We shouldn't forget that insofar as the US is nominally a democracy, we are all accountable. If we don't stop it, we are allowing it to continue. It's easier not to think about it, but I know that I am part of that we who is not stopping the war. 78% of us are opposed. If this is what democracy looks like, this waiting, this observing of candidates who are indistinguishable and undistinguished, we need something else.
Link: Gen. Petraeus testifies before Congress Democrats arrest protesters, praise US commander in Iraq.
The Iraqi Red Crescent Organization reported in August that the number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, from 499,000 to 1.1 million, since the surge began in February. According to the Red Crescent, 100,000 people a month have been fleeing their homes since the US surge began.
The US military’s Task Force 124, which runs US detention operations in Iraq, reports that since February the number of prisoners held by the US and other foreign military forces has risen by 50 percent, from 16,000 in February to 24,500 now.
As for the impact of the surge in Baghdad, the Independent newspaper reported Monday: “A city divided by high concrete walls, barbed wire and checkpoints: armoured columns moving through deserted evening streets lit by the glow of searchlights and emptied by official curfew and fear. This is Baghdad, seven months into the surge...”
The surge has meant a further brutalization and terrorizing of the Iraqi people, and virtual transformation of the country into one large concentration camp. Little wonder that a new poll by ABC News, the BBC and the Japanese broadcast NHK finds that barely a quarter of Iraqis say their security has improved in the past six months, over 65 percent say the surge has worsened security, political stability and reconstruction, and 79 percent say they oppose the presence of US forces.
A raft of new polls taken in the US show a parallel hardening and broadening of opposition both to the war and to the Bush administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress.
A New York Times/CBS News poll reported that 78 percent of Americans favor either a large or total withdrawal of US troops, and 64 percent favor establishing a timetable for a 2008 withdrawal. Bush’s approval rating is at 30 percent and six in ten say the administration deliberately misled the public in making the case for the war. Even more significantly, the approval rating for the Democratic Congress stands at 23 percent, a new low.
Absolutely agreed. WE are responsible, no matter which way you look at it. For an excellent review of the stagnation of the Left, take a look at this Petraeus spoof @ Lenin's Tomb (http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/09/general-petraeus-speaks.html):
"As I see it, neither our domestic enemies nor our foreign enemies has sufficient clout to obligate us to change course. It is true that American intolerance of combat deaths and outright genocidal violence against our enemies means we can't launch the kinds of attacks that would enable to us to exert meaningful, lasting control over significant portions of Iraq. Nevertheless, we have access to elaborate and sophisticated means by which to induce greater tolerance of combat deaths especially Iraqi combat deaths, since our [racist] assumption is that people are naturally more empathetic to their own kind. We have the means to moralise each mode of destruction that we choose at our disposal, and we are working to find new ways to make it effective. It is true that enemies whose loyalty we purchase can as easily be purchased by others, but it cuts in both directions: any friends we sell can be repurchased.
Unless significant global constituencies, namely Americans, take decisive action to raise the social cost of what we do [strikes, sit-down protests, occupations], thereby causing our political leadership the kind of difficulty that will cause them to restrain our actions [tie one hand behind their backs, in other words], we have nothing to fear from an audacious and wide-ranging, multilayered campaign of violence. The truth is that our domestic enemies are weak, disunited, and lack resolve. They are, at present, no contest. We are not colonialists. Colonialists are set in determinate relations and inevitably accrue responsibilities that cause them to lose dynamism and control. We are engaged an open-ended, simultaneous, and indeterminate operations to obtain political control over strategically significant regions, and to maintain them. The advantage of this is that each 'intervention', as we choose to call it, is disburdened of history. Each military and diplomatic transaction can be discussed as if it is unique, a response to an emergency that we have not helped to create, and therefore we bear no long-term responsibility for its outcomes, and no broad conclusions will be drawn about our actions [unless they confirm the master-narrative of humanitarian intervention and crisis resolution].
I told Lenin he should do this as a spoof on Youtube, dressed up as Petraeus etc.
Posted by: cynic librarian | September 12, 2007 at 02:14 AM