That's the question of the day, now that the Iraq Study Group has released its report and Bush has been photographed holding an actual book in his hands, his face a study in bewilderment. ("So, um, what do you do with these things?") Sivestre Reyes, newly appointed House intel committee head -- and a long-time opponent of this war -- argues that we should have a modest increase of troops while engineering a phased withdrawal. He seems to have the crazy idea that Iraq can be spared the dark segue from civil war to ethnic cleansing.
As for myself -- well, I've retreated into a position similar to that found at the end of The Stranger (another piece of Bushian reading material). We can do one thing. We can do the other. Nothing really matters.
The situation is going to go to hell anyways.
The Peace Team argues for an immediate pull-out. That course of action will keep our troops safe -- although we will forever after know that we entered a police state and turned it into something even more hellish:
The policy is, always was, and in the minds of the Bush cabal will always will be, to occupy Iraq indefinitely while we install 14 permanent military bases, where they have absolutely no business of the Iraqi people to be there. And until they are absolutely forced to do otherwise that is where they will stay, which is what is precisely meant by Bush's recent rejection of any kind of "graceful exit."If you agree, just visit their page and you can take action with only a few clicks. Yes, I still believe in taking action, even though I took my Camus pills this morning...
To the contary, they are about to ask for ANOTHER 100 billion dollars!! Dennis Kucinich is calling for an end to funding for the war and occupation now. Ultimately, that's the only reason the war in Vietnam ended at all. Congress stopped paying for it. That's what must happen now.
2 comments:
Did you finally get back on the Camus pills, too, Joe? Man, must be something in the air that is inspiring so many of us to return to the existential realm. "The walls remain, always, no matter how we try to circumvent them...lies, upon more lies...the war president lingers on..."
The U.S. is simply irrelevant at this point -- which is obvious to everyone except "us".
It gets even more infuriating, because no party to this domestic dispute would even begin to contemplate the level of investment needed to restore Iraq's pre-invasion infrastructure, much less turn it into the paradise we promised them.
The Marshall Plan was largely a subsidy to U.S. industry -- very little money actually went abroad -- but we won't even do that much.
What a country we are! Destroy an entire nation, reopen the torture chambers and then blame the inhabitants for being insufficient grateful to us.
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