[Marxism] Withdrawal Saves Many Lives: Bring Our Troops Home

[Bob Zimmerman <uxor414@xxxxxxxxx>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tiburon, California, May 8, 2004



Withdrawal Will Save Many Lives: Bring Our Troops Home



Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calls the actions of our troops ?totally 
unacceptable and un-American.? But, President Bush boasts we will ?stay the 
course? in Iraq. His course, dubbed ?Operation Iraqi Freedom,? is a 
dishonorable, murder-laden, failure; the Bush course is an endless minefield 
that yields nothing but the death, maiming, and the torture of innocents; in 
sum nothing but catastrophic human suffering. While our soldiers die in Iraq 
and Afghanistan on an ill-defined mission, Bush hits the campaign trial and 
laughingly thanks his host for an ?excuse to get out of the White House.?

    Retired Army general and former director of the National Security Agency 
under President Reagan William Odom says, ?Iraqi anger at U.S. troop presence 
and the systemic murder and torture of innocent Iraqis has spun irretrievably 
out of control. The only way out is immediate withdrawal. Once you?ve done a 
stupid thing you don?t fix it by keeping at it. The only question is how long 
we?re going to wait to leave and what price we?ll pay if we try to stay.? The 
plan to invade Iraq was writ by Bush neocons long before 9/11. Bush then used 
9/11 to pummel a terrified Congress into granting him the very war powers they 
must now revoke.

     Bush neocons lied to us about their real ambitions and intentions. Their 
plan to invade Iraq was never about exporting democracy. Nor was it about 
conquering al Qaeda, or finding WMD, or to cure an imminent threat. These were 
gigantic lies to cover for their real intentions. Bush ordered the invasion to 
?one-up? his father who repeatedly warned that an American occupation of Iraq 
would produce nothing but horrors. The Bush neocons had different motivators. 
They sought personal power, war profits and cheap oil. They sought to fulfill 
their ambitions for global military domination and economic exploitation. (See 
the web-based Project for a New American Century).

     By every reasonable measure, the invasion of Iraq is another bloody stain 
on America. This ungodly invasion is Bush-led fascism in action. The neocon 
prescription for peace is perpetual war. The neocons have threatened war with 
any group or any nation that stands against their hegemonic ambitions. War?in 
all of its hideously manifold forms?is an archaic festival staged by impotent, 
armchair, fools attempting to intoxicate their unexceptional lives. The 
weapons, the slaughter, the torture, the strutting, the lies, the mockery, the 
bravado are all pitiful attempts to breathe life into lifeless elites and the 
life-denying structures of government they now control. Strong nations shun 
war. Strong nations go to war only as a last resort or to end genocides. Truly 
strong nations do not invoke false propagandistic phrases like free trade, free 
markets, and economic globalization as cover to dominate weaker nations.

     The former Soviet Union aggressively attempted to export communism. That 
hideous project came to a screeching halt when its leaders realized such 
ambitions were a foolish. But, sensing a power vacuum as the Cold War receded, 
neocons in and around the U.S. government decided to take up the Soviet folly, 
merely substituting the phrase freedom and democracy for communism. The 
Bush-led neocon folly must also come to a screeching halt.

     Unfortunately, many Americans are more like sheep than torchbearers for 
democracy. They are more concerned with narrow self-interests than with 
creating real conditions for peace on earth. Without thinking through the 
consequences, Americans elect mostly fools, cowards, and self-seekers to run 
the executive and legislative branches of our federal and state governments. 
They favor phonies like Bush or uneducated, celebrities like California?s 
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. They refuse to decode their lies. The more they 
are lied to, the harder it is for them to understand that just about everything 
the Bush neocons say is a lie.

     Bush?s miserable record in Iraq shows that our soldiers are unsuited to 
assuring the security of the Iraqi people. Our presence in Iraq only ups the 
probability that Iraq will erupt into a lengthy, bloody, and unnecessary civil 
war. Americans must realize that democracy is not a commodity we can readily 
export or an ideology we can impose on other nations. Democracy must be home 
grown and nourished by citizen desire, sweat, and toil.

     To begin on a path toward peace, Americans and the Congress must recant 
Bush fascism and the explosive dynamic it has created. We must immediately 
withdraw every American soldier and contractor from Iraq. We must reverse the 
seizure of Iraqi assets by western business interests. And we must pay proper 
reparations to the families of suffering Iraqis, to orphaned Iraqi children, 
and for reconstruction. The work of rebuilding and governing Iraq is Iraqi 
work, work that the United Nations and NGO?s can help with, but only to the 
extent that Iraqis opt for that help.

     With these actions, America will begin to demonstrate to a suspicious 
world that we are abandoning our unilateralist foreign policy and seeking to 
rejoin the world?s family of nations as a partner instead of a dictator. Our 
planet and its peoples are far too fragile to withstand another four years of 
Bush invoked ?shock and awe.? The myth that the American military is the only 
way to bring peace to Iraq and the Middle East is as wrongheaded as the domino 
principle was in Vietnam.

                                                     # # # # #

By Bob Zimmerman, author of The American Challenge:

Twenty-One Winning Strategies for the 21st Century

www.bookmasters.com/AmericanChallenge/

Contact: Bobbi Pallas at 415-383-8481, or BobZimmerman@xxxxxxx


                
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