those countries a chance for a leg up on the US at least for access to Middle East oil. The ISG and Bush administration will do all in its power to prevent this from happening, but the US has lost so much credibility in the region, they face a daunting task and long odds for success.

The ISG report mentions none of this, but does stress the importance of Iraq's oil by mentioning it 63 times and calling for the US to help Iraq privatize its state-owned oil industry, opening it up to Big Oil foreign exploitive investment and the profits from it. If or when the US ends its occupation without leaving a reliable client state in place, it would be hard to imagine Iraq will quickly forgive and forget and be willing to conduct business as usual with oil or other corporations from the country that laid waste to it and only left in humiliation and defeat.

It shows how hard it will be for the US to get out of this mess, and it's likely to prove more than Jim Baker, his high-powered team, and "all the king's horses and men" are up to. They stand virtually no chance to implement a coherent, workable plan for success short of the only operable one they'll never agree to until they no longer have a choice - a full and unconditional withdrawal. It only remains to be seen how long it will take for them and whatever administration is in power in Washington to draw that conclusion and how much time the public's willing to give them, the Bush administration and the majority Democrats in the Congress elected to chart a new course they've so far indicated no intention of doing.

It all adds up to an exercise in deception and futility, but in the end things will end up where they all began in 1990 before the long US assault against Iraq started. When it does, that country will again be free from a foreign occupier but will face a long, expensive and painful struggle to mend and rebuild. As happened when the US left Vietnam, this country will leave it to the Iraqis to recover and regenerate from the carnage and misery on their own that may take a generation or more to achieve and that for most now alive may never be possible.

This will be the legacy of the US invasion and occupation and tainted presidency of George Bush and his corrupted notion of moral superiority, claiming to have brought democracy, liberation and the benefits of western civilization to this blighted country but having to do it through the barrel of a gun. This time things unraveled faster than usual, but it only showed the people of Iraq reject what too many at home still believe - that the US is a benevolent democratic republic serving the will and needs of its people and supporting the rights and sovereignty of free people everywhere to live in peace and security. It's an illusion understood by most others around the world and gaining recognition at home as being just as hollow here as on the streets of Baghdad and Kabul.

It remains to be seen how long it will take for a mass awakening to occur to arouse the public at home, as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan, making them no longer willing to put up with the kind of abuse and neglect they've so far failed to resist. If history is a guide, it will happen, and when it does it may signal the denouement of another repressive imperial state succumbing to the arrogance of its own overreach, excess, hubris and disregard for the needs of its own people demanding redress. It can't come soon enough for the many around the world oppressed by it crying out "freedom now" and beginning to do something about getting it.

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Stephen Lendman [send him email] lives in Chicago, and maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com