The first step in the right direction out of this mess would be to stop lying to ourselves and others. Without that step it’s virtually hopeless.
The next step would be to get completely out of their countries, off their land, out of their business for the first time in forty years:
"It’s a sad day for democracy.
It’s another sad day for Iraq and the US.
After months of working on the grassroots level, collecting letters from US tax payers to their representatives in DC, and after months of sending thousands of hand-written letters and personal phone calls to DC, the Senate and House finally passed a bill banning any funds for permanent bases in Iraq.
I spent many nights running from door to door asking people to write letters to their house representatives and Senators. I collected 35 letters in one night in Berkeley. California Peace Action’s team alone collected hundreds of letters in the last couple of months. Other thousands of people across the US sent letters and called to support this bill.
and now after it passed in both the House and Senate, some Congressional Republicans just scratched it out!
The measure was passed by the House, the Pentagon would have been prohibited from using any of the funds for any military basing rights agreement with Iraq.
A similar amendment passed by the Senate said the Pentagon could not use the next round of war funding to “establish permanent United States military bases in Iraq, or to exercise United States control over the oil infrastructure or oil resources of Iraq.”
The Bush administration has said that it does not want to place any artificial timelines on a U.S. presence in Iraq and that it wants to begin withdrawing troops when Iraqi security forces are better able to protect their country. But it has not ruled out permanent bases.
Senate aides said Republican staffers removed the provisions from the bills before House and Senate negotiators convened this week in a late-night work session to write a compromise spending bill.
Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) opposed efforts to reinsert the language.
This is so fucking depressing.
What is the point of wasting all of that paper and time if a few republicans can just wipe out the will of the people with a stroke of a pen?"
– Raed in the Middle, the original Iraqi blogger
