What Are We Fighting For?

And it's one, two, three
What are we fighting for?"
--Country Joe MacDonald, "The Fish Cheer & I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag"


First, the Democratic Party's foreign policy establishment can't congeal around an Iraq strategy, reports Robin Wright in the Monday, December 5, Washington Post, with appropriate quotes from the usual suspects. Then today, December 7, the Washington Post's Jim VandeHei and Shalaigh Murray report that Democratic Party leaders fear a voter backlash next fall if they take a strong position in favor of a quick pull-out of troops from Iraq. There's a lot of rumbling about not wanting to leave an unstable situation and not wanting to cut and run, but not wanting the current situation either. For balance, there are a few calls for withdrawal by the end of 2006. These are good stories, but who cares what the Democrats think? With a few exceptions, they have allowed fear and itimidation to rule them.

Don't any of them understand that their colleague, John Murtha, is talking for at least a sizeable part of the military.

For some of us, war is always a matter of conscience, and this one never passed muster. Now the stench is so strong that it has even begun to penetrate the noses of Washington's olfactory challenged officialdom. In short, the only reason to fight this war is because we are fighting it, and what the troops are fighting for is honor and devotion to each other. That is no lie; the lie comes from the Bushies who pretend that the war is about something else--substituting a new explanation for each one that falters on "reality."

As Juan Cole lays out in Truthdig.com, the Bushies have succeeded in handing Iraq to Iran by replacing Saddam with a Shiite theocracy. And he does not even deal with the ethnically cleansing Kurds.

The real question is why the foreign policy elites, not to mention the elected officials, of the Democratic and Republican parties are so impotent in the face of the willful ignorance of the Bushbucker-in-Chief, an ignorance that is responsible for 10s of thousands of death?

For a change of pace, check out my dog genome blog at http://thebark.typepad.com/.