Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Democrats Take A Cohesive Position On Iraq War
Iraq * Lebanon, The Proxy War and "The Futility of Force"
It was long overdue but better late than never. The Democratic leadership in Congress got their act together in a joint appeal for an end to the unjust war. "After months of struggling to forge a unified stance on the Iraq war, top congressional Democrats joined voices yesterday to call on President Bush to begin withdrawing U.S. troops by the end of the year and to "transition to a more limited mission" in the war-torn nation." The President isn't going to pay any attention to it. What matters is that the Democrats succeeded in presenting an united front.
- With the midterm elections three months away, and Democrats seeing public discontent over Iraq as their best chance for retaking the House or Senate, a dozen key lawmakers told Bush in a letter: "In the interests of American national security, our troops and our taxpayers, the open-ended commitment in Iraq that you have embraced cannot and should not be sustained. . . . We need to take a new direction."
No relief in sight for the suffering Lebanese. They are caught in something much bigger than the battle between Hezbollah and Israel. While the members of UN Security Council are working to reach an agreement for cease fire it is clear that the United States is determined to extract its pound of flesh -- complete surrender by,and disarming, of Hezbollah and thereby defang Iran and Syria's power and influence in Lebanon. Experts doubt whether the Hezbollah can be completely disarmed or be forced to cease their activities. Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian:
- The Futility of Force - Israel is learning a lesson that the armies of other countries, including the US, have already grasped. Military force can no longer guarantee victory, certainly not in the conflict Israel and its western allies say they are engaged in - the "war on terror", as the Bush White House calls it, or the "long war", as the Pentagon now prefers.
- Whether you call them guerrillas, insurgents or terrorists, you cannot bomb them into submission, as the US has found to its cost in Iraq, and as Israel is discovering in Lebanon. Even Tony Blair appeared to admit this in his weekend speech to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp organisation. "My concern is that we cannot win this struggle by military means or security measures alone, or even principally by them," he said. "We have to put our ideas up against theirs."
