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http://snipurl.com/fiyo Our Newest Proconsul Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com June 09, 2005 It's a foregone conclusion that the Senate will confirm Zalmay Khalilzad to be the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, replacing John Negroponte. Still, it's worth stepping back to consider what Khalilzad's appointment says about the Bush administration's continuing refusal to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster in Iraq�and about the Democrats' inexplicable inability to step forward and challenge the president as Iraq continues to deteriorate. His confirmation hearing Tuesday slipped by almost unnoticed, thanks in part to a docile stable of Democrats who decided to give him a free pass, rather than seize the opportunity to lambaste the president's Iraq policy. First, on the man himself: it's hard to imagine anyone worse than Khalilzad for the Baghdad job. Like one of Alexander the Great's proconsuls, Khalilzad neatly steps into one U.S.-occupied neocolony, Iraq, from another, Afghanistan. Khalilzad, born in Afghanistan, has been deeply involved in U.S.-Afghan policy for more than two decades. He is arguably as much to blame as anyone for the catastrophic mistakes that led first to that country's civil war, then to the rise of the Taliban, and finally to the Afghanistan of 2005: a warlord-dominated narco-state, in which heroin and opium provide fully half of the gross domestic product, and in which a thriving, Taliban-led Islamic fundamentalist insurgency is recently showing signs of emerging, once again, as a mortal threat to a tottering regime in Kabul. Zalmay Khalilzad, it seems, is getting out just in time. In Baghdad, Khalilzad will be forced to deal with an Iranian-backed coalition of Shiite fundamentalist parties that is that country's main power. Yet Khalilzad will be right at home. For two decades, Khalilzad has consistently argued that the United States ought to support Iran's ayatollahs, Afghanistan's mujahideen and the Taliban. In the 1980s, Khalilzad served as a senior State Department official in charge of the Afghan war, and he worked closely with Thomas Goutierre of the University of Nebraska, whose center received CIA, Pentagon and Unocal funding in the 1980s and '90s, in support of the Islamist guerrillas. That, of course, was the U.S.-backed jihad that catapulted Osama bin Laden to prominence and that created a worldwide network of militant Islamist guerrillas schooled in terrorism, including assassinations and car bombings. In the early 1990s, during the first Bush administration, Khalilzad was hired by his mentor, Paul Wolfowitz, as a defense policy planner. During that era, Khalilzad argued forcefully that the United States ought to build up the Islamic Republic of Iran against Iraq. He also drafted a controversial defense policy paper for Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney that called on the United States to exert a hegemonic, post-Cold War strategy of dominance so that "no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the Soviet Union." It also called for a policy of military preemption of emerging threats. In 2003, the twin policies of hegemony and pre-emption combined to result in the invasion of Iraq�and Khalilzad will now have to deal with the unhappy aftermath. In the mid-1990s, Khalilzad was a paid consultant to Unocal, the American oil company that was courting the new Taliban government, and he happily attended receptions for turbaned Taliban dignitaries visiting Texas, Nebraska and Washington. The fact that Khalilzad was part of the coterie of U.S. officials and businessmen who genuflected to the Taliban while seeking U.S. influence in Central Asia's oil and gas industry somehow didn't make it into the official State Department biography of Khalilzad that was distributed at his confirmation hearing. That biography does note that Khalilzad served as a RAND Corporation military strategist from 1993 to 1999. The impossible task that awaits him in Baghdad is, at least, poetic justice, for it was Khalilzad who helped to champion the forcible regime-change strategy in Iraq beginning in the 1990s. Along with the core of foreign policy radicals and neoconservative strategists, Khalilzad joined the Project for a New American Century to demand, in 1998, that President Clinton shift adopt a policy for "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power." Along with Cheney, Wolfowitz et al., Khalilzad was a key architect of the war-on-Iraq policy that seized the Bush administration from its inception in January, 2001. Given all this, it is clear that Khalilzad's appointment is the latest evidence that the Bush administration has no intention of rethinking its Iraq strategy. The United States has only two exit strategies in Iraq: The first is simply to declare victory and get out, and the second is to scrap the current puppet regime, make a deal with the resistance and the Sunni insurgency, and internationalize the oversight of the new government in Baghdad. Khalilzad, of course, will support neither one: he is part and parcel of the failed policy of trying to keep the lid on a growing resistance movement with an occupation army that is not up to the task, and of backing the tenuous, ever more fractious alliance of Shiite religious parties and Kurdish warlords that now purports to control the country. The civil war that looms�whether it is triggered by a Kurdish grab for Kirkuk and Iraq's northern oil fields, or by a Shiite demand for more Islamization of the country, or any one of several other flashpoints�will happen on Khalilzad's watch. The seven-point plan for Iraq that Khalilzad alluded to at his confirmation hearings gave not a hint of fresh thinking. Yet, aside from some mild grumbling, the Democrats let Khalilzad�and the Bush administration�off the hook at his hearing. Polls show that the American public is teetering on the brink of a wholesale rejection of the Bush-Khalilzad Iraq policy: too many U.S. casualties, too much carnage, and, at $1 billion a week, too much money. Perhaps the Democrats are hoping that the 2006 elections will be run on the old, familiar turf of taxes, Medicare, Social Security and the environment. But as in 2004, they will be mistaken. The issues in 2006 are still likely to be terrorism, Iraq, and national security. Their meekness on challenging one of the architects of the administration's errors in all of those areas is a sign that they still don't get it. Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. 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