Saturday November 25th 2006, 12:08 pm
Steny Hoyer, nicknamed “boy wonder,” is speaking tough to the besieged Iraqis.
Hoyer, as incoming House Majority Leader, wants the Iraqis to understand they only have themselves to blame for all the murder and misery in their country. “In the days ahead, the Iraqis must make the tough decisions and accept responsibility for their future,” said Hoyer during the weekly Democratic radio address. “And the Iraqis must know: Our commitment, while great, is not unending.”
“Once in power, Hoyer said, the Democrats hope to work with Republicans and the Bush administration to change direction in Iraq war plans,” reports ABC News.
Please note: Hoyer didn’t say the Democrats will end the “war” in Iraq. He said they will work with the Bush administration, that is to say the perfidious neocons.
All of this should be nothing new. Democrats have repeatedly expressed their approval of decimating Iraq and reducing it to a depleted uranium wasteland where, one day, the living will envy the dead. Last November, for instance, the Democrats voted their approval, by a 37 to 6 margin, for a Republican amendment in support of the neocon policy on the Iraq war. Not surprisingly, they also voted to support the illegal torture and internment of dirt farmers and hapless Muslims at Guantánamo.
“The passage of this measure was portrayed by Democrats and sections of the media as a rebuff to the Bush administration’s conduct of the war,” Patrick Martin wrote at the time. “It actually represents the watering-down of an already weak amendment offered by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan containing the same language about a ’successful completion’ of the US ‘mission’ in Iraq,” in other words, some things never change, and you can’t tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans, even if you turn them upside down.
No difference in the lot. Take as an example Tom Lantos, pegged to take over the House International Relations Committee. “A Holocaust survivor and strong supporter of Israel, Lantos is a hardliner on the Middle East—he has supported going to war in Iraq, sealing Syria’s borders with Lebanon, and getting tough on Iran,” writes James Ridgeway for Mother Jones. It should be remembered, as well, that Lantos held the forum responsible for launching the propaganda blitz in preparation for the first Gulf War. Lantos “held a hearing that starred a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl known only as Nayirah, who tearfully testified about the brutality of the Iraqi soldiers who pillaged her country,” but after the war had commenced, it turned out this girl “was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and had been recruited by the PR firm Hill and Knowlton to sell an Iraq intervention to the American public.”
Some things never change.
Turn Lantos upside down, he is a flaming neocon. “Paul George, the director of the California-based Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, an anti-war organization whose membership is drawn largely from Lantos’ district, believes that as chairman, Lantos could spell trouble for the Democrats plans to change course in Iraq. ‘I think he’s going to be a real problem for the Democrats if they are sincere about reversing Iraq policy as it now exists,’ he said. ‘As chair of the committee responsible for Iraq, I think he will be in a position and be willing to block any changes that are needed,’” Ridgeway concludes.
Poor pathetic Dennis Kucinich thinks he can cut funding and put an end to the Iraq occupation. “The Democrats made their choice, and we’re united behind Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and our entire leadership team, and we’re going to do everything we can to fulfill the hopes of the American people for a new direction in Iraq, and I am going to do my part to keep the debate going,” Kucinich told Joshua Scheer earlier this month.
How dismal. Kucinich backs Pelosi, who has said “Democrats should not seek a unified position on an exit strategy in Iraq, calling the war a matter of individual conscience and saying differing positions within the caucus are a source of strength for the party,” in other words, more of the same. “Pelosi said Democrats will produce an issue agenda for the 2006 elections but it will not include a position on Iraq. There is consensus within the party that President Bush has mismanaged the war and that a new course is needed, but House Democrats should be free to take individual positions, she said,” according to the Washington Post.
In short, the Democrats support a Tower of Babel approach to Iraq.
It is said Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and Israeli citizen Rahm Emanuel, who also acts as a representative from Illinois and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, are leading the charge to get the United States out of Iraq.
And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell.
As an example of how Democrats can be flipped, consider the fact Pelosi, described as one of the most “liberal” Democrats in Congress, opposed the invasion and, as the senior Democrat on the intelligence committee before the invasion, argued that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States. As Democratic whip, she managed to scrape together 26 Democratic votes against Bush’s unconstitutional “authorization” to invade Iraq, but she was ultimately taken down by the Democrat leader Richard A. Gephardt, yet another warmonger who, if we did not live in Bushzarro world, would be in the docket, dressed in orange, awaiting prosecution for war crimes.
Now, with the victory of the Democrats, we have a new Nancy Pelosi.
It’s not so much that Democrats are “lily-livered vacillators on Iraq,” as Robert Dreyfuss would have it, but rather most of them support the occupation. Most of them, as Dreyfuss correctly notes, “voted for the war (and for the Patriot Act), and their ranks are shot though with pro-war right-wingers, not to mention the revived neocon Joe Lieberman…. The Democrats must thunder from the pulpit, threatening to rain down hellfire, hail and brimstone on Republicans who want to stay the course—while scrutinizing every Pentagon budget request and holding investigative hearings into war crimes, abuses, cost overruns and mismanagement.”
Sorry, Bob. But it ain’t likely to happen.
More likely, the U.S. military will meander toward an embassy rooftop sort of withdrawal, à la Saigon. But not before it sows more chaos, murder, and heart ache in Iraq and, as the neocons plan, in Iran, Syria, and the rest of the neighborhood.
Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, General Westmoreland, the criminals behind “Operation Menu” (the illegal invasion of Cambodia, resulting in the ascendancy of Pol Pot and the murder of 1.2 million Cambodians), Operation Linebacker II (also known as the “Christmas bombings,” the indiscriminate bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong), and hundreds of others, no shortage of them Democrats (in fact, it can be claimed Vietnam was indeed a Democrat war), should have faced a tribunal for war crimes.
Instead, most of them were allowed to write their memoirs.
It will likely be the same with the current crop of war criminals and appeasers.
Steny Hoyer talks tough with the Iraqi government, installed by the neocons, and the Democrats, under the guidance of Nancy Pelosi, are allowed to do their thing and not reach a consensus on withdrawing from Iraq.
In the months ahead, the Pentagon will “Go Big,” with a nod and wink from Democrats, who will declare they are still working on a withdrawal plan, honest, and John McCain’s plan to send more troops, most recently spelled out an op-ed piece published in the Manchester Union Leader, will be adopted “to protect Americans from the threat posed by violent Islamic extremists,” even those created by the CIA.
Finally, as McCain admits, the “voters might not always agree with us, but when they see us act on principle, see us tackle the hardest problems and risk our personal ambitions, they will draw the right conclusion: that we are acting on their behalf, not just our own,” never mind at the end of this road is not only a rendezvous with madness, but bullet-stopper conscription, as a continuation of the “war” in Iraq will embolden the neocons to carry out their plan to shock and awe Iran, a demented plan likely to result in a wider conflagration, flaming oil tankers, oil prices at $200 or more per barrel, a precipitated fall of the dollar against other currencies, a crushing and unsustainable deficit, and a hollowing depression, naturally blamed on them damn Arabs, the root of all evil in the world.
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