March 17, 2003
War will inflict terrifying casualties on the Iraqi military. There will be collateral damage to civilians, even with attempts to attenuate that damage, and in case we fail to remember, soldiers are like everyone else. They have families and loved ones.
What is uncertain is the aftermath.
This is the variable that is never factored into the thinking of our native political lumpen-bourgeoisie; their deeds plant the seeds of future and furious resistance.
If half million Iraqi soldiers die, and 100,000 civilians are killed in collateral damage, we have to remember that there are at least (for the sake of argument) five people who intensely love each of the dead. And if we think of the grief of millions after this slaughter, and of the conversion of that grief into rage, and combine that with the organization of the internecine struggles based on historical ethnic fault lines (that the Ba’ath Party has repressed), we begin to appreciate the explosive complexity of post-invasion Iraq.
This invasion will also ignite the fires of Arab and Muslim humiliation and anger throughout the region.
April 21, 2003
Resistance had shrunken into pockets, some still doggedly determined, and much simply disappearing behind this valiant screen. Tens of thousands of Iraqi combatants are missing to this day, and speculation that they might eventually use Syria as a jumping-off point to stage operations back into their nation has led the US administration to rattle its saber, even as its capacity to wage war effectively anywhere else in the world right now is next to zero.
If ever there were a time to thumb one’s nose at the US, it is now. They are a big dog at the end of a thick chain.
The imperial crowing about this lopsided attack is tempered behind the scenes by the knowledge that - contrary to all the bullshit about destruction of Iraqi units - the boldest sacrifices by Iraqi fighters were made not in conventional confrontations but in delaying tactics. Those tactics worked. The Iraqis took good advantage of the US aversion to high “friendly” casualties and their obsession with “force protection.”
The fact is, the lion’s share of Iraqi forces managed an orderly retreat… somewhere…and the US suspects Syria. Perhaps. Perhaps they are still in Iraq. Perhaps they quit. Perhaps not.
There are still thousands of tanks and armored personnel carriers unaccounted for in Iraq, and they didn’t drive themselves away. Hundreds of thousands of small arms. Up to 3,000 wire-guided anti-armor missiles. Over 1,500 artillery pieces, a half dozen SCUD launchers, 1,000+ MOWAG light anti- aircraft weapons as well as a decent supply of unfired Surface to Air Missiles, a dozen Hind attack helicopters, several dozen smaller choppers, and up to two dozen PC-7 and PC-9 fixed-wing aircraft.
These numbers haunt US military commanders, as they should.
July 3, 2003
Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, “We are losing this war.”
July 26, 2003
The recent news stories about the Bush administration’s mountain of lies was not news to those of us who learned long ago to seek sources outside officialdom. Millions of us said they were lying over a year ago.
August 4, 2003
The official story since the resistance started is that there is no resistance. There are merely “Saddam loyalists.” For a while, Rumsfeld actually tried to claim the attacks were coming from people released from prison. To admit there is a resistance with a popular base is to give the lie to the last doddering pretext for the invasion, that it was meant to liberate someone. The “liberated” don’t want us there.
Now CENTCOM and others have been buoyed by the great military victory against two men and a boy, using a reinforced rifle company and about a million dollars worth of TOW missiles, which by the way served to enrage the entire local population. The fact is, as Robert Fisk pointed out, once Saddam is out of the way - if that comes to pass - the resistance will become more generalized, not less. Many anti-Baathist Iraqis are laying back right now because they don’t want to run the Americans and Brits out if it means the Baathists could re-emerge with enough military power to re-consolidate themselves politically.
The American political and military establishments, meanwhile, continue to suffer from the self-delusion that the capture or assassination of one man will magically transform Iraqi society. What they fail to remember is that thousands of Iraqis have been killed and maimed by Americans, and the Americans were behind the lethal sanctions that were wielded against the whole society for over a decade. They have also failed to grasp the full implications of their polarization of other Muslim and Arab states, the destabilization of Pakistan, and the crisis that will emerge are sure as sunrise around Kurdistan and Turkey. And the responses to the attacks in Iraq have been heavy-handed and largely ineffective at anything except accelerating recruitment for the resistance.
The only victories here will be Pyrrhic ones.
[Also] Saddam is not now nor was he ever the central issue except in the demonizing narratives in the run-up to war. Surely the Saudi regime is at least as autocratic, and the Israelis have violated UN resolutions with near impunity. The fact is, Iraq will become more dangerous in the absence of the Ba’athist leadership, because many who are waiting to expel the so-called coalition want that same coalition to rid them of their most formidable domestic opponent - this is the realpolitik and not the dumbed-down official narrative from the executive branch PR flaks that reads like a passion play.
[Also] I would advise the President to do the following: fire Donald Rumsfeld and appoint retired General Wayne Downing Secretary of Defense. Announce to the world that the US plans for the re-colonization of Iraq will be abandoned, and that the Pentagon has one week to submit a plan for a rapidly phased withdrawal. Simultaneously publish an executive order that all aid to Israel will be summarily suspended pending their withdrawal to pre-1967 borders. Announce a unilateral cease-fire that will hold so long as no further attacks against American troops, which will be completely redeployed within one month. Recognize an interim Iraqi governing council selected by Iraqis without American interference, and offer to negotiate with them subsequent to American redeployment for reparations in the form of rebuilt infrastructure using a nationalized Halliburton/Kellogg, Brown & Root, and a complete recognition of Iraq’s sovereignty. Conduct a simultaneous and immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. Apologize to the world and the American people for lying to them. Suspend the PATRIOT Act in its entirety, and begin processing all detainees through civilian judicial structures with access to counsel for all and full media access to proceedings. Push for drastic intermediate Keynesian economic measures that restore full employment to the US, with an emphasis on social infrastructure and environmental clean-up. Forgive the debts of all developing nations, and take Wall Street into federal receivership. Fire Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. Submit them to prosecution for violations of the Geneva and Hague Conventions and violations of the international Laws of Warfare.
August 5, 2003
Troops might be bewildered, as we all are, by ideologies of chauvinism, consumerism, gender, and so on, but they’re still exposed to all that contradictory stuff that life presents them. In fact, troops are often exposed more directly to the charlatan character of official horseshit than the rest of us. As middle class white America comforts itself with the cake-and-ice-cream of ‘liberation’ in Iraq, for example, the troops who are the instruments of this wretched folly are confronted each day with the generalized hostility of an occupied people, and with the glaring fact that their senior officers–whom they’ve been told to trust as leaders–are now professional hucksters assisting with the sale of war to voters and taxpayers.
August 18, 2003 (comparing Iraq to Vietnam)
The same people who applied this scalpel-like logic were, of course, completely unprepared to assess the impact of the character of the war itself on troops:
(1) a war that had been misrepresented as a defense of America;
(2) a war against a tenacious enemy with a home-court advantage, and
(3) a war with a geo-strategic disposition such that a US defeat was nearly certain.
September 15, 2003
In the real world, Bush’s little junta wanted control of the oil, and that was always the reason, and it never changed. If Iraq’s principle resource had been chick peas, our troops wouldn’t be there. There were never any mushroom cloud ready to bloom over New York, and never any connection between September 11th and Iraq. The only mushroom cloud was the smoke blown straight up America’s ass by these shameless thugs. It was oil. It still is oil. They are waging economic war on Europe and Asia, and oil is the lever. And so they repeat the word “liberation, liberation, liberation” like a mantra.
The repetition of words like ‘remnants’ and ‘foreigners’ is another childish cover story (It’s a good thing my Mom isn’t in DC, or she’d tear that ass up.) to conceal the fact that the Iraqis are not conforming to the neo-con script.
October 3, 2003
The U.S. is stuck right now, having lost the battlefield initiative, and is losing the war.
[Also] The resistance is Iraqi and indigenous. It’s also fairly coherent, but I’m not sure how. I can only infer that from the smooth and rapid transition that the Iraqi guerrillas made from hard targets to soft ones when the Americans pulled back inside their installations. One day, they were hitting U.S. patrols, the next, they were hitting collaborators and embassies. There is something going on there.
The repetition of words like “remnants” and “foreigners” is a childish cover story to conceal the fact that the Iraqis are not conforming to the neo-con script by being “good little colonials” and accepting the big white man’s direction.
October 17, 2003
George and his cabinet ministers transformed into Taxi Driver Travis Bickles, practicing armed confrontations in the mirror, the post-90s politics of megalomaniacal machismo dressed up as statecraft, like sunglasses on a pig.
