The Bush War Doctrine, now understood in the Iraqi theatre as the Bush democracy-building strategy, is built on the predicate that avoiding war with Iran and Syria is an important war aim because such an expanded war would destroy any chance for a democracy in Iraq.

Notwithstanding the anti-war crowd’s chants that the neo-cons are driving Vice President Cheney, who in turn is pushing President Bush, to start a new war front with Iran, the evidence would suggest that practically nothing would bring President Bush to take that step.

Let’s take our own step back. Just the other day, the army did what it doesn’t usually do. It announced in no uncertain terms that Iran is the insurgency’s big warehouse. Planning, weapons, money, and even manpower. Syria is playing a role as is Saudi Arabia, but each in turn a lesser one than Tehran.

That Iran covets Iraq could not have been missed by the Bush administration prior to the war. First, there was the centuries-long struggle over the border region of Khuzestan and just recently Saddam’s almost decade-long war on Iran in a bid to take advantage of the new and weak revolutionary regime. (Arguably, Saddam was also motivated by the real threat of a religious regime of hostile Shia on Iraq’s border.) Second, Iran’s Ayatollahs have long considered the Shia world as part of its Caliphate and that most certainly goes for the Shia of Iraq who make up the overwhelming majority of the population and the group most tyrannized by the Hussein regime.

That being said, President Bush and his military team developed a war strategy in Iraq. That strategy was to overwhelm the Saddam regime and then to piece together a Shia-led coalition government based upon western liberal democratic principles. We have certainly written enough on this subject for any reader to understand just how insane this approach to civilizing the Middle East through democracy-building was and continues to be.

Beyond the political, historical, and geo-strategic absurdity of taming Iraq and civilizing the world of angry Muslims by exporting liberal democracy, the Bush approach to Iraq and the so-called Global War on Terror was a bastardization of war itself. Colonel Snodgrass has essentially presided over a post-graduate course in war making to teach that WAR = MOTIVATION + CAPABILITY. If you can’t defeat the Jihadists’ motivation, then you must end their capability. Since an insurgency, which is another name for guerrilla warfare, does not allow you to destroy huge numbers of enemy combatants at any given time or to destroy large portions of their arsenal on any given battlefield, the only way to destroy their capability is to cut off their re-supply lines. This is especially true in a battle like the one we face in Iraq (and like the one we faced in Vietnam) where the insurgency is heavily dependent on cross border transfers of materiel, money, manpower, and leadership.

So, after thousands of our soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis fighting on our side have been murdered by arms and militant Jihadists led and fed from Iran, the question must be asked why President Bush has not taken the one decision he must to win this war? Surely after the evidence established beyond any reasonable doubt that Iran is fueling this war, after the act of war to capture British soldiers in Iraqi waters, and given Iran’s nuclear threat potential, no rational man would allow this state of affairs to continue. The counterinsurgency is flailing and failing precisely because with every advance it makes doing the right things on the ground (and it certainly appears that General Petraeus is doing what he can within Iraq to combat the insurgency), the failure in the surge is precisely in its steadfastness to ignore the Tehran tentacles which keep the insurgency war machine primed.

So we are left with the question, Why? Why does President Bush, seemingly a good and decent man, allow US lives to be lost in Iraq in an endless quagmire?

The answer can be boiled down to this: the Redirection as Peace Process. Permit us to explain, if even just briefly. If you have followed our work at the SANE Works for US web journal for very long you will understand quickly enough and all will be as painfully clear as it needs to be.

Unless a leader is a tyrant he has no authority on earth or from the Almighty to send his own people to their tragic death. (In this context ‘tragic’ means unjust and futile.) Peoples and their nations, if they are worthy of the title, exist as an articulation of a higher purpose; a divine purpose. But they exist in political society at the very least in order to exist and to prevail over their enemies. That is why we must have borders and armies to enforce those borders. That is why as Americans we value the lives of Americans more than we value the lives of those residing in other nations. If we did not, we would cease to be a people and nation in quick order. If you don’t see that, and if you insist that no good or decent man could possible apply such discriminacy, then you need read no further. You are blinded by the Redirection, or you are an evil man, or you are a fool. There is no other way to describe you.

But, as we have stated on many occasions, the greatest likelihood — if you think of yourself as a conservative and you flinch when we speak of discriminacy — is that you are enveloped in an existence overcome by the Redirection. You are blinded and numbed to your own experience of existence.

