Posted on June 23rd, 2006 by Gavin M.
There’s an item today from the ever-sober and wonderful Josh Marshall at Talking Pants Memo that I think needs an asterisk and a footnote.
I’m a bit confused. I’m hearing a lot of reports about Republicans chanting about staying in Iraq forever, the danger of ever withdrawing our troops. There’s Cheney. There’s Frist. I can’t say I’ve done a systematic scan of all media. I’m just saying what I’ve happened across during a day of work. And I’m not seeing any Dems. Not hearing any clear message.
What Republicans want is More of the Same.
That’s the motto. More of the Same.
The president says he wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. Virtually every Republican agrees. Three more years. They approve the course the president has set.
They’re for More of the Same. They don’t have a plan. They just want to stay indefinitely.
They’re just for More of the Same.
As far as I can tell — and I’m not the smartest or most sober guy ever, but I can often make up for it by doing really focused due diligence — the reason we’re in Iraq is that there’s oil there; and we’re building permanent military bases because we intend to maintain a presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future, in regard to that oil, which would otherwise be on the market where such entities as China would be competing for it equally. It’s not about WMDs, or about removing a threat, nor about ‘spreading democracy,’ and never was; but about the simple fact that there isn’t very much oil left unclaimed in the world, and whether ensuring a supply of it militarily, through conquest, is a good or bad thing geopolitically (I wonder about that often, with clammy discomfort), the current administration is an administration of oilmen, who are also focused almost exclusively on the needs of people like themselves.
So no, they’re not leaving. They intend to stay. And they can’t cite a reason for that which doesn’t make them eligible for the penalties meted out at Nuremberg, under the charge of ‘conspiracy to wage an aggressive war.’
By which I refer to a sentence of hanging, which is ugly talk. But we ought to know what we’re talking about here.
We’re talking about an invasion of a sovereign nation for the purpose of controlling their resources. And that’s not in the least strange or unprecedented, historically. And I’m not Noam Chomsky, bless his stalwart heart. But we ought to realize that below the daily scrim of words, of charges and countercharges, there’s a core of rationality to this policy, for which it’s up to us to decide whether it’s good or evil, inept or shrewd (and I know what my conscience has told me). But not under any illusions of American exceptionalism or benificence, nor purely in the language of politics.
Geopolitics is, in the last resort, ugly. People are hurt, lives are ruined, bodies are violated by crude scraps of metal flung through the air, the stench of the dead rises to God in heaven. And I certainly don’t know whether there’s a God or a heaven, or a Great Cosmic Interconnectedness like you think of when you’re stoned on the cheeba, or whether death is such a big deal in the scheme of things, or anything like that; but I posit a God sometimes for the sake of making decisions that aren’t touched by scrabbly, graspy human pettiness, and it seems to work, so it’s a habit I’m happy to keep. And by that metric, we ought to be getting a little smarter here.
The US conquered Iraq, invaded it militarily under no provocation, and the US intends to stay there doing anything it wants, while feeding any rationalization that seems to work to its own citizens and to the world. To say anything else is not a polite fiction, but a crude, dick-out, flagrant, screaming stench-pile of fool-ourselves nonsense.
It’s the worst kind of lie — the lie to oneself. And life is filled with lies like that. The world is a pageant of them, in a sense. But we don’t have swallow the bigger ones cold, all the time.
