From StanGoff.com:
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(Disclaiming in advance for the rare exceptions in Congress)
If there is one thing we can always count on, it’s politicians who walk over human corpses to show fear only in the face of something as formless and abstract as an opinion poll. The veterans and military families antiwar movement are well-versed on so-called realism – and that deference we are supposed to exercise when we approach elected officials, hat in hand, for a few crumbs of your attention and support.
We understand power very well.
You are fighting each other for your careers, and you are retaining your power over us through distance and guile, and trying to promote that power by pretending you are hearing our “concerns.” But we have more than “concerns” at stake here.
It is because we understand power that we haven’t the slightest intention of allowing ourselves to be used to promote your careers past the 2006 elections. If you fail to demand US withdrawal now, you are supporting the war; and if you support the war, as far as we are concerned, you can go straight to hell in 2006.
It is because we understand power that we are not going to forgive and forget that when the war fever was up, fed by the lies of Republicans, the war was facilitated by the eager xenophobic complicity of most Democrats, and by the slavish obedience of the corporate press. Most of you not only co-signed what you knew to be an illegal invasion – you have continued to sign the checks to perpetuate the war.
You wanted to be lied to about the war, because the polls supported the war, and you were sniffing the political air.
It is because we understand power that we know that most of you did this out of craven opportunism and a concern for your political ambitions – knowing full well that no one you loved was likely to be sent home without a limb, without an eye, without a life.
It is because we understand power that we know how cynically cavalier you are with the lives of others, and how narcissistically self-promoting.
It is because we understand power that we understand why many of you are backpedaling in your support for the war. You are maneuvering to be “critical” of the war. You “demand” the administration provide “an effective exit strategy.” And you haven’t said a goddamned substantive thing, as the cameras shutter away for you. And you want us to play along – so you can beat Republicans without taking a single real position. You don’t want to stop this war. You want to win an election. By the time you win that election, another thousand troops and another 20,000 Iraqis could be dead. We do not calculate time the way you do.
It is because we understand power that we know most of you will stand by while those of us with less privilege see our loved ones sent to kill and die. The real corpses produced by the exercise of power are no more to you than a political calculation.
We understand power, because we know what really stands behind it. Power is embodied in the mounted cops you use to police our protests. Power is expressed by the armed guards for your gated communities. Power is the ability to kill and maim and get away with it, even if you dress it up in $5,000 suits and trot it out on the talk-show circuit, on C-Span, in your interviews with CNN.
Power is projected onto other peoples using your Cruise missiles and A-10s and Bradley fighting vehicles and the people who join the military. And the price of that power doesn’t merely come from our pockets. We probably wouldn’t fight you about how you rob us for your pork barrel defense contracts. The price that has us in motion right now – you really must understand this, because it means we will never back off – is exacted on the bodies of human beings.
The price is exacted with mortars, with IEDs, with high powered rifle ammunition, with bombs, with the same A-10s and Bradleys; and it is exacted on the bodies of our loved ones and the loved ones of the Iraqi people.
That’s why we are not going to grant you the power to manipulate us, to contain us, to corral us, or to pimp our grief over this war and its costs on behalf of your political careers or the needs of a political party. That’s why were are going to be rudely explicit when we say that your bombast against the Bush administration – as if they did this without your help – in calling for a more effective “exit strategy” and demanding that people merely think about a plan for withdrawal from Iraq that will take months or years… this verbiage is meaningless and manipulative. We will never stand for studying a withdrawal, for phasing a withdrawal, for delaying a withdrawal, for setting conditions for a withdrawal, or for partial withdrawal. Never.
Our demand from the beginning remains unchanged. It is for withdrawal, and for immediate, unilateral, unconditional withdrawal; and if political careers go up in smoke as a consequence, we do not give a good goddamn. People are dying in Iraq as a direct result of this war every single day. Go back to your fucking law offices and let our children live.
Gradual, phased, planned, strategized, conditioned, delayed, partial withdrawals get implemented, if at all, while those military sedans continue to roll up in front of people’s houses to announce the extinction of a human being to his or her family… and while the bodies are dropped into the fresh graves at the cemeteries of Iraq.
Gradual, phased, planned, strategized, conditioned, delayed, partial withdrawals get implemented, if at all, while the poisons accumulate in the soil and water and food of Iraq, and in the bodies of Iraqis and occupation troops.
Gradual, phased, planned, strategized, conditioned, delayed, partial withdrawals get implemented, if at all, while the hospitals fill up with the lamed, maimed, blinded, and disfigured.
Gradual, phased, planned, strategized, conditioned, delayed, partial withdrawals get implemented, if at all, while the grief and horror associated with this criminal war become the daily emotional fare of more and more people, occupation forces and Iraqis.
No member of Congress has the moral right to dither on the question of his or her precious career while a single constituent is facing the fear of that devastating knock on the door. We say the emperor has no clothes; and we say we know you when you feign “concern” with your eye fixed firmly on your ambition.
An exit is not a strategy. An exit is a command.
If the commander in chief won’t give that command, then you in Congress – if you want to salvage anything that looks vaguely like a conscience or a soul – will refuse to grant this administration another penny to continue this war. We are not hearing you when you tap dance about political “realism.” The mounting mass of corpses, that you have walked over every time you voted a cent to continue this war, is about as real as it gets. Don’t you dare ever lecture military families and veterans about realism. And don’t you doubt that we understand power.
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