End It Now!

The horrific disaster inflicted on Iraq and America by the most cynical, dishonest, and incompetent President in our history and his Lamebrain Trust must be made to end now.

Not some time later, not in months, not after the useless deaths of hundreds more young soldiers, but immediately, with as much efficiency and security as can be managed, and as much assistance and support as can be had from a world community that has long been sickened and appalled by Mr. Bush and his blundering falsity and shameless fraud.

It is now established fact that the attack on Iraq was made on the basis of outright lies.

1. There was no connection between the destroyers of the Twin Towers and Iraq: none.

2. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq and never had been: none.

3. Iraq had no capacity to attack America and no intention to do so: none.

The Bush regime’s complex of lies caused us to launch an unprovoked blitzkrieg on an enslaved people in a militarily impotent country. Its staggering ignorance and wanton incompetence have created bloody chaos, guerrilla civil war, and profound hatred of America where none of that existed before, while destroying Iraq and its people. Its determination to steal the vast Iraqi oil potential for American Big Oil has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of non-combatant Iraqis and thousands of our soldiers. And still, in the face of its humiliating, catastrophic failure, the psychopathic Bush regime would have us continue this unconscionable, inhuman, sanguinary insanity.

In the idiot process of this metastasizing horror, we Americans have suffered assault after brutal assault on our own civil liberties and social well-being, and all for nothing–for less than nothing–since we are now unquestionably more hated and loathed around the world as well as throughout Islam, and are therefore far less safe, now and in the time ahead.

We have seen the slipshod Patriot Act cut chunks out of our Bill of Rights in the name of national security when those officials and agencies trusted to manage it have knowingly subverted our most basic laws and safeguards to spy illegally on guiltless Americans.

We have seen our high officials openly advocate torture and abuse of prisoners, permit secret renditions of uncharged captives to third-world torture dungeons, and whitewash high command for the obscenities and degradations of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

We have endured a stream of hysterical nonsense about plots, terror cells and jihadis loose among us, made on trumped-up grounds, leading to bungled trials and dismissals.

In short, we Americans have been victimized by the perjured, deceitful Bush regime to an extent unparalleled in our history, and we have taken it lying down in support of an act of raw, cynical, brutal imperialism that, if allowed to continue in its fatal trajectory, has the potential to destroy us entirely as a nation of laws and a viable republic.

All this must stop. For the sake of our viability as a nation, it must stop: now.

Democratic leadership in the impossibly divided Congress has made feeble, floundering attempts to engineer a gradual end to the occupation. Their timid, tentative maneuvering has won their party nothing but obloquy from Republican know-nothings defending the indefensible, and contempt from the public which elected them to end the carnage. This has been richly deserved. They know why they were elected and what was expected, hoped for, yearned for from them by most Americans and they have not done it.

Why not? The reason is clear: they have put ducking responsibility for a painful, ethical act ahead of doing what principle, reason and humanity demands of them. The argument used to justify this moral cowardice is that they must “support the troops”. There could not be a more blatant and cynical falsity than the delusion that continuing this brutal, bloody, failed occupation somehow “supports them”. Those troops are being crippled and killed daily in a country that hates and rejects them, in a lunatic effort that can not and should not succeed: to secure the oil fields of Iraq and Central Asia for obscenely profiteering American oil companies. They are there for no other reason. None.

Forcing young men and women soldiers to do arbitrarily extended combat tours, requiring them to go back again and again, and to pay with their lives and limbs in this insane, murderous, and larcenous effort is not, by any reasoning, “supporting them”.

Congressional Democrats need to summon their moral courage and take the only action that actually “supports the troops: to end the occupation now and bring them home. It will be said that they don’t have the numbers to override a veto, which is true but irrelevant. They need not create a bill to cut funding. As Congressman Dennis Kucinich has repeatedly pointed out, all they have to do is deny all further funding requested by the disgraced and discredited Bush regime. They have the strength in numbers to do that.

It will be said by the swiftly shrinking cadre of deranged Bush backers that they want America to “cut and run,” but imbecilic taunts have no force in the face of hard truth.

In the disordered minds of those vastly wealthy old draft dodgers of the Vietnam era–Bush, who evidently did his service in cushy country club bars on the Gulf Coast, and Cheney, who by his own admission, “had better things to do than to fight in Vietnam–it is far better that the children of America’s poor continue to bleed and die killing thousands of Iraqis who want their country back than that America withdraw from the horrid bloodbath Bush/Cheney caused and turn the light of diligent investigation on the blatantly criminal and treasonous machinations of these two contemptible sociopaths that got us there.

Democrats must honor their mandate or face abandonment by the millions of us who trusted them as well as the certain, unequivocal condemnation of history. End it now!

PAUL EDWARDS is the chair of the Progressive Democrats of Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

 

 

 

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net