Bring Back My America

Surprise, surprise! BushCo announced yesterday that they might not be able to reduce the troops back to pre-surge levels after all. It seems they fear that violence might resurge if we only have our usual 135,000 or so troops in Iraq.

So does this mean that the surge wasn’t successful in reducing the enemy threat after all? Are they just lurking in the wings in wait for the moment when we pull out enough troops to give them free reign to go back on the offensive? Was General Patraeus’ program of buying their loyalty only successful as long as we also had sufficient troop strength to scare them?

In other words – doesn’t this announcement just confirm the long held contention that what we are really facing in Iraq is a civil war that will never go away until the contenders are given the chance to fight it out?

Iraq has fallen out of the presidential campaign rhetoric, but it is no less an issue than it has been all along. It’s high time it came back into the picture so that candidates have to be forthright in expressing their ideas of how to handle it.

The truth is that the economy is as it is and it will not be affected in the short term by presidential policy, but only in the long term as it has been by BushCo's completely misguided policies of war and waste. Presidents can only affect it in the long term through the consequences (both intended and unintended) of the general policy line they follow.

Short term policy application is the presidential forte, and war is a problem that can be addressed through short term policy application.

The Democrats have been more successful than the Republicans at creating stable economies over the past 50 years because their basic philosophy has been to steer income to the middle and lower classes while the Republicans have concentrated on steering it to the top 5%. To me that translates into a better long term fiscal expectation for the country no matter which Democrat is elected, so the issue of what short term economic policies a given candidate intends to apply is relatively moot.

I want to hear how each candidate plans to get us out of the muck BushCo has stuck us into in the Middle East. I want to hear some candidate – any candidate – say that a policy of asking every country in the Middle East to come to the peace table cannot work as long as we insist that part of the outcome is to allow Israel to do whatever they want with regard to Palestine. I want to vote for any candidate who says that there is a problem with our two-faced alliance with Saudi Arabia and that he/she will attempt to obtain an agreement with that government that stipulates their facilitation of rights for their own citizens and realistically combats terrorism within their own borders as well as in other parts of the world. I want a president who will renounce the policy of pre-emptive war, apologize to the world for the mess we have made of Iraq, offer détente to Iran and Syria, curb Israeli suppression of the Palestinian people, negotiate with Hamas for the extinction of its program of missile attacks on Israel and show the world – in many ways - that we have a higher set of interests than just our own ability to guzzle oil.

I really don’t want much – just the America I believed in back in 1960.


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle