More on GOP, Iraq withdrawal...

Of course, this week's 'toon takes place in a fantasy world where Republicans (and many Democrats, for that matter) actually intend to make some kind of effort to END the Iraq War. Many analysts believe (justifiably) that they have no intention of ever leaving Iraq; check out a previous blog post on that. So anyway, back in the real world, the goal of this cartoon was just to try and debunk some of the prevailing myths and flawed arguments about withdrawal from Iraq:

• First, the myth about the effectiveness of the "surge" (aka "escalation"). Howard Zinn asks an excellent question:
  

  If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite—provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence—they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home.

  The answer is, of course, that logical argument has no meaning for the advocates of this war, who will chug along forever in a world of nonsense. See Bill Kristol, who says that 75% of the population is crazy and that the "surge" (like Bush's presidency) has been a complete success!
  


• On the Democrats and politics, here's a question: for as incredibly unpopular as Bush and his war are, why the hell is it that Democrats and the media still allow Bush and his Republican loyalists to frame the terms of the debate on this issue? Why in hell are they afforded any credibility at all?! Tom Engelhardt has a good column on this, and Larry Everest has a take-no-prisoners column on the Dems' imperialist roots.
  
  So yeah, Joe Lieberman is an asshole. But the truth is that the Democrats are just as beholden to political motivations as the Republicans are. As Robert Parry and Gary Kamiya point out, the proof of this is the simple fact that they are not doing the right thing and cutting of funds for the war and aggressively pursuing impeachment.
  


• I don't think it's a huge secret that many in the hard-core neocon gang are stark raving mad, murderous lunatics, but I wanted to stick the thing in about Norman Podhoretz just because I find him so very offensive. Glenn Greenwald has a good profile of him titled "Face of a Psychopath" (check out his eyes -- my caricature was not an accident). See also a blog post by Steve Clemons on Johann Hari's infiltration of the cruise from hell, where great minds like Kristol, Podhoretz, John Bolton, and other dark forces from the netherworld gather aboard a luxury cruise liner to hash out plans like random executions of anti-war liberals to send a message.
  
  On the myth of "promoting democracy" check out Chris Floyd and Noam Chomsky.
  

• On the myths of "emboldening the enemy" and the terrorists "following us home," check out Ivan Eland, who compares the average American's chances of being the victim of a terror attack to the probability that they will be hit by a comet from outer space.