Although non-binding, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden introduced legislation which would divide Iraq into three separate regions, giving each autonomous powers. It was approved by a 75-23 vote including 26 Republicans. Republican Senator John Warner, one of the more moderate Republicans to vote for it, was joined by the usually ultra-conservative Texas Republican Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison.

A Washington Post article stated “Showing rare bipartisan consensus over war policy, the Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a political settlement for Iraq that would divide the country into three semi-autonomous regions.”

Unfortunately for the American people and the U.S. military bogged down in Iraq, Bush has no intentions of implementing any plan which deviates from his own dictates that are etched in an unrealistic and foolhardy vision of a unified Iraq with a democratic central government in Baghdad.

Still yearning back to the halcyon days when he touted the Purple Finger moment in Iraq when their citizens voted with the hopes of creating a stable government and an end to the daily slaughter by “Saddam dead-enders,” Bush still insists that he alone will determine how much sovereignty he will allow the Islamic Shiite Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki and his crumbling parliament, in deciding what kind of government they will have. Bush says it must be a democracy, even if it results in the incineration and maiming of tens of thousands more Iraqis while putting thousands more U.S. military in body bags.

"I don't think there is something called reconciliation, and there will be no reconciliation as such," said Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd. "To me, it is a very inaccurate term. This is a struggle about power."

Of course, he’s right. He’s right because Kurdish north Iraq had been a quasi-autonomous state long before Bush preemptively bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq in March 2003 and then installed a provisional government headed by Paul Bremer. Bremer, as we know now, followed explicit orders (which Bush claims he doesn’t recall) disbanding the Sunni-dominated officer corps of the Iraqi army.

The “de-Baathification” of the army following the U.S. military’s quick success in ousting Saddam Hussein’s regime, was the beginning of the biggest blunder and military catastrophe in United States history.

The Kurds, unless anyone else except Bush hasn’t noticed, enjoyed almost complete sovereignty during the twelve-year period after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 which lasted only about 4 months. Iraq was effectively divided into thirds with the northern Kurdish and the southern, mainly Shiite areas of Iraq, under the U.S.-British No-Fly zone during those years.

Bush’s grandiose plans to democratize the entire Middle East at the end of a gun barrel began when he decided to abandon the actual war on the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan when he unilaterally launched a war that immolated tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children in a country that had nothing to do with the catastrophe on September 11, 2001 when 19 hijackers of U.S. airliners, 15 of whom were Saudi Arabian citizens, crashed the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The nationalities of the other four were Egyptian, one Lebanese, and two from the United Arab Emirates. Not one was from Iraq. Yet, astonishingly and because of a wildly successful inundation of propaganda, almost 50% of Americans when polled, believe that Iraqis were responsible for 9/11 and that Saddam Hussein possessed and used W.M.D. during Bush’s “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Now, Bush seeks to impose his autocratic will on Iraq by demanding that they adhere to a centralized government in Baghdad as if a unified Iraq would suddenly emerge once the insurgents were driven out and disarmed. Bush cannot comprehend why the Kurds wouldn’t want to give up their control of oil fields in Kirkuk in northern Iraq. Neither does Bush comprehend that the Shiite-controlled militias who dominate the second largest Iraqi city, Basra, and the huge oil wealth in southern Iraq, do not want to share the oil revenues with the hated Baathist Sunnis who subdued and suppressed them for over three decades.

These are all irreconcilable differences in Iraq, when added to the humiliation of being occupied by a foreign power that will not be resolved at the end of a gun barrel -- the only so-called diplomacy that Bush knows.

Yes, Bush may think that just because the vast majority of Americans today believe he has presided over the most failed presidency in America’s history, his legacy (in his dreams), like George Washington’s, will still be written about three hundred years from now. But he presumes, erroneously, that whatever is written about him will ultimately be favorable.

That presumption of course, was the mind-set assumed by Bush and his war mongers, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Armitage, Libby, Rumsfeld and others who have long departed the Bush sinking ship when they claimed we would be greeted by Iraqi citizens as liberators while Iraqi children waved American flags and tossed rose petals in the paths of the liberating army.

Bush’s horror show in Iraq will not be over the minute he and his acerbic, gutter-mouthed Svengali Dick Cheney depart the White House on noon, January 20, 2009. He has guaranteed that horror by the repetitive drum beat of war and the incendiary, divisive rhetoric of fear and intimidation.

Americans will need a long period of a government trustworthy enough to reject the Machiavellian philosophy entrenched in the Republican Party whose current lineup of leading candidates all seek to perpetuate Bush’s Iraq War if any one of them is elected in 2008. They all spout the party line, promoting the doctrine of fear over our citizens.

It is a philosophy enacted by G. W. Bush who insists that democracy can no longer work in the United States each and every time he appends signing statements to laws and legislation passed by the U.S. Congress allowing him to ignore those laws. His legal advisers like John Yoo and former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, have held opinions and interpretations that the powers of the executive preempt our U.S. Constitution.

Yes, there are irreconcilable differences -- between the Republican Party and a democratic government. If our elected leaders cannot be held accountable to the people and if they are reluctant to uphold the tenets and principles penned by our Founding Fathers, we should look no further than Bush’s Iraq War and the depraved, corrosive Republican Party to understand why.

An informed American electorate will deliver the message loud and clear in November 2008 that the voice of the people will be heard. Maybe then, the minority party Republicans will realize that there is room to accommodate those principles.

Richard A. Stitt
Austin, TX