Pass the Paper

Yesterday all legitimate debate about whether or not to create a timeline for withdrawal of troops from Iraq ended. The Iraqis settled the argument, once and for all, by demanding one. The Bush administration responded immediately by claiming “multi national forces are in Iraq under a UN mandate” and by insinuation that that trumps any Iraqi mandate. This administration’s devotion to the UN is rivaled only by it’s dedication to the spread of democracy.
Republican’s have been using the suffering of Iraqis as a political lever for five years. They waved purple fingers in the face of all dissenting opinion and now they are playing the UN card to counter the wishes of the Iraqi government? So much for all that bull shit about the importance of an independent democratic Iraq. The demand for a US timetable for withdrawal is one of the precious few things that Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis have been able to agree on, but hey we got that UN mandate thing…
Over the next week Republicans are going to attempt to make this more complicated than it actually is-but make no mistake-we are either liberators, or conquerors. We can’t be both.
Many of us have suspected all along that the real Neo-con tendency was toward the latter. That the idea of spreading “Democracy” was an easily digestible prepackaged meal that would be too tempting for Americans to pass up. That, to the cabal at AEI, Enterprise and Empire are synonyms. The good news is that now there is a simple litmus test to determine our real intentions. Either we are liberators, and we respect Iraqi demands for a timetable, or we are not, and we don’t.
Or we’ll be distracted by Republican hucksters as they make a scale model of reality out of Origami.