Monday, March 20, 2006
Mea Culpa posted by Richard Seymour
Hari:I think of the people trapped in the siege of a civilian city, Fallujah, where amidst homes and schools the Americans indiscriminately used a banned chemical weapon – white phosphorous – that burns through skin and bone. (The Americans say they told civilians to leave the city, so anybody left behind was a suspected jihadi – an evacuation procedure so successful they later used it in New Orleans.).
That line was worth repeating. The rest is a liberal-humanitarian confession of guilt, an apologia, De Profundis, sometimes glib and often inaccurate. Nevertheless, he draws the right conclusion: troops out now. "[B]ut will the Bush administration surrender Iraq’s oil, after spending $200bn to grab it, just because the Iraqi people and their own troops want them to?" Well, Johann, check it out: the US owes 8.3 trillion dollars to the world, will find it increasingly difficult to sustain even the very modest welfare safety net that supports the poor and dependent (unless someone unthinkably and heavily taxes the ill gotten gains of the US ruling class), and yet: US War Spending to Rise 44%. If you're just talking hard cash, the US is throwing more of it into suppressing the rising barbarian hordes. The only way they're going to quit is if they're forced to quit by the resistance of Iraqis, both armed and unarmed. And if those soldiers want to go home, then they must effectively join the Iraqi resistance and start fragging their officers.