As the new year unfolds, our war crimes complicit corporate media will tell us Bush is "drawing down" the number of troops in Iraq. In fact, the tempo and frequency of mass murder will increase, as the Straussian neocons have no desire to abandon their plan to decimate Muslim society. "Major U.S. news outlets are dodging the extent of the Pentagon’s bombardment from the air, an avoidance all the more egregious because any drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Iraq is very likely to be accompanied by a step-up of the air war," writes Norman Solomon for the MediaChannel. "Caught between the desire to prevent a military defeat in Iraq and the need to shore up Republican prospects at home in the face of an unpopular war, President Bush is very likely to keep escalating the U.S. air war in Iraq while reducing U.S. troop levels there." In short, the increased mantra to "bring the troops home" will result in an escalation of Iraqi death and suffering.

On December 10, Seymour Hersh wrote for the New Yorker:

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

Of course, all of this harks back to Nixon’s so-called "Vietnamization" policy, not only a disaster for the people of Vietnam and surrounding countries but also the beginning of the end of the Pentagon’s criminal war in Southeast Asia. "We have a foul-mouthed Texan in the White House, facing a domestically unpopular war that he never expected to have to fight," former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski told Tomdispatch. "In order to stop a persistent anti-American insurgency in a faraway country, this president will now escalate the use of air power, striking deep into the heart of insurgency strongholds and destroying the will of those that support the insurgency."

This sounds like a replay of Rolling Thunder, March 1965. The Pentagon, led by the last remnant of those who were supposed to have directly experienced the danger of politicized wars managed out of the White House and the sheer uselessness of air power to win hearts and minds, must indeed be out of its collective mind to support a strategic shift like this.

Either out of their minds or suffering from amnesia. As usual, history serves—while suffering greatly under the punishment of Rolling Thunder, the Vietnamese responded to Johnson and McNamara’s sustained bombing campaign by dispersing their supplies and developing the means to repair and rebuild the supply network during lulls in the bombing raids. Even though the Pentagon had dropped 900,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam—more than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War—McNamara eventually conceded that airpower could not win the war.

In Iraq, under the direction of the Straussian neocons, there are major differences—however, the neocon-Likudite plan remains front and center. "The tempo looks set to increase this year as the Americans pull back from urban combat, leaving street fighting increasingly to Iraqi forces supported by US air power," opines the Times Online. In other words, these cobbled together Iraqi forces will be calling in air strikes. Seymour Hersh adds:

One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was optimistic that "American air will immediately make the Iraqi Army that much better." But he acknowledged that he, too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. "We have the most expensive eyes in the sky right now," the consultant said. "But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores."

In fact, these "old scores" are crucial to the neocon-Zionist plan for the Muslim Middle East, for the plan is not to win the "war" and usher in a pie-in-the-sky version of democracy for benighted Arabs, but rather to break up the region into manageable chunks based along tribal and ethnic lines. "The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking," Israel Shahak wrote in the forward to Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. "For example, Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the 'best’ that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: 'The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part’ (Ha’aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old."

Indeed, it is a cornerstone of Zionist thought and lies at the heart of the neocon strategy, not only in regard to Iraq but Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as well. As for the latter, Max Singer, former president of the neocon Hudson Institute and the World Institute in Jerusalem, presented a paper to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment urging the dismemberment of Saudi Arabia. British MP George Galloway comments: "Saudi Arabia could easily be two if not three countries, which would have the helpful bonus of avoiding foreign forces having to occupy the holiest places in Islam, when they’re only interested really in oil wells in the eastern part of the country."

Capturing the oil wells is part of the scenario, especially for the transnational neolibs in collusion with the Zionist neocons. But for the Straussian neocons ensconced around the cardboard cut-out of a president Bush and burrowed deeply in the Pentagon, oil wells are secondary to the "very old" plan to slice and dice the Muslim Middle East into micromanageable chunks ruled by malleable proxies.

As noted above, more pragmatic minds in the Pentagon (those not enthralled or captured by the neocons) realize Bush’s version of Rolling Thunder in Iraq will ultimately result in "settling old scores" and eventually facilitate the fragmentation and balkanization of Iraq. In the process, Bush may be able to declare, as mid-term elections roll around this year, he is drawing down U.S. troops in Iraq. Of course, at the same time, the neocons in league with the Jabotinsky Zionists in Israel will be allowed a free hand to put forward their long-standing plan to eviscerate Muslim and Arab societies and crush Arab pan-nationalism, a basic tenet at the heart of Zionism.