Pull The Plug!
02 February 2007 5:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
Pull The Plug!
guest post by Ed Encho
Enough already! There is no way to gracefully exit Bush’s Mesopotamian abattoir despite whatever protestations that emanate from the war party sycophants that it is still winnable. Iraq was a lost cause from the day that the Bush-Cheney-Rummy triad chose to ignore the advice of the generals and experts and consulted instead with neocon lunatics and adopted their wet dreams of creative destruction. Given the intransigence of the ruling junta with their obvious contempt of oversight, let\’s just pull the plug by cutting funding for this debacle entirely. Senator Feingold has already taken a chance in floating the idea and will be walking point into an ambush by the right-wing slime machine by doing so. Leaving Iraq is of the utmost importance but there should be no argument over leaving just enough money available for a swift withdrawal from the cauldron of carnage.
It is time to really support the troops and get them the hell out of the lunatic funhouse that is the meat grinder of Iraq. It didn’t have to be this way. Le Enfant Terrible only had to accept the lifeline thrown to him by Poppy and the Iraq Study Group. That would have at least allowed for an exit with some semblance of honor from this most dishonorable of foreign misadventures and would have been publicly accepted by all but the ultra-violent think tank thugs and right-wing die hard zealots, but they are irredeemable. Perhaps valuable lessons would have been learned on the foolhardiness of ‘preemptive’ war.
But that just didn’t suit the fanatics at the American Enterprise Institute, the Saudis and Likudnik hard-liners so the Oedipus complex and the military industrial complex consummated their bastard union and chose escalation over extrication. The media elite of course professed shock after the renunciation of the overly hyped James Baker ‘intervention,’ but anyone who truly understands dead-enders like Bush and Cheney knew that it would only further enrage and embolden the cornered rats. Ivory tower dwelling ideologues Kristol and Kagan did the rest with their clever focus group friendly term ‘surge’ – a euphemism for ratcheting up the carnage that in the long run does as much for stabilizing Iraq as putting a band aid on a sucking chest wound.
But it buys time until the conditions are right for the throwing open of the gates of hell that a joint U.S.-Israeli attack (possibly using tactical nukes) on Iran that is looking increasingly imminent barring the decapitation strike of criminal charges against Cheney blossoming out of the Scooter Libby trial. The propaganda chop shops are already in overdrive, kicking out stories about Iranian meddling in Iraq like this one that is guaranteed to have nationalist war pigs seeing blood red, white and blue and braying at the moon for the war president to turn Tehran into the world’s largest parking lot.
This is the run up to Shock and Awe all over again only repackaged for the newest product launch. The changes were minimal as only one letter had to be changed on the originals to replace Iraq with Iran but this is the exact way that the first disaster was fraudulently foisted off on a gullible public. The difference is that this time there is at least some hope of a Congress that will not just act as a rubber stamp to everything that is sent to the Hill by the White House war criminals. Not that the media is doing a better job of scrutinizing obviously contrived propaganda – war sells.
If funding is cut it will end this madness and stop the secretive offloading of flag draped caskets. It will make secret funding from black budgets a criminal offense for which violators will be hauled before investigative committees. Most importantly it will remove our troops from a region that has been inflamed by their presence and perhaps eventually the virulent anti-Americanism that this disastrous administration has wrought will subside. Only this time Democrats need to play defense. There will be an onslaught of reich-wing propaganda seeking to lay the blame for this debacle of a lost war (technically an occupation) at the feet of liberals and progressives. It will be the post-Vietnam blame game redux and it’s already started with the reemergence of the big lie of widespread spitting on the troops . If Democrats haven’t learned anything from the three decades long reactionary onslaught that allowed the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil to slime their way into power to begin with then it is hopeless. This time however I strongly suspect that things will be different and the accusations of backstabbing the troops, the media ‘losing’ the war and the revisionist history that follows will be countered. This time there is the internet to cut through the fog of MSM lies as well as a growing grass roots movement against the fascists who have turned the land of the free and the home of the brave into The Homeland – a most un-American of terms.
If Bush and his lunatic junta defy Congress and the will of the American people by insisting on escalation then it will be time for a serious look at impeaching the bastards. This is not a popular opinion amongst those who have been fecklessly cooing the soothing song of bi-partisanship, but it is necessary to save the republic itself. The time has come once and for all to deal with a rogue junta that fancies itself above the law.Conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts puts it best in a recent piece over at Antiwar.com.
The Bush regime lied and fabricated \”evidence\” that was used to deceive Congress, the American people, and the United Nations. The vice president of the United States and the national security adviser created public images of mushroom clouds going up over American cities unless Iraq was invaded and Saddam Hussein\’s terrible weapons of mass destruction were destroyed.
At the time that these absurd claims were being made, experts knew that they were false. Today everyone knows that the claims were lies.
The invasion of Iraq under false pretenses comprises solid grounds for impeaching both Bush and Cheney and for turning them over to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. Under the Nuremberg standard, to commit unprovoked aggression is a war crime.
Among the consequences of Bush\’s monstrous war crime are the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the destruction of Iraqi civilian infrastructure, the outbreak of civil war between Iraqi Sunnis and Shi\’ites, the spreading of this sectarian conflict throughout the Middle East, and the consequent destabilization of the region.
Try to imagine all the lives, careers, hopes, and families that Bush has destroyed. Try to imagine the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees, the departure of educated and skilled Iraqis from Iraq, the ultimate horror of civil war that is only beginning.
Official U.S. casualties (dead, wounded, and maimed) at time of writing total 26,194. Experts have estimated the cost of the invasion and attempted occupation to be in excess of the enormous sum of 1,000 billion dollars.
Many principled conservatives like Roberts are outraged at the conduct of the Bush-Cheney war party and are among its most outspoken critics. This is a rare time in recent American history where conventional wisdom regarding traditional party alignments on issues can be cast aside and we can work together towards a shared cause of saving America by stopping the attack on Iran, getting out of Iraq and totally marginalizing the Bush worshipping sycophants as the reactionary thugs and knuckle dragging, intellectually challenged haters that they always have been. Senator Chuck Hagel has broken with lockstep GOP loyalty to the Bushists and is raising hell over the war while Hillary continues to triangulate and use DLC approved canned messages to marshal support for her 2008 coronation. Hagel pulls no punches in a recent GQ interview and is demonstrating a steely resolve to introduce the concept of accountability to the rarefied air of the Senate. Hagel is a dangerous man to the status quo because he dares to address the issues and stray off message, but nothing terrifies the elite more than statements like this one:
\”I think these issues are starting to redefine the political landscape. You are going to see alliances and relationships develop that are based on this war. You are going to see a reorientation of political parties.\”
Hagel’s recent strong comments on Iraq and the duty of Congress led to a
condemnation by Cheney himself and Bush administration water carriers are seeking to prevent any embarrassment to their leader by seeking to undermine next week’s vote on the non-binding Iraq resolution. And it should come as no surprise that it is led by the two-headed monster McLiebercain.
The consequences of continuing to allow madmen and ideologues to run amok is now apparent to all but the most FOXed-up of right-wing dead enders, racists, pathological haters and Rapture pimps.
It’s time to ring the curtain down on this tragic farce once and for all. It’s time to take the keys to the war machine away from the neocon cabal and their front man George W. Bush who was never up to the job to begin with.
