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Paul Craig Roberts , was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington ; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice

Information Clearing House:

'Catastrophe Still Awaits.
By Paul Craig Roberts.

"The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in
developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones." - John
Maynard Keynes

12/07/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- A ray of realism appeared
in the confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense nominee Robert
Gates before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Gates himself said
that the U.S. was not winning in Iraq, a statement with which
everyone agreed except the White House.

The U.S., however, is not out of the woods. The question remains:
what will be the U.S. government's response to the lost war and the
terrible calamity that Bush has created in Iraq?

Many Americans are still fighting the Vietnam War. They see Iraq
through the lens of the futile Vietnam misadventure and express their
dismay that America will lose another war because "the Democrats will
cut and run like they did in Vietnam." These Americans have forgotten
that it was a Republican administration that got the U.S. out of
Vietnam and that it was the Democrats who committed the U.S. to that
conflict. Moreover, Democrats are not showing a cut-and-run propensity.

For example, Silvestre Reyes, the incoming Democratic chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee, says the U.S. cannot withdraw from Iraq
until it has dismantled the militias. Reyes wants to put 30,000 more
U.S. troops into Iraq to dismantle the militias. Reyes has forgotten
that sending more troops was the Democrats' policy in Vietnam, a
policy whose only result was that more Americans lost sons, fathers,
husbands, and brothers.

Obviously, sending more U.S. troops will not succeed in dismantling
the Iraqi sectarian militias. However, a U.S. attempt to dismantle
the militias will result in the militias joining the insurgency and
turning on the U.S. troops. The situation would deteriorate, not
improve. It is frightening that the incoming chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee does not understand this.

The appearance of a ray of realism about Iraq in the Senate Arms
Services Committee does not mean that the U.S. will escape
catastrophe. At the Armed Services Committee hearing (Dec. 5), some
senators said that U.S. troops must not be used in a civil war
between Iraqis, but that the troops have to stay until stability is
created. Senators have the idea that U.S. troops can be shorn of
their combat role, but remain to train the Iraqi army so the Iraqi
government can put down insurgency and civil war.'

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