Two parties - same parties

‘Centrist’ Democrats Want It Both Ways We just want the troops home now!

The New York/Washington power elite, dominated by Bush and the Clintons, doesn't have the guts or the honesty to admit that Iraq is hopeless and that U.S. soldiers are being killed and mutilated for nothing more than Bush's vainglory. The power elite's spokesman, the champion equivocator and ace sloganeer Thomas Friedman, provides the purest distillation of the current conventional thinking on Iraq. The other day, The New York Times's star columnist was still clinging to the fantasy that America could have “properly occupied” Mesopotamia and even now could send more troops and “crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it.”



Friedman and many Democrats haven't figured out that lots of Iraqis view America as a dark force of colonialism and don't want our version of “progressive politics.”



Friedman apparently doesn't even remember that Iraq was once a British colony, since he blames the present chaos on “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Ba'athist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Nothing about the Sykes-Picot (1916) carving up of Syria and Iraq by the British and French; nothing about the destabilizing British practice of divide and rule that pitted Sunnis against Shi'ites, Arabs against Kurds; and nothing about Washington's support for Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and '80s.



As a senior Democratic senator told me last week in Washington, with the Democrats divided the only politician who can end the American role in the war is the executive, George Bush. That means we're a long way from leaving Iraq, no matter what the voters want, no matter how loudly the Democrats celebrate their victory.

Since they do not listen and do not learn from history it is time for the people to take power again. Demand peace! Demand an end to funding! Demand that no more troops are sent, but instead all are brought home! If we remain silent, the powers will win - and then the people will lose as we have in the past.