Democrats work for Bush: will not call for withdrawal. posted by Richard Seymour

News from the Iraq reconciliation talks says that they have demanded a timetable for "immediate withdrawal" of occupying troops. Further, while condemning attacks on civilians, they have acknowledged the "legitimate right" of Iraqis to resist. Doubtless, the formulation on the latter point was the most that could have been agreed on with Jalal Talabani involved, for instance, since he stipulated afterward that his goal was to "bring the resistance of the Arab nationalists to an end". At least he didn't pretend that the resistance was the work of Al Qaeda. However craven Iraq's pro-US leaders, most of them depend electorally on being against the occupation, which some 82% of Iraqis strongly oppose.

Murtha's call for an immediate timetable for pullout within six months, meanwhile, hit the skids immediately. It received a derisory vote in Congress. Leading Democrats like John Kerry immediately recoiled from the very suggestion of withdrawal. The Democrats are only now trying to form an official position on the Iraq war. Whatever emerges from such a colloquium, it is unlikely to be what Iraqis want to hear, and it is certainly unlikely to inspire voters. The Democrats are congenitally incapable of saying anything to their base beyond "Bush is Baaaaaad", for the splendid reason that they intend to pursue the same policies once in government.

However, as even hardline, hawkish Republicans are discovering, continuing the occupation is not a vote-winner. Rick Santorum, the young gay-baiting Christer in the Senate, has even gone so far as to make timid little noises criticising the White House and has voted for a withdrawal plan - because he is 16% down in the polls in his home state of Pennsylvania, which also happens to be Murtha's home state. The White House strategy of going on an all-out offensive on Murtha, invoking the dread name of Michael Moore and sending Rumsfeld out to 'rebut' the anti-occupation arguments, was so successful that Bush immediately distanced himself from it. The utter failure of the occupation has produced a more generalised antiwar reflux with 42% of US voters saying that America ought to "mind its own business internationally". Let no one bleat about "isolationism" in this context: America being obliged to cease its latest round of empire-building would be a massive improvement on the present policy.

Fox News is littering its studios with bricks over the prospect of a "fall out" in the stock market if there is a pull-out, but I tend to think most voters will blame the war for GM's announcement that 30,000 jobs are to be cut after demand for SUVs supposedly declined due to higher petrol prices. If that really is the reason why these jobs are being cut, then we may well have started to reach the stage where the capitalist class decides that the war is too costly, just as in the later stages of the Indochina cataclysm.

Among Rumsfeld's various 'rebuttals' of Murtha was this intricate bit of emotional blackmail:

Put yourself in the shoes of a soldier who thinks that we’re going to pull out precipitously ... Put yourself in the shoes of the Iraqi people ... . Put yourself in the shoes of the enemy.

Never mind that the soldiers would probably rather be coming home. The interesting thing here is that the Iraqi people are the enemy as far as the occupiers are concerned. Hence, the death squads in which the US and Britain are implicated, the drill-killings being carried out by British-trained police, and the regular accidental killings that Major Steve Warren insists "only happen because Zarqawi and his thugs are out there driving around with car bombs". Well, the root-cause-brigade, eh?