The Redirection is best described by the Science=Certainty/Democracy=Uncertainty Reciprocal we have described at SANE on many prior occasions – indeed it is the centerpiece of our work at SANE, based upon the careful and penetrating analysis of Professor Robert J. Loewenberg — but on this occasion we are not going to repeat that discussion. For now, we are going to describe the Redirection not as a theoretical matter, but as a practical one. We are going to examine the Redirection as it plays itself out in the murder of a nation and its people. In this context, the Redirection as applied in war can be described as nothing less than treason.

The Peace Process

As we noted earlier, a leader has no authority to commit his own people to be murdered. If he did, it would be akin to national suicide. No man would abide such a state of affairs. It would be an occasion for revolution. Certainly, America’s revolution was born out of lesser evils.

But what would happen if a leader of a country under siege by enemies seeking his nation’s destruction decided that the best approach to fighting a war of existential survival was to make peace? In other words, what would we think of a leader who consciously chose to ignore the history of war, the language of war, and the acts of war waged by his nation’s enemy and instead began a “peace process?” Initially, we might just say he was reckless.

But what would we say if during the peace process, and long before there was any peace or even peaceful outcome, the leader gave his enemies weapons which he knew would be used against his own people as instruments of murder and mayhem? Initially, we still might give this leader the benefit of the doubt and conclude that he must have failed to appreciate the danger involved in this risky approach.

But when we learned that the leader had clear and convincing proof that the very weapons he was turning over to his enemy, and the territories he was ceding to them were being used to murder his people, and when we then heard the leader proclaim his commitment to the peace process and praise his now murdered fellow citizens as “victims for peace,” the only thing we could possibly understand was that this leader had turned his back on leadership and had embraced tyranny. That is, he was no longer a legitimate representative leader.

Indeed, we would conclude that this leader was guilty of murder; if not directly, at least twice or thrice removed. And if he was complicit in the murder of his own people, then he would be guilty of treason.

We have already witnessed a Peace Process of this sort unfold in the Israel-Palestine affair and it continues, under different names and under different guises. Weapons, money, and even entry visas are granted by Israeli leaders to the Palestinians so the enemies of Israel should not suffer when the Israeli leaders know that these weapons, funds, and entry visas will be used to murder Israeli citizens.

We have written of this Peace Process and the Israeli rush to national suicide in several essays. One, entitled "Israel: the Advanced Case of Western Affliction," is based directly on the work of Professor Loewenberg and his early study of the Redirection in the guise of the peace process.

Now we witness the Peace Process in America as our own nation struggles futilely in its war against Islam. The advanced case is now the American malady. It did not really take that long to find its way here.

On 9-11, America was brutally attacked after almost two decades of lesser attacks by Islamic Jihadists. Even after the standard chorus of international condemnations, including by puppet imams owing their positions to regimes dependent on US protection or largesse in one way or the other, no man who understood anything about Islam and its history could not know this was to be a war to the end. Either the West was to destroy Islam as it has been known for 1,400 years or Islam was going to destroy the West as we know it today.

But this truth was not allowed to be stated. Indeed, in Europe to say such a thing is a crime. In America, it is for all practical purposes one.

Instead, we labeled the threat Terrorism and President Bush, after careful and frequent apologies to the Muslim world, set off to defend America from this threat of Terror. But because Mr. Bush is as blinded by the Redirection as the next man, he could not look Islam, Muhammad, the Koran, and Allah in the eye. Instead, he went looking for a strategy and decided that democracy would cure the world of this dreaded threat.

But, the question must be asked again. Why? Why would this seemingly good and decent man refuse to see what was before his eyes? How could he ignore Islam and the fact that hundreds of millions of Muslims were prepared to live in a world ruled over by Shari’a or Islamic law? Moreover, how could he have come to the conclusion that all men, everywhere, and at all times were subject to the siren song of a liberal democracy? Why was it so hard for him to understand that vast numbers of men and women the world over simply refused to accept a co-existence with the West?

The reason we suggest that Bush was blinded to these realities is because he has himself become blinded to any reality but the Redirection. President Bush and all of his men, and indeed most western men, can simply not fathom that a man could live his life and experience certainty or truth. Certainly not a western man. For the modern western man, who has abandoned the certainty of his own existence and the divine ground of his own political order, all but mathematical physics is an uncertain reality where truth is at best relative to time and place; where History or Progress is the new transcendence replacing the divine; and where all the newly granted uncertainties of the world are resolved by man through his acceptance of them as the new telos. Democracy, the truth of methodological certainty in place of Truth given to man living in a political order, was the Enlightenment’s elixir to the destruction of the human (as created in the image of G-d) formulated by science.

