You might think that the Iraq war is impossible to win, or you might be one of those who have put your faith in the “Petraeus Plan” (though admittedly that’s unlikely if you read this blog). But whether you are for or against the Surge, pro or anti-withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, you would be wrong. At least, that’s what Air Force Major General Charles Dunlap, Jr. says. What’s his plan for victory in Iraq? Surprise, surprise: it involves bombing someone, in this case, Iran!

What does every war-fighting effort require? Fuel. In this instance, Iran has real vulnerabilities that the “overwhelming application of the air instrument” can exploit.

Specifically, despite huge reserves of crude oil, Iran nevertheless must import about half of its gasoline, largely because of a shortage of domestic refinery capacity. Targeting what refinery capacity Iran possesses could directly and concretely erode its ability to support Iraqi insurgents.

Oil refineries are ideal targets for air and missile attack. They are large, relatively “soft” facilities that are difficult for even the most modern air defense to protect. At the same time, they represent wholly lawful targets generally subject to attack with a minimal risk of collateral damage.

Besides reducing the fuel available to support insurgent activities in Iraq, the further cutback in refinery capacity could influence Iranian leadership, as the nation has already seen civil disturbances as a result of gasoline rationing.

Another indirect benefit of destroying refining capacity: Billions of dollars otherwise available to support Iraqi insurgents would have to be diverted by the Iranians to import additional gasoline supplies.

Because the only way to win the war in Iraq is to expand it into Iran! I seem to recall that this was the exact approach used by a former President who once upon a time was bedeviled by the failure of American troops in another US war of occupation to eliminate the local “freedom fighters.” And we all know how well bombing Cambodia worked out for us.

(cont.)

Yet despite the months of airstrikes, the bombings did little to curb NVA activities. On the contrary, communist forces crept further and further into Cambodia. The US bombers followed suit. Significant populations of Cambodian peasants were now at risk, though no one knows how many of them were killed during the campaign. And the Khmer Rouge, previously a weak guerrilla force run by disenfranchised leftist politicians, grew in the wake of the bombings, as each attack on Cambodian land legitimized their virulent hatred of Sihanouk. They would still need more fighters and weapons if they ever wanted to rule Cambodia, but at least the bombings reinforced the Khmer Rouge’s taste for violence. The war in Cambodia was escalating, spiraling out of control. Sihanouk, whose greatest evidence of his mandate from heaven was that he had kept his people out of the war, no longer had the right to that claim. His days were numbered.

Yes, that Khmer Rouge, led by one nasty piece of work, Pol Pot, was enabled by the American bombing campaign and the chaos it created. They eventually gained power over the entire country, and began the worst systematic genocide since Nazi Germany:

From 1969 until 1973, the U.S. intermittently bombed North Vietnamese sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia, killing up to 150,000 Cambodian peasants. As a result, peasants fled the countryside by the hundreds of thousands and settled in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh.

All of these events resulted in economic and military destabilization in Cambodia and a surge of popular support for Pol Pot.

By 1975, the U.S. had withdrawn its troops from Vietnam. Cambodia’s government, plagued by corruption and incompetence, also lost its American military support. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge army, consisting of teenage peasant guerrillas, marched into Phnom Penh and on April 17 effectively seized control of Cambodia.

Once in power, Pol Pot began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia inspired in part by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which he had witnessed, first-hand during a visit to Communist China. […]

He began by declaring, “This is Year Zero,” and that society was about to be “purified.” Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism.

Here’s a little more detail regarding the “unintended” consequences of America’s bombing of Cambodia:

In proportion to its population, Cambodia underwent a human catastrophe unparalleled in this century. Out of a 1970 population of probably near 7,100,000 Cambodia probably lost slightly less than 4,000,000 people to war, rebellion, man-made famine, genocide, politicide, and mass murder. The vast majority, almost 3,300,000 men, women, and children (including 35,000 foreigners), were murdered within the years 1970 to 1980 by successive governments and guerrilla groups. Most of these, a likely near 2,400,000, were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge.

Oh, and the war in Vietnam? The US lost anyway. So, you might wonder why this nut case Air Force General is being taken seriously. You would, that is, until you realize the even crazier nutcases within and without the Bush adminsitration who are behind the effort to provoke a war with Iran.

We have known for a long time that Cheney wants a major air attack on Iranian nuclear sites and other military and economic targets. But an August 9 story published by McClatchy newspapers reveals that, instead of waiting for a decision to go ahead with such a strategic attack against Iran, Cheney now hopes to get Bush to approve an attack on camps in Iran where Iraqi Shiite militiamen have allegedly been trained in recent years.

The McClatchy story says Cheney proposed such a strike within the administration “several weeks ago,” citing “two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.” The official sources say Cheney “argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran’s complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq.” An example of such “hard new evidence,” according to one of the official sources of the report, would be “catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran.” […]

The revelation of the Cheney attack proposal throws a new light on a series of developments relating to Iraq since early June. The first event that takes on new meaning is Joe Lieberman’s public call on June 11 for exactly the same kind of attack on the alleged training bases in Iran as Cheney was advocating inside the administration.

Lieberman, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, said, “I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.”

Was that just a coincidence? Not a chance, says one Washington insider who is very familiar with Lieberman and the inner workings of the whole neoconservative demi-monde. “Lieberman is not the kind of guy who goes off on his own to make a proposal like this,” says the observer. “He’s very disciplined. He’s a foot soldier, an integral part of the neoconservative movement.

In other words, Lieberman was acting as a stalking horse for Cheney’s proposal, softening up public opinion for later war propaganda.

Cheney and Lieberman probably just love General “Bomb Iran to Win in Iraq” Dunlap, don’t you think?