Drying up the Water:McCain's Iraq prophecy on Meet the Press this morning!

[patrice]

Prophecy or Freudian slip?: About the bombings in Iraq this week, McCain quoted Mao along the lines of " '. . . guerillas are to the people as fish are to water', and we(the U.S.) are going to dry up the water".

I think he thought he was refering to making it so $weet for Iraqis that they will cooperate with us. There was much discussion with Russert and Biden about the need to increase Military resources(costs), little or nothing about other COSTS, i.e. paying off the Iraqi people (electrical infrastructure, highways, hospitals, WATER SYSTEMS, economic stimuli etc. = everything except the control of their own oil), thusly making it so sweet for Iraqis that they won't support guerillas, BUT, given Iraq's geographic position relative to the fresh water in the REGION, there is at least an implied threat in that statement about "drying up the water" concerning what is going to happen if we don't get our way. If "we" mess with water rights in the region, it will make other countries feel justified in increasing terrorism against us. Can you say Viet Nam?

Also, on the point of making deals with Iraqi$ in order to keep them away from guerillas, and how much that is going to cost us, remember that U.S. deals are competing with a bunch of other actors in the region right at this very minute, Arab and NON-Arab, and given the fact that "we" just shit in the world-nest, foreign cooperation with U.S. economic interests in the region is going to be quite limited. All of them are going to bid up the price of stabilizing Iraq in order to put us in our place.

It is so f-----g ironic that they will be doing to us what Ron Reagan did to the USSR, and this god-darned pip-squeak s.o.b. of a president can't see it coming, or if he does, he doesn't care, because he is rich enough to hide from it.

Well, he won't be able to hide from the Dry actually, because what McCain said this morning about drying up the water was more than an abstract symbol; it is the aggregate effect of everything we are dong. The whole IS greater than the sum of its parts.

Is anybody out there familiar with the mythical figure Ouroboros? In simple words Ouroboros translates to "Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye."

[Jack Rabbit]

1. Your interpretation of McCain's remarks is probably correct

On the face of it, it sounds like McCain was advocating genocide, but that's not McCain's style. It's Tom DeLay's, perhpaps, but not McCain's.

So let's go with the interpretation that the idea is to be so benevolent towards the Iraqi people that they will not resist the occupation.

It sounds good, but it won't work. He could have said something like "we will win their hearts and minds." That strategy failed thirty years ago in another colonial war.

No matter how sweet and nice we appear to be, the Iraqi people know what the invasion and occupation is really about: Making profits for US multinational corporations at the expense of the Iraqis. We can rebuid Iraq's infrastructure and deliver power and water to homes and small businesses, but it will mean nothing to the Iraqi people if their money is flowing to banks in New York and their oil profits are diverted to Texas. No matter how much of a gilded cage the Bush junta makes it, it is still a cage. The effect of occupation will still be that Bush's corporate cronies will get richer and Iraqis won't.

Thus, rersistance will continue and grow. The Iraqi people have as much right to resist American occupation of their country as the Indian people had to resist the British or the Algerian people had to resist the French. Conlonialism is still colonialism. It still has no more moral justification than slavery.