"Bring Home the Troops" is No Longer Enough
By NORMAN SOLOMON
CounterPunch
".......The present situation has a different twist along the same lines. The Iraq war drags on, the United States is certainly not the victor -- and the U.S. president, a fervent believer in war and violence, still has a lot to prove.
Faith that American might makes right is apt to be especially devout among those who command the world's most powerful military -- and have the option of trying to overcome wartime obstacles by unleashing even more lethal violence.
These days, there's a lot of talk about seeking a political solution in Iraq -- but the Bush administration and the military leaders who answer to the commander in chief are fundamentally engaged in a very different sort of project. Looking ahead, from the White House, the key goal is to seem to be winding down the U.S. war effort while actually reconfiguring massive violence to make it more effective.
Two sets of figures have paramount importance in mainline U.S. media and politics -- the number of U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and the number of them dying there. Often taking cues from news media and many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, antiwar groups have tended to buy into the formula, emphasizing those numbers and denouncing them as intolerably high......"
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