soft on terror...,
2004-09-28 11:31:21
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the most important presidential debates since 1960!...,
2004-09-29 01:25:31
withdrawing without withdrawing:
sweeping their way across the blogosphere are reports that fewer than two-thirds of the former soldiers [Individual Ready Reserve] being reactivated for duty in Iraq and elsewhere have reported on time and:
Anthony H. Cordesman, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, released a study Friday showing that the Iraqi Police Service payroll list "includes large numbers of pensions and 'non-performing' police" known not to be serving. He also said the overall police numbers were dropping "in part because of desertions and purging of low-grade personnel."
We accept these reports as leading indicators that 'Iraqization' is a bust - it exists no more than 'reconstruction' - and we're not having good luck finding Americans to volunteer for this debacle, those who have happily volunteered service to country will instead be threatened into unhappily racketeering for their country. That means a draft or a withdrawal. Either way that means we'll be leaving before the 'job' is 'finished': that is, creating a successful neo-colonial puppet state in Iraq. Such trivialities as the puppet having its own strings tied to Bush's elbows should provide us with some comic relief.
Nancy Pelosi, amidst all this, is on the right track preventing covert interference in Iraqi elections: and safely we might ad, right wing attack poodles can't spin into action lest they a) make mention of such plans and correspondingly b) demonstrate their absolute disdain for democracy. If this story makes it into newsmax let me know, I can't find it. Likewise let me know when Pelosi does anything about overt US interference in Iraqi elections.
We should be informing the Iraqis that they're going to be on their own (Have what we call 'moderate Iraqis' organized anything useful yet? Can they with the US promising sunshine and buttercups and blowing smoke up their collective asses while it demolishes those moderate institutions that existed or could have existed: cancelling local elections, undermining local government, and usurping Iraqi labor unions? Is there any route through which said 'moderate Iraqis' might organize a means towards collective action and agency, since we're quite stubbornly refusing to do so regardless of whether it's possible for us to do so?), so they have time to figure shit out and do something about these enemies of their enemies that they've been tolerating, instead of waiting for our bizarre excercise in foreign bolshevism to instatiate object models of western democractic facades.
update 9/29: The US' strategy now is to facillitate not the organization of "moderates" but their subordination to the US:
To force an agreement, the US threatens both economic and military attacks on the city as a whole. Part of the plan is to use brutal air power that can annihilate buildings or whole city blocks in an effort to convince residents and leaders that the cost of resistance is simply too high. The underlying assumption is that the "moderates" will eventually choose to negotiate rather than see their city destroyed. As one marine officer in Fallujah told Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chadrasekaran, the goal is "to split the city, to get the good people of the city on one side and the terrorists on the other".
The new plan is designed to achieve two goals. First, the US hopes to reduce drastically the number of attacks on US convoys and bases outside the cities. These attacks are planned within the cities, the weapons used are stockpiled there, and the guerrillas are protected from detection by their civilian identities as members of local communities. By demobilizing, arresting or killing the guerillas, the new plan holds the potential to reduce direct attacks on US forces drastically.
Second, by replacing guerrillas with police as the source of law and order in the city, the US hopes to obtain control over local public life, including establishing pro-American political leadership, instead of the current clerical leadership hostile to the US presence. This will permit US control of the electoral process in January and guarantee a legislature compliant with US policy.
...Recent polls conducted by the occupation report less than 10% support for a continuing US presence.
That's just pure neocolonialism, pure and simple, something that doesn't benefit us, just the fuckers on top who run the dog and pony show, while normal people pay for it in blood.
