Sunday, December 24, 2006

CRONY DRAWDOWN instead of TROOP SURGE

Digg!

Marine Corps General and two time Medal of Honor winner said:
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.


http://www.hackvan.com/pub/stig/anti-govt/war-is-a-rack...
so long as the Democrats and the mainstream media debate the war in the fairy tale propaganda terms of the far right, the war will not end.

If the Smedley Butler, naked reality dominates the debate, the right will have nothing left to say that will sound even remotely credible.

One way the Democrats could force this into the news, is if they don't have the courage to completely defund the war, they could cut off the profit motive.

  • Freeze all contracts to American companies and give that money to the Iraqi government as block rebuilding grants.

  • Ban the use of armed mercenaries and in particular their use as interrogators (an obvious gesture of goodwill to Iraqis).

  • Stop the pressure on Iraq to privatize their oil and give contracts to American corporations and tell them they are under no obligation to keep such stipulations in their law and constitution once our troops pull out, and failure to choose American corporations or bend to their will will NOT result in further military action, coups, or interference in their government.

This could have a couple of benefits:

  • Profit motive would be removed, so lobbyist pressure to stay would dramatically diminish

  • Iraqis would see this as a step in the right direction toward respecting their sovereignty and not sucking their country dry and leaving the dessicated husk rotting in the sun.

  • Bush would be forced to put his cards on the table. He would most likely veto it. But Democrats could then point to that veto and say Bush's cronies are more important to him than the lives of our troops or democracy and stability in Iraq, which is already true, but either not stated loudly or often enough or censored by the mainstream media.
Even though they didn't particularly run on it, they won on a wave of revulsion against the war. If they do not take this kind of creative, aggressive action, Americans can only assume that our democracy is as much a sham as any Third World dictatorship that has show elections, and will conclude that merely voting and hoping that their elected representative won't screw them to please a corporate donor isn't enough and that more fundamental action is required instead.

1 comment:

COLORADO BOB said...

Happy New Year Prof .... I found a fellow that has a eye-popping site :
The Unapologetic Mexican