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this should be obvious. there are at least two levels of trouble for the bushpeople at this point--(a) there is considerable resentment about the way in which the administration chumped congress and the people at the start of the iraq debacle--but there is also little to be done about it now, except maybe throwing the administration out of office--which i would personally enjoy watching, but which i do not see happening---and (b) there is every reason to think that on strategic and tactical grounds, this surge is the wrong idea at the wrong time.
the tangling of these levels is the object of partisan jockeying. for folk on the right, (a) is dominant and (b) erased to the greatest possible extent; for folk who support the democrats, the priority is reversed. so it is obvious that the weighting of one as over against the other functions as an index of your political position in general.
as to the question of strategic wrongness--gad, what a crappy clause that is---anyway (1) the americans are a faction within a civil war and are not in a position to operate otherwise (2) the strategy really should be trying to find a way to address (1) rather than continue down the road that put the americans in that position in the first place. i have posted this before here, so i'll just say that if (1) is true, then the strategic goal should be to work toward a way of internationalizing the situation in iraq with the idea of rolling the americans out of it. the primary obstacle to pursuit of this direction seems to be the amount of shit the neocons would have to eat to do it--because to pursue this direction is to admit defeat on their own grounds. i dont think this is an adequate justification for pursuing an intensification of the present strategy, such as it is, in iraq--which is the "strategy" that has resulted in the americans being part of a civil war that their actions put into motion, and which has for a long time now been entirely out of their control.
i would think that if the administration was pursuing a different strategic plan than they are, these resolutions would not have been advanced. this is why i think the resentment over having been chumped is a secondary consideration. but i could be wrong about that--it is a speculative position on my part.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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