Monday, October 8, 2007

"It's over, George"

p m carpenter's commentary

George, listen up. Concentrate. Even your idol, Abe, would now call it quits. He would conclude that though he once had virtually no hope of winning this war, he now has absolutely no hope of winning this war.

That, at least, is what he'd conclude after ripping this morning's headline from the wire: "Top Iraqis Pull Back from Key U.S. Goal" -- followed by a lead that confirms the worst: "For much of this year, the U.S. military strategy in Iraq has sought to reduce violence so that politicians could bring about national reconciliation, but several top Iraqi leaders say they have lost faith in that broad goal."

That's it, George. That's the ballgame. That's all she wrote. There now officially remains not one solitary justification for staying the course, for there is no acceptable course on which to stay. Either Iraq is partitioned, which you oppose, or it settles into a permanent sectarian power structure of brutal ethnic cleansing and minority oppression, which you also claim to oppose. There is no other future, George, no Third Way.

Please note the use of the word 'officially'. The 'official', albeit unspoken but well known justification for this criminal war is and always has been OIL.

And George, Shiite pols, Sunni pols and Kurdish pols are now open about it. To say, as this news piece did, that "some potential progress toward reconciliation has run into recent trouble" is like saying Hitler's '43 Russian campaign hit a bit of a bump in the road. It's over, George, and all the pertinent players are conceding just that.

Since Iraqi pols are leaving no question about the direction of Iraq's future, that leaves us, George, with only one remaining question: How are you going to spin this one? We await your speechwriters' inventiveness, but frankly, even your idol, Abe, would no longer bother.

Go ahead, George, and tell us that we can't leave yet because we didn't steal contractualize all Iraq's oil yet and we wouldn't want all our troops to have died in vain by failing to get it. Go ahead, George, I dare you.

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