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Published on Tuesday, October 9, 2007 by The Huffington Post

How Pelosi Ended 'The War With Iraq'

by Tom Gilroy

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but The War With Iraq is over.

Like everything with the Bush administration's relationship to it's gullible public, the point is never what they're doing, but what they say they're doing; it's the words, not the deeds.

So No Child Left Behind of course has nothing to do with helping challenged children in bad schools to keep up, it's about defunding and dismantling the public school system. And 'saving Social Security' has nothing to do with saving social security, its about handing over what's left of the public trough to the investment industry, etc, etc, etc---is there a single American under a rock anywhere that doesn't know this drill by heart by now?

And now the war with Iraq is no longer 'The War With Iraq'; its been successfully rebranded as 'The War with Iran'.

Try and sit through a single newscast or reading of the international page without finding a reference to how Iran is the real 'enemy' over there; whether it's the nuclear bomb there's no evidence of them developing, the IEDs there's no evidence of their government smuggling across the border to harm the agents of our benign humanitarian effort in Iraq, or how Ahmadinejad's denial of the facts of the Holocaust means he's ready to wipe out the free world---or at least America, which can't really be called the free world anymore. But I digress.

Mel Gibson denies the facts of the Holocaust, too, but unless he's planning on wiping out the free world by boring them to death with shitty movies, I don't really see him as much of a global threat. And our own leader, the intellectual from Yale who can't pronounce 'nuclear'--he routinely denies the facts of not only evolution, but global warming, contraception, carcinogens in drinking water, etc, etc, etc and you never hear a peep about him bringing on Armageddon. (Well, only in fundamentalist churches, but they're happy about it.)

But if you scan any of the news for idiots---The NY Daily News say, or CNN--- you'd think Ahmadinejad had actually flown the planes into the World Trade Center and that he literally walks around Tehran with American blood dripping off his bib. When he spoke at Columbia last week, the conservatives who run American mainstream media spun it like Hitler had spoken at ACLU headquarters in the middle of the Blitz.

The rebranding of War With Iraq into War With Iran is only Phase I of a multi-phased rebranding strategy that will go on for years, a strategy that is in fact prepping us for the big hand-off to a Democratic White House that needs its own public spin for staying in Iraq until we've met the one and only (private) benchmark we've had all along; a permanent force in the world's largest military base securing the theft of the world's second largest deposit of oil. But don't take it from me--ask Alan Greenspan, that liberal.

If you doubt the existence of this strategy, than you must've missed the emergence of Phase II last week, when all three of the leading presidential candidates from the 'opposition party'--- the party that supposedly has a mandate from the American people to end the war---furrowed their collective brow and professed dismay that it just seemed too darn unrealistic---and no doubt unpresidential--- to get troops out of Iraq any earlier than--are you ready?--2013.

Why not just let Bush stay president? It's what he wanted all along.

Of course the troops the Dems plan to keep there won't be 'combat' troops, because the 'war' will be over---at least rhetorically. They'll be a 'stabilization force'--that's Phase III of the rebranding.

Phase III will last 50 years, and you'll never hear the word 'combat,' only 'stabilization', but on the ground, the facts will be the same they've always been; unwelcome Americans kids getting killed and maimed by a debilitated local populace who hate them. Desperate Iraqis--armed and otherwise--with no water, sanitation, electricity, protection or hope will still be slaughtered in the streets or made into internal or external refugees. And of course there'll be the big cherry on top we've wanted all along; control of the oil.

And voila--we'll basically have our new Israel; a permanently volatile and unstable place that we'll diplomatically dither with for eternity, all the while pumping tax dollars into a 'stabilizing' military infrastructure to ensure the local population will never have peace and are so distracted by survival that we'll get away with grabbing what we've decided is ours to steal.

Any questions?

The opposition party 'came back into power' and passed non-binding resolutions to chide a president who doesn't give a shit who chides him and then voted to support an ill-advised surge and increase funding for the very war they had a 'mandate' to end. These are facts, not rhetoric.

The Democrats bought Bush the time he wanted by pitching their rhetoric to their constituents, while the White House bought time pitching their rhetoric to their few remaining constituents, and now the moment to get out of the whole abhorrent mess has passed. Bush will be gone but the troops will stay and we'll have gotten the oil.

Oh sure, there's all the side 'benefits'--the American taxpayers funding the creation of a massive invasion/occupation industry--companies like KBR, Bechtel, Blackwater, you know the names--that take taxpayer dollars to at first rip a region down and then take taxpayer's money to build the region up again, albeit in accordance with their own privatized corporate needs and with inferior materials and slave labor.

(or perhaps you thought all those buildings in the Green Zone were built by well-paid union construction workers outfitted in state of the art protective gear with round-the-clock-workplace safety standards in place--you know, like in Katrina)

In short, a massive, publicly funded destruction/reconstruction industry for private profit. Call it 'socialized terror.'

They'll call it 'job creation.'

What could've stopped it all, the great rebranding, the escalation, the extra deaths and crippling debt, not to mention yet another gutting of the power of the American voter? The impeachment process. This is of course the one thing Nancy Pelosi declared was 'off the table' before she'd done a single thing as Speaker.

Say it again, to yourself: 'The one thing that truly could have derailed the longest war in US history, in the one moment where it was still possible, was declared 'off the table' by the leader of the opposition party, placed in power by a mandate from the people.'

The 'Ending The War Phase' is over and the 'How Can We Sensibly Approach A Solution Phase?' has begun. Feel any different?

It's like Karl Rove is still writing the script. Maybe he is.

Our new Democratic president will tell us the 'war is over' and it will be as hollow as 'mission accomplished'--especially to the Iraqis. But Americans will hear our 'combat troops' are coming home and sigh with relief as they nod with a feeling of democratic triumph at 'the wave of change in Washington'---and go back to American Idol and Dancing With The Stars.

Maybe we should stop parsing the spin and arguing over which lie seems closer to the truth we want to believe.

Maybe we should forget about reality TV for a sec and start thinking about reality reality.

--Tom Gilroy
© 2007 The Huffington Post

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