The Congress of the United States has finally voted for troop withdrawal from Iraq, marking the first official recognition that the citizens of the U.S., as well as a majority of recently elected representatives, are ready and eager to end the illegal occupation of ancient Babylon by a more modern version.
Not always the opposite of Progress. The Resident-in-Thief, predictably, has used his ill-gotten veto to flaunt the expressed will of the people, but a milestone has been passed for the peace movement. Reality has finally caught up with the imperialists, and by continuing the hostilities in defiance of the timeline, the Administration will be further exposed for a rogue regime operating in open violation of laws domestic and international.
The next step is to defiantly and unapologetically refuse to offer any additional war spending bill at all, letting the buck fall squarely in the lap of the paper tiger. Let history reflect that, in the end, Dubya himself vetoed the appropriation for his own pet vendetta. The more gullible of us are expected to believe that disaster will ensue in the wake of troop withdrawal. Insurgents, and civil war, will tear apart the fragile fabric of the infantile Iraqi society. What this really means is that the unpopular puppets and collaborators, whose power in Baghdad derives entirely from the barrels of American guns, will fall faster than Enron stock without our dupes to support them.
Hashing out a new government will doubtless be a struggle in Iraq. After all, practically everyone with experience in public service has been executed or arrested. But if democracy, instead of merely an Orwellian inversion of it, were ever to prevail in the Persian Gulf, we can be sure that expelling Dubya's cronies would be the order of the day.
Who, exactly, is the enemy in Iraq? The invasion was originally mounted, in theory, to prevent the use of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Now that the dictator and most of his family has been wiped out, gangland-style, the question begs like a displaced refugee: why should sectarian violence erupt now, when the cause of all the land's woe has been stuck in the ground? Round and round, this circular speciosity goes. Withdrawing troops is tantamount to abandoning the locals to the violence that foreign presence inspires. We are begged to give time for the troop surges to "work.
" What would this mean? Escalating the raids and martial law to the point that partisans are too cowed to bomb Parliament? Progressives who oppose the occupation but apologize for continuing it appear to be plagued by a sense of responsibility to the region, an obligation to clean up the mess we have made. Indeed the responsibility is great. Will anyone support a budget which expends peacetime dollars in foreign aid to help an independent Iraq rebuild, at the rate that wartime funds ravaged it? Can any hawk be delusional enough to actually believe that invading forces are a stabilizing force, let alone the mealy-mouthed moderates who have let this travesty go on for over four years now? We remember who has abided the war crimes, and who spoke out. Let us remember them well in 2008. The articles of impeachment have been filed; let us convene our Nuremburg.
Read On!\More by Indi Riverflow at www. blues4kali. com.
http://www.blues4kali.com/
