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the great reversurgerator.....

the great reversurgerator .....

Embracing Iraqi interests would mean giving up the Washington dream of a wide-open, Wild-West, virtually unregulated Iraqi economy bloated with energy revenues and ripe for the picking by international investors. Two out of three Iraqis want their energy sector -- the source of 90 percent of the country's revenues -- to be developed by the state. But the United States didn't invade Iraq just to have another Arab country with massive oil reserves controlled by a state oil company and huge subsidies propping up its citizens. So the conflict will continue.

Embracing Iraqi interests means ending the occupation -- eight out of ten Iraqis want the U.S. to commit to a timetable for withdrawal. Iraqi Saleh Adnan, 34, a mechanic, watched a broadcast of General Petraeus' testimony this week from Baghdad, and summed up the feelings of most Iraqis: "For us the main point is when the occupation will end," he said. "For me the main report will be the one which announces the American departure." But while Bush endorsed a "draw-down" of troops in his Oval Office speech, it will be a token withdrawal -- the White House and the Pentagon won't be satisfied with only a toehold in the Middle East. So the conflict will continue.

Of course, the United States will never willingly concede its interests for any reason -- the concept is anathema to our foreign policy elite, to anyone trained in international relations. But Iraq demonstrates to what degree the very concept of "national interests" can be manipulated to mean the interests of a few. Maintaining the occupation may indeed serve the interests of those who fantasize of a benevolent American empire lasting throughout the century, and it may well serve the interests of the American investor class. But occupation at the cost of thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars doesn't serve the interests of most Americans any more than it does the Iraqi people.

Bush Won't Let Go Of His Failed Iraq Project

meanwhile …..

A new survey by a British polling agency suggests that the Iraqi civilian death toll from the war could be more than 1.2 million. The agency said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?"

Wild West...


United states of affray

OPINION: Phillip Adams | September 15, 2007

HOW do I kill thee? Let me count the ways Americans have killed others and each other throughout their history. Oh, the body count might have been higher in Hitler's war or Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China. Nonetheless, no nation has a more bloodstained history than the US. And no other nation has such a culture of violence.

We can never know how many tens of millions of Native Americans died as a consequence of the white man’s arrival, but the Indian Wars took a massive toll as Europeans took possession of what would become the United States. The slaughter of the men, women and children of the Indians’ “500 nations” got the new white nation off to a bloody start. Massacre, famine and disease on a genocidal scale.

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Gus:  When I made a similar assertion to the Guardian as well as placing Australia in the same boat in response to an article — before the invasion of Iraq — I got the ears of the journos pricked... They wrote to me directly questioning as if "I really meant it"?. Weird.

fractions and "farniente"

Mr Gates also made clear he envisions US forces remaining in Iraq for the long-term, although "at a fraction of the size of today's deployed force" and under terms negotiated with the Iraqi government.

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Gus: "...at a fraction"?... 7/8th is a fraction... 18/17 is a fraction... so the fellow is not lying. He's just fudging, trying to fool our understanding of elasticity in numbers that are not whole.

"under terms negotiated with the Iraq government"?... The Iraqi Government is doing what Washington says with a sprinkling of local flavour and a "farniente" that would put the Spanish siesta to shame... Mind you, its job is made very difficult by the "planned presence of US troops for years to come" under whichever fractuous numbers Washington sees appropriate...

When Bush, Howard and "Bliar" invaded Iraq, we knew they were lying on both the speed of "in and out" as well as to the WMDs concoction. Throw Howard out and impeach Bush...

 

rejecting exceptionalism .....

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Friday rejected a U.S. Senate proposal calling for the decentralization of Iraq's government and giving more control to the country's ethnically divided regions, calling it a "catastrophe."

The measure, whose primary sponsors included presidential hopeful Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., calls for Iraq to be divided into federal regions for the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities in a power-sharing agreement similar to Bosnia in the 1990s.

Iraq PM: Senate Proposal "a Catastrophe"

Hitler morphed....

Bolton calls for bombing of Iran

Ros Taylor
Sunday September 30, 2007

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.

"If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change ... The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back."

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Gus: Yes John, as the article says too:

Mr Bolton told an inquiring delegate that he was not and had never been a neoconservative: "I'm not even a Reagan conservative. I'm a [Barry] Goldwater conservative. They [neocons] have somewhat - I would say excessively - Wilsonian views about the benefits of democracy."

So, excessive democracy can be bad for you?... Sure, if you use sticks and bombs to implement it...

Hitler never died. he morphed into John Bolton...

John Bolton, a [Barry] Goldwater conservative?

Goldwater:

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,"

"moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Gus: Anarchy, military rule, despotism and terrorism feed on the the same teats...