The old official masculinity, enduring, quiet, emotionally distant, and unconcerned with its coiffure — illusory and oppressive as it was — now looks almost attractive in the face of the new one — immodest, loud, and fascistic — and one that is played out on stages and in studios, vicariously, by those who have the freedom to indulge l’imaginaire, that habit of consiciousness that Sartre characterised as an escape from social reality.
There’s sure a lot they need to escape from. And escape is exactly what this public relations counteroffensive was all about. Escape from accountability.
November 13, 2003 (Open letter to the troops)
The essence of all this shit was that we had to “stay the course in Vietnam,” and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.
When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.
When that bullshit story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote.
What they didn’t tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and commiting rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren’t in a position to figure out the difference between me–just in country–and the people who had done those things to them.
What they didn’t tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children.
January 1, 2004
The multi-form Iraqi resistance is making it clear to anyone with eyes and ears that they are united around at least one thing — they do not want to be occupied.
April 20, 2004
George W. Bush, the president who does not read his memoranda, leaning back for instructions from his mad mandarins, issues commands to his careerist generals, and secures his place in history as the mediocrity who put a simian smirk on the destabilization of the American empire.
September 8, 2004
Back when the pack of professional liars in Washington DC and their slavish corporate press still had Americans brainwashed that Iraq was a threat to the United States, General Tommy Franks–then the chief military planner of the catastrophe in Iraq–said, “We don’t do body counts.”
December 11, 2004
What the Bushes and the Rumsfelds have failed to understand about soldiers, old soldiers and new soldiers, and the families of soldiers who learn these things from and with us, is that when we learn that there are different experiences in the world, and when we learn to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and when we learn that we can survive extreme hardship, and when we learn to accept our own mortality, and when we learn to recognize con-men, and when and if we finally learn that everything they say is a lie, and every mission is vandalism and murder, then what is left behind is still a soldier, but he or she is not THEIR soldier any more.
January 1, 2005
The de-legitimation of this administration, while absolutely essential, can not become an end in itself. We have to be prepared to take advantage of that sense of dislocation to foreground new connections, new ways of understanding the world. These connections must aim to create a higher level of understanding of capitalism as a system that breeds war, and they must do so in ways that are intellectually and emotionally compelling to people.
January 14, 2005
Given Cheney’s belligerence toward Iran, we can rule out that the U.S. wants to allow Sistani followers to establish an independent Iraq that will embrace its Persian neighbor as its main partner in the region, and they can arrange an oil bloc that would push both countries back to the front of the world stage.
And given that the administration has even acknowledged, however elliptically, that the elections would not stand down the insurgency, then we can safely assume that this was not the real objective of the elections. In fact, I think we can go one further, and say that the elections - no matter how much credit is being taken for them by Cheney’s Legionnaires in Washington - were not the Bush administration’s idea. They were Sistani’s idea, and his demand after he took the controls and hauled the U.S. out of a dangerous downward spiral when the Sadr rebellion broke out.
And unless we are going to claim that the entire apparatus is on mescaline, we have to acknowledge that they know what any of us with the attention span of a Redbone pup already knows: that these elections have dramatically increased the probability of civil war in Iraq.
March 1, 2005
With March and the second anniversary of their little Mesopotamian misadventure right around the corner, and the anti-war movement finally untying that anchor attached to its ass — the Democratic Party and its impersonation of an electoral opposition — the neocons need some breathing space to accelerate their failing agenda in Southwest Asia. So they are turning up the volume on good old Amerikan paranoid xenophobia.
Crazy dark people are burying weapons underground to pull out and throw at us, so we need atomic bunker-busters. Crazy dark people are planning a second 9/11. Amazing how crazy and yet how devilishly clever those dark people are!
With satellites that can read your birth certificate through a cumulo-nimbus, that wacky Kim Jong-il managed to secretly build nuclear weapons, but he is too dumb to realize that using them against a US target would trigger his nation’s annihilation?
Go figure.
There’s obviously only one explanation for this co-evolution of technological brillance and flatline stupidity. It’s the explanation provided by film script conventions here in happy-happy SUV-Amerika. This is, after all, where a preppy turd like Bush, who has never experienced a day’s anxiety in his life about paying a bill, can pass himself off as an Everyman, and an Austrian steroid stallion is elected Governor of California. We are a simple people, and we need simple explanations.
