It’s KATRINA, Stupid.

The New York Times, itself oh so instrumental in uncritically adopting Administration propaganda (and IMHO committing war crimes in the process, at least to the extent that similar actions to its resulted in the occasional conviction and death sentence at Nuremberg) that helped get us into Iraq, now offers us this discussion of Congressional Republicans’ exploitation of some Democrats’ call for a timetable for American withdrawal– a timetable favored by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis, btw. Katrina.
Let me make this easy. We can’t really leave Iraq; no, we shouldn’t be there in the first place, but we’re there, and none of us can change that. But U.S. forces leaving will, aside from breaching some moral obligation to the Iraqi people by engulfing them in a full-scale civil war… effectively destabilize the crucial oil producing Middle East, and probably result in yon sectarian strife spilling over into Saudi, Kuwait and the Gulf States… in short, say what you will, but we’re not going anywhere for some time… doubtless several years, until we can at least assure ourselves that this spillover effect can be contained. (Perhaps this will be an abject lesson to the American people about the limits to what can be solved by launching an aggressive war, but the American people tend not to learn from history, or much of anything else…) Again… we’re not going anywhere for some time, regardless of who the President is. Katrina.
The only answer for Dems: point out that Congress can end the war tomorrow with a funding cut, but no one on the Republican side is courageous enough to have a national debate, because they are chicken-shit afraid of being called “soft on terror” and “not supporting the troops”. Point out that the war itself, and all of its funding measures to date, have passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the current attempt to generate yet another wedge issue is just a cynical Republican ploy to try to change the subject and to run away from policies that the American people overwhelmingly no longer support. Katrina.
Now… let’s talk about how the Republican government handled KATRINA! In the event of another crisis– either man-made or natural– this Government and its Republican lapdogs in Congress have given us no reason to think that it will be handled any better than, or even differently from, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. No different.
And THAT…Katrina… is the issue.