Even the believing Christian (‘belief’ here being the controlling adjective) in the White House could not bring himself to confront the evil of Islam. To do so would be to know that the American People and Nation were bound to carry the burden of the West against Muhammad and his warriors. There just had to be a better way; a way where all men would embrace the uncertainty demanded by the science/democracy Reciprocal. If these primitive peoples the world over wanted the benefits of the modern world’s advancements, they must per force embrace uncertainty and in so doing, democracy. Bush was determined to be the man to bring the Redirection to all men, everywhere, and at all times. All he needed to do was to prepare the ground and create the right opportunities for liberal democracy to bloom.

So it is that President Bush embraced the Peace Process. He went into Iraq and at the first opportunity halted his massive and quite effective war machine before victory was achieved and began building his democracy. He took men and women committed to Jihad and Shari’a and enfranchised them alongside the more western oriented men and women. He embraced the notion that all Iraqis would now have an equal say in choosing their democratically elected leaders and he sought to empower them with an army of their own and a police force.

But that meant his own American troops would be sitting ducks. It meant that instead of acting like an army at war, US soldiers had to behave and conduct themselves like a quasi-civil, para-military force operating under rules of engagement only lawyers might understand. But early on it was clear that democracy would not hold the country together. Moreover, it was even clearer that the raging insurgency was being fueled from over the borders.

But President Bush refused to act. He feigned on occasion like he might do something to respond to the Iranian and Syrian acts of war but it soon became apparent to all that the President was frozen in place. And it was clear to all, and to the Iranians most of all, why the US was frozen. If the US attacked Shia Iran, the democracy-building fig leaf would fall away. The President and the Iraqi coalition government would be left naked, exposed for what they were: frauds. Any act against Iran would have outraged the Shia majority. The government of Iraq would disintegrate in seconds and there would be no alternative for the US but to decide: either fight the war to destroy our enemies in Iraq mercilessly and completely while taking out the re-supply lines in Iran and Syria or cut and run and continue running until a Pakistani or Iranian nuclear bomb was detonated over the populated regions on the East Coast of the US homeland.

Faced with that choice, the President remains fixed in his place as do the rest of the Republican candidates for president. And, the Democrats, who have long given up any pretense to fight any war to defend America’s national existence, are all battling to be the first to embrace Syria’s Assad and Iran’s ruling Ayatollahs as the US political class abandons all wars in the hopes of beginning ever greater initiatives to re-invigorate the global Peace Process.

And, every day the President allows OUR troops to die meaninglessly at the hands of a Persian-fueled insurgency knowing that he could end this war if he acted decisively against Iran and Syria, the Peace Process lives on. Only this time it is an American leader not an Israeli one talking of the Victims for Peace.

The President told Americans after 9-11 that any country or regime which actively engaged in Jihad (of course he used the neutral-PC term ‘Terror’ not ‘Jihad’), or any country that supported Jihad, would be our enemy and subject to our wrath. This came to be known as the Bush War Doctrine or the Pre-emptive War Doctrine.

But what actually happened is that the President turned this sound theory of war into the Peace Process and the Bush War Doctrine morphed into another version of the John F. Kennedy Limited War Doctrine. All men, everywhere, and at all times would turn away from war if faced with the uncertainty of death. In other words, if our motivation to fight was decimated in the face of our own uncertainties and it was all quite real to us, it must apply to all men, everywhere, and at all times.

The Bush War Doctrine, now understood in the Iraqi theatre as the Bush democracy-building strategy, was now built on the predicate that avoiding war with Iran and Syria was an important war aim because such an expanded war would destroy any chance for a democracy in Iraq. Whatever chance, however slim and even fantastical, an Iraqi democracy had of surviving, the sacrifice of American soldiers was worth the effort.

So now we have a new understanding of Victims for Peace. American lives, our young soldiers, can be sacrificed not to destroy and to gain a victory over the actual enemy who seeks our destruction but in an effort to demonstrate that all men, everywhere, and at all times are really equal and equally prepared to embrace the Redirection where the certainty of a nation’s existence is at best as good and as superior as the next plebiscite. Put in different but truer words, it is now our policy to allow Iranians to murder Americans in order to demonstrate that nations and peoples are not different. Even simpler: Murder in the name of Indiscriminacy. Is this not treason?