roachboy

ace:
when you say:

"we dont have the will..."

what on earth are you talking about?

the notion of collective will is a theoretical construct.
in political theory, it gets used in fantasy scenarios that provide allegories for the formation of states.
for rousseau, the will appeared to be an actual operational category, but his explanations of it never made any sense to me.
hobbes at least treated it as a fiction, a result of the setting-up of the sovereign. look at the frontespiece to "leviathan" sometime and you'll see the whole of the theory of will.
it is a picture, ace.
it is a metaphor that delineates something of the imaginary relationship between subjects and the images of unity the generation of which is a primary ideological function of the state itself.

but it does not exist, it is not a capacity:
unless you imagine there is some sort of seance linkup that connects people in the states thinking really really hard a sequence of lovely, rosy thoughts about a fantasy iraq to the military, which following the logic of the discourse of the will can only be a collection of meat puppets that twitch about and do things because they are animated by the really really hard thinking undertaken at these seances.

but where are these seances?
do you go to them?
what are they like?

as for leaving iraq in defeat, i also do not know what you are talking about: you seem to think that i would advocate a simply pullout, when the fact is that you have no idea what my position on this might be.
and that would be because i dont have a firm position on this matter. i dont think we are getting adequate information.
the tactical situation is in flux, even as seen through the fog of "public diplomacy."
the overwhelming incompetence of this war in iraq has resulted in a situation that appears to leave no good options open.
and this AFTER a significant period of tightly organized support--so following such coherence as there might be in your theory of the will, the period immediately following the invasion should have been one triumph after another.
but it wasnt.

instead, you have a cold hard reality. the war in iraq is a horrifying debacle. it is a horrifying debacle that conservative voters bear responsibility for, because they put this nitwit administration into power, and managed--somehow--to keep it there for a second term of overwhelming incompetence.

conservatives like to talk about taking responsibility. well it doesnt seem like conservatives themselves are any good at it. you cant even face up to the reality created by an administration that you support. instead of even looking at it, you prefer to advance a crackpot pseudo-history narrative whose sole function is to let the bush administration off the hook conceptually for what it has done in and to iraq. period.

i dont know ace: it seems to me that this is enough of a disaster that the only way the conservative apparatus could possibly even begin to own up to what it has wrought would be an act of ideological hara kiri. "we thought we were doing the right thing, but it turned out that we are a menace and so we are dissolving ourselves."

but wont hold my breath waiting for it...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite