Remember when you turned on the news in late August 2005 and saw this?
Remember how the government did virtually nothing to protect the people of the Gulf Coast? Well…it’s a pattern. The administration never plans ahead. They had no plan for the occupation of Iraq and they won’t even discuss whatever plan they might have to get out.
WASHINGTON – The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda….
“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” [Undersecretary of Defense Eric] Edelman wrote.
He added that “such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”
Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines called Edelman’s answer “at once outrageous and dangerous,” and said the senator would respond to his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. The best argument for staying in Iraq is this: Do you trust these guys to plan a coherent withdrawal?
If I were Rove, I’d point to that picture of Hurricane Katrina and ask the American people if they trust them to get our troops out of harms way.
It is really just a misrepresentation of the agenda.
http://www.augustreview.com/
A whole propaganda industry designed to obfuscate and confuse.
because i’ve said it so many times before, i’m quite honestly sick of repeating myself, but i do not for one minute think the bush administration has ever acted out of incompetence… i think they know very friggin’ PRECISELY what they’re doing – in iraq, with katrina, with the gwot, with the failure to capture osama – everything… i trust bushco implicitly and completely… i trust them to create and perpetuate the conditions for endless war, to destroy our constitution and civil liberties by convincing us that it’s for our own good, to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that government cannot be trusted to look after the common good, to negate any and all implied or explicit social contract between the government and the governed, to lobotomize the middle class and create a society of indentured servants, and to install a framework of social control predicated on fascist principles and christian fundamentalist ideology… all you have to do is to put the right frame around all of it (see jeffery feldman), and it all makes perfectly good sense… and, using that frame, the bush administration has been remarkably successful…
I’ve considered that. For a while I embraced it. I don’t think so anymore.
And even their mistakes–which are real–serve this end.
That the whole strategy is crazy and likely to fail does not matter at all–there is nothing else for them to try, anyway. Peace and goodness is no part of their agenda.
Thanks profmarcus, for your repetition. One just has to keep trying.
While, in a sense, that American democracy can be fixed and restored is the underlying assumption of this blog, it would be good to have a back-up plan if that assumption proves false. Americans are showing no desire to wake up from their consumerist trance, and when disaster strikes, will they be ready to give up their fantasies then? What can help them to give up their fantasies?–that we should be working on!
But the strategic situation is clear: The US does not intend to leave Iraq ever–and the reason is oil. The US committed itself to this path in the election of 1980.
To be a real peacenik, you have to start giving up your oil addiction. It is not easy, but recovery is possible, one day at a time.
Keith Olbermann had a blistering Special Comment on this last night. He’s starting to use the “I” word more and more…