The explanation is… they are not stupid; they are evil. The capitals of nations all over the world are being taken over by Hannibal fuckin’ Lecter.
March 12, 2005
Revolutionary optimism is not pollyanna optimism that leaves everything to God, or fate, or whatever. A correspondent on an old list I was on said, “Praying for peace is like praying for a weedless garden.” Revolutionary optimism contains an element of faith, too, but not faith in some intangible realm that envelops our own, and not faith that the world is permeable to our incantations.
Revolutionary optimism and faith is the optimism of an activist and a movement that makes up its mind not to quit until it prevails, and faith in ourselves and the efficacy of collective action. Faith is starting the journey without knowing exactly how we will get where we are going, but with the belief that through organization and perseverance and the development of strong revolutionary cultures and communities, we can get there. We have no idea what the last battle will look like, or what the battles of others might look like in other places. We make the fight that is in front of us, here and now. When that one is done, we can step back and see how our interventions have changed things, and prepare for the next.
March 29, 2005
Over time, however, those who supported the war have been faced with one setback after another - setbacks that were difficult even for the cheerleader media to conceal. Not only were there none of the ballyhooed WMD, the Americans were forced to stage their own Iraqi liberation celebrations (the statue stunt, for example), and Bush gaffed with his victory speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the brain-dead remark about “bring ‘em on.” And not only did the political situation crash like Humpty Dumpty with its serial Quislings and serial US proconsuls, but the military situation degenerated into one where the US quickly lost any semblance of the battlefield initiative. Left with a half-baked doctrine foisted on them by Donald Rumsfeld, a doctrine like its predecessor that was designed to defeat a state, they had created a stateless battlefield milieu that rendered the entire doctrine moot. Cracks were appearing in the official cover faster than they could be repaired, with soldiers speaking out of turn, prison photographs leaking, and a handful of independent journalists who managed to avoid being killed by the American military carrying out stories that made the US occupation look positively Wehrmacht… which it is.
April 5, 2005 (response to Operation Truth, and its claim of US “benevolence” in Iraq)
This benevolent force you are arguing to leave in Iraq has been used to enforce attacks and sanctions that are slouching toward a body count of 2 million, microtoxified the entire environment with a radioactive condiment that produces babies born without brains, slaughtered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, trashed the social and economic infrastructure, imprisoned thousands of people in indiscriminate round-ups (including children, by the way), subjected detainees to sexual humiliation, beatings, rape, murder, and other methods of systematic torture, bombed whole neighborhoods, kicked in the doors of sleeping families and waved guns at their infants and grandmothers, surrounded a city (Fallujah, in case WE forgot), then blocked the exits against “military-aged males,” who the US armed forces then exterminated, Warsaw-style, by the thousands.
October 27, 2005
The U.S. military occupation of Iraq is the single greatest catalyst for the violence there. Fewer than 4 percent of the insurgent fighters are foreign, and they are there because of the U.S. presence. Most of the daily attacks are directed at Americans, though more vulnerable civilians bear the brunt of these attacks. There are around 500 attacks per week, and electoral gymnastics have not changed this one whit — in fact, these U.S.-managed affairs may actually make things much worse.
It’s time to face these facts head-on and to get out of Iraq now. Immediately. As quickly as the plans can be drawn up for redeployment.
November 1, 2005
The crisis here is one of legitimacy. There is no immediate threat to the general stability of US imperial power. There is a threat, however, to the Republican Party that is being borne into the party by a fairly reckless lame-duck government, and the latent threats to imperial power are growing everywhere.
If the US left doesn’t encumber itself with unrealistic expectations, there is ample room to make some headway in the next period. But we have to understand which points we push on will give way and which won’t.
Standing on the sidelines during the Republican terramoto to show how above bourgeois politics we are strikes me as pretty foolish and self-indulgent. We definitely have to unite with this gathering storm surge of resistance to the seated government, even when it does provide some short-term opportunities for the Democratic Party.
November 16, 2005
“It appears to me that the Iraqis have made up their minds that they are not going to accept foreign domination.”
