Saturday, April 12, 2008

It's the Occupation, Stupid!

19th Variation on a Consistent Theme
For me, anyways . . .
David Corn, published on The Alternet writes,
Dems Miss Opportunity to Challenge Surge . . . The Democrats on the committee took shots at the the-surge-is-working narrative, but with their 10-minute-long bursts of disjointed questions they were not able to redefine the debate.
Well, of course they weren't. True to pattern, right?

But Corn, himself, doesn't do too well pointing out a direction for redefining the debate over Iraquagmire, either. Corn still clings to Busheney's "WAR" frame. In his piece, Corn actually uses the expression 'war' a dozen times. (That's not counting his usages in the "civil war" context.)

As long as Liberals buy into this frame, the debate is going to be all about winners and losers, warriors and quitters. Iraq hasn't been about war for years. Bush declared victory on May Day, 2003. By December 2003 he had captured Saddam. Since then, Bush's war has morphed into occupation mode.

It's an OCCUPATION, stupid. How many times does Corn use the words "Occupation", Occupier", or Occupy"?

Zilch, zip, and zero!

No one wins or loses an occupation. In occupations, the occupier eventually realizes an irreversibly adverse trend in his opportunity-cost equation and goes home. Isn't that always the case in uninvited and hostile occupations? (Except in cases, of course, when the occupier also becomes a colonizer?)

There's a difference between Liberals and Progressives. Liberals flail around and about because they share their language and lexicon with conservatives (and NeoCons). Progressives insist on the importance of words. (Pay attention, Hillary!) Words always effect the way we think.

Progressives want to go from point A to Point C and are aware they have to go through point B. In this instance, Point B is realizing that we are in occupation mode in Iraq. Bush is not a war president. He's an occupation president. A compliant Congress and media has allowed Bush's imagined entitlement of war powers to persist for years. Actually, all he's really entitled to are occupation powers.

WTF are those? And where were they provided for in the October 2002 Authorization to Use Force against Iraq?

Bush has sentenced the world's greatest, bravest and most professional military organization to policing gangs and ghettos in a land foreign to us in culture, language and geography. Tha amounts to military malpractice.

Bush is a C.I.C.? WTF! Give me a break..

Bush has turned the U.S. Armed forces into the American Foreign Legion. (Or the Lost Patrol?)

If you can call a spade a spade, then you can call Iraq an Occupation. Then the surge becomes a splurge.