Aquarian Weekly 2/14/07
REALITY CHECK

WAR VS. OCCUPATION
Congressional Quagmire Over Defining Terms & Objectives

We had to pay people in cash, so the cash disappeared.
- Lewis Paul Bremer III

It's been approximately one month since the 110th Congress took power and three weeks since our challenge to it to enact the will of the voting public: Cease and desist the dead-end course currently being enacted by ineffective leadership by using its control on the purse strings of the federal government to force the president's hand.

So far there's been a whole lot of nothing.

Oh, there have been debates and resolutions thrown around in the usual grandstanding fashion, plenty of posturing, and a lengthy argument over whether the speaker of the house should get her own jet. Meanwhile the last remaining war hawks slap amendments on the end of proposed bills that send the things into a sinkhole of jabberwocky until they are rendered impotent and grind proceedings to a halt. And there is always an infinite stream of claptrap about failing to meet "procedural demands" and a goddamned verbal joust on whether to proceed with even the most innocuous non-binding resolutions.

Business as usual. No change. Talk, self-aggrandizing, lies wrapped in rhetoric, and childish finger pointing. Same old shit. And the president is steadfast, as usual. He has to be. This is his legacy being blown to bits in Baghdad. What's another life to this lunatic? There's been so many anyway. He will not stop this madness. He refuses to alter his suicide mission. That much has been established. So what is the public's recourse? What do they tell us in all those obnoxious ads: Vote or Die. Your Vote Counts. Exercise Your Right.

A whole lot of nothing.

This past November the prevailing motivation to oust the Republican majority was this seemingly endless occupation in Iraq that everyone still mistakenly calls a war but is not. It is policing, rebuilding, struggling to keep the peace in the middle of a Civil War, but it is not a war. It is a money pit. It is a meat grinder. It has compromised this supposedly critical war on terror. But it is not a war. Don't let them sell you on that, either side: The anti-war or pro-war geeks. They want to make this grander than it is to either continue it or stop it. It cannot be stopped. And it certainly cannot continue. It has to be fixed. Will it?

A whole lot of nothing.

Ah, but our watchdog committee here at the Reality Check News & Information Desk did detect some measure of progress on the hill this week. A congressional investigation committee probing the roughly $8.8 billion pissed away during post-war shenanigans is finally beginning to come to light.

Paul Bremer, the American proconsul in Baghdad for 11 months succeeding the initial seizing of Iraq, was exposed last week as the co-architect of massive fraud and embezzlement in this outlandishly botched reconstruction effort. Working directly under the consistently inept Donald Rumsfeld, Bremer was in complete and unchallenged charge of creating a "new Iraq" from scratch. The outline of his ill-advised attempt to gut the Iraq Baathist regime, deconstruct what was left of the Iraqi Army, and disband all civil services first drafted by Reagan reject, Douglas Feith, effectively launched the post-war quagmire that exists today.

Under Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority reportedly caused the first quakes of segregation between Shia and Sunnis by instituting a quota system for those hired to work in the rebuilding committees, thus tying political issues with religious and cultural ideologies. Not that these maniacs needed any prodding, but the uneducated and pompous way Rumsfeld and his ilk ran things speaks volumes on how badly ill-equipped these idiots were in dealing with a potentially volatile social situation.

Further investigations by journalists in country, like Washington Post correspondent, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who spent the entirety of Bremer's tenure in Iraq, report that while recruiting Americans to the reconstruction plan his coalition put a greater priority on the ideology of potential employees - whether they were pro-life or displayed Republican Party loyalty - than whether they spoke Arabic or had even the most fundamental understanding of Middle Eastern sensibilities.

Chandrasekaran, whose eye-opening account of American blunders in post-war Iraq, "Imperial Life In The Emerald City", cites that "an enormous amount of goodwill following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein" was tragically squandered by an unyielding commitment to "enshrine a formal occupation".

Here's where the rubber meets the road, squire. These fucking morons, helpless, myopic, ego-mad jackasses took literally tons of our tax dollars (stacked in blocks on pallets and shipped to nowhere) and squandered it, siphoned it, hoarded it away while inflaming a powder keg.

Now we get to the heart of the disaster: For the first time a serious inquisition on the post-war handling of money, defense, and democratic restructuring of a nation is in motion, and not whether it was sound policy to expunge Hussein from power in the first place. Thus, a serious look at what is transpiring now, not four years ago, but now: A tactless, immoral occupation of a foreign sovereignty rendered dysfunctional by our aggression, failed planning, and general stupidity.

This is called "getting real" in Beltway speak, something rarely borne out of the swirling tide of fancy speechifying and angry retorts. It is great theater, but as functionary as bull tits or fish bicycles unless someone is made to pay and something is made to change.

Will it?

So far…

…a whole lot of nothing.

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