December 21, 2005 (on the election of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia)
This strategic challenge to US power in the region is further facilitated by US dependence on Venezuelan oil. A critical margin of 15% of US oil imports comes from Venezuela. Bolivia, too, is sitting atop combustible hydrocarbons — including 48.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas that Morales has promised to nationalize. The technocrats are threatening to “strike,” as they attempted in Venezuela to prepare the coup, but there is as wild card named China that is cutting deals for energy development in Latin America, and China has no interest in perpetuating external debts to keep Wall Street’s boot on Bolivia’s neck. And of course… there is Venezuela.
February 7, 2006
In an era when even the American male working class is as commonly found in an office cubicle as a factory, when we spend an average of 7.5 hours a day in our homes with televisions on, drinking in this cognitive data stream of fantasy gender-norms, when we live in places called Fox Run with no foxes, Deer Park with no deer, Sleepy Hollow that is in fact a bulldozed lot built over with masonite boxes, its little wonder that even the old oppressive masculinities — at least actually connected with where one lived and what one did for a living — have given way to costume-consumer masculinity. It is also little wonder that people can successfully run for king of the country in this reverse-drag as one of the mytho-erotic archetypes.
Cowboy. Hunter.
April 30, 2006 (when there was a rumor-fest that Iran was about to be attacked – Goff said it would not)
Two main points need to be made on this Iran issue. (1) The Bush Administration is not the latest embodiment of the Illuminati that acts independently of its ruling class base. (2) Iran is over a decade away from being able to make a nuclear weapon. Not, these need to be fleshed out a bit. The antiwar movement is being flushed this way and that like a covey of quail at Dick Cheney’s hunting club. Do we need to put Prozac in the water towers? Boo! There they go… “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” “They’re gonna nuke Iran!!!”
Forgive me, y’all. But a war in the hand, as the saying goes, is worth two in the Bush.
May 18, 2006
I am grateful to Representative John Murtha for not adhering to what is considered good manners. He is not only defying the spineless and opportunistic Nancy Pelosi’s directive to avoid the issue of the Iraq war, when he says saying we need to get our troops out of there pronto; he is now being very explicit about why. The fact that he is a former Marine with scar tissue from Vietnam only makes his public statement, that the result of the investigation will confirm a massacre at Haditha, discomfit the war boosters of the right and the Schumer-Pelosi sales managers of the center that much more.
June 8, 2006 (on the killing of Zarqawi)
The attention-deficit disorder of the media and a society inebriated on the instant gratification of the consumer bacchanalia will watch this triumphalism fade, in days, not weeks, and the grating realities of our culture’s meaningless drudgery and vacuous need to be entertained, the steadily mounting casualties, rising gas prices, the Haditha massacres… all of it, will return. When it does, the draught will be that much more bitter. The war will continue. The blood will spill. Even fewer people will retain the capacity to fall, yet again, for the old Turning-the-Corner parlor trick.
August 16, 2006
It’s an Orange Alert; it must be an election year.
September 27, 2006
You are in greater danger from automobiles than you are from some (justifiably) pissed off Muslim from halfway around the world, who politicians would have us imagine is restlessly obsessing about packing bombs into the ‘burbs. Actually, a war on automobiles makes a lot more sense than war on an amorphous noun.
October 11, 2006 (on the Foley scandal and release of the Lancet Report)
I think Foley is an asshole, but I could say that about plenty of them in both parties. He sexually power-tripped some young men (of an age where young men regularly run sexual power-trips on young women and boast of their exploits). Men sexually power-trip women, young and old, all their lives, and we call that… love. Is Foley’s transgression comparable to 600,000 dead Iraqis?
November 8, 2006 (day after the election)
It will be far more difficult now, for example, to see the US attempt to militarily redispose its forces from the anachronism of the Cold War to seize control of strategic Southwest Asia… as a Bush policy. Congress holds the purse strings to this whole project; and the Democratic Party leadership is as imperialist as any Republican. Expect to see the DP tie itself into the most excruciating rhetorical knots in order to explain what it tolerates.
November 13, 2006 (from an open letter to Robert Gates, newly chosen Secretary of War)
Killing time until politicians can figure out how to save face is killing people –Iraqi and American. Every day that goes by with this US occupation distorting the political landscape of Iraq is forcing Iraqi groups to deal with one another in light of who is and who is not with the Americans, instead of dealing with one another as Iraqis… as the residents of Iraq. In other words, sir, the American occupation of Iraq is the primary source of inter-Iraqi bloodshed; and painting this as ethnic rivalry might be a great public relations palliative for people in the US, but it is a deadly deception.
