ISG: Defeat With Honor

by CHRISTIAN PARENTI

[posted online on December 18, 2006]

Having read the national bestselling paperback The Iraq Study Group Report, I am not so convinced by much of what I am reading about it from writers on the left. Many progressives have interpreted the document's real message as a call for "Stay the Course Lite" or as a not-so-cloaked argument for privatizing Iraq's massive petroleum reserves. (Of course the centrality of oil in all of this should never be in doubt, but the situation in Iraq has spun out of control in ways that go far beyond privatization schemes. And of course the ISGR is predicated on salvaging US imperial power, redeploying it and rebuilding. Pointing out such things is like "discovering" that the sun again came up in the east.)

Nor are the pundits of the gray center getting it: They seem bogged down in the report's seventy-nine suggestions. Shift US troops to advisory roles? Will Iran come to the table in good faith?