November 16, 2006
Abazaid, Congress, the Bush administration, and television-medicated America are all in a parallel universe from the actual war… It’s an abstraction, even to Abazaid, who resides safely in the Green Zone -that great, glowing, electricity-eating, alien presence in the midst of the ruin… sitting in Baghdad like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
November 20, 2006
Barack Obama made a big CNN-hit today outlining his “plan” for Iraq, as a first baby-step to running for the Presidency. The most economically comfortable third of the Democratic Party’s base (the chattering class) is demonstrating its self-delusion in reaching for Hillary Clinton, the Oprah crowd will rally behind Obama, the green capitalists of carbon-trading will go for Gore. Unless Gore is nominated, however, and comes forward early with the out-now position in Iraq, the Democratic Party will get an old-fashioned country ass-whuppin’ in the 2008 presidential follies, precisely because of shit like Obama was spouting in his CNN Presidential job interview today. Aside from proving the simple-minded way polls set the boundaries of “legitimate” public discourse, the fact that 43% say we can not win, 56% say we will not win, and 33% think we should get the hell out of Iraq a quickly as the loading manifests can be written, proves that support for the war will be nearly non-existent in two years.
[And]
In August 2003, the number of D-voters who said out-now on Iraq were 14%. If it’s 33% today, does that tell anyone what it’s likely to be by November 2008? Because the war is going to become more glaringly horrible as time passes, and public opinion will hit a tipping point. Shame about all those people who will be killed and maimed in the meantime, while politicians pretend they can have their cake and eat it too. If we can’t appeal to your humanity, can we appeal to your self-interest?
Anyone… start now running on an out-of-Iraq-right-by-God-now position, and you’ll be the next prez. A lot of us passed “gradual” a long time ago.
December 1, 2006
Not only do I not want the US to “win” in Iraq — whatever that is supposed to look like. More importantly, Bill (O’Reilly, who asked people if they wanted the US to win in Iraq), the US has already lost. What I want is, I want the US to acknowledge its loss sooner than later. Because the Bill O’Reilly’s and George Bush’s of the world are not paying the price; and neither are the Democrats who are wringing their hands when they are confronted with the terrible specter of their own inescapable national chauvinism.
You’re acting like cornered rats. Oh me, oh my, yes, we want to win, but it’s complicated. Your complication is your desire to further your shitty careers by avoiding the uncomplicated truth. I’m glad Bill O’Reilly put Democrats’ asses on the spot. You are walking over the bodies of the dead when you equivocate.
December 15, 2006
It is not surprising that the Badr Army (Hakim’s SCIRI militia), then, has largely operated jointly with Americans outside Shia areas (against Sunnis) often using the same modus operandi as the former death squads of US proxies in Latin America. The facts on the ground, then, include that Muqtada al-Sadr now controls the only viably independent Iraqi armed force in Baghdad; and that force has popular support as well as massive home court advantages. It is, in a word, embedded.
December 21, 2006
Now they are reading aloud about George W. Bush wanting to send more troops to Iraq and his Generals assuring him that this will not win his lost war back. They know he is dumb, dumb as a rock. They also know that they obey, because they are obedient, obedient as sheep, and the most they can muster on behalf of their own strong feelings is an elliptical contradiction. Big, strong macho men in scary uniforms, talking throw-weights and combat power, and their idea of rebellion is to kiss this venal blueblood’s ass a bit less enthusiastically. Later on, they will exclaim — as pundits — Bush was dumber than we were. Then there is Congress, now dominated by the Party of Perennial Identity Crisis.
Will they step forward and stop these distractions? Will they at last ascribe significance to the dead and dying and crying, and say enough is enough, this war must end, and end now, even if it means a blow to the prestige of Imperial Power? Will they say the lives of these people and the will of not just the American people who are now opposed to the war, but the will of the occupied Iraqis who overwhelmingly want the US troops out NOW… will they say that these lives and these wills are more important than the risks to their political careers? Will they say, we followed a dumb man and a dumb plan to do an evil thing, and we now have to reverse this evil stupidity?
No.