I am forced to AGREE with Mr. Silber as my HOPE is to love the TRUTH. What he says IS documentable as TRUTH. I cannot add to Mr. Silber's words, he has pled his case most adequately. How about a POSSIBLE SOLUTION? If Congress cannot stop the funding of our present problem, perhaps we as, AMERICAN TAXPAYERS, CAN. The game is played on OUR NICKLE, if we don't throw it down on the table, then there IS NO GAME. Maybe we've come to the point where it's unconscionable to keep financing the people and their FAILED adventures.

There are few worthier causes in the blurfosphere.

Indeed not - he's one of the best, if not the best. No offence... ;)

No offence...;)

OFFENSE TAKEN!!!!!!!

...but, seriously, I agree.

He lost me when he failed to understand where Atrios is coming from. He completely mis-interpreted the quotes below:

And if you were to look to the liberal-progressive blogs in hopes of finding a different perspective on this question, you would be sorely disappointed. As just one example out of many, Atrios announced in December:

One thing this latest conversation has done is acknowledge that there aren't enough troops. So why aren't all of these patriotic Americans enlisting or calling on their fellow travelers to do so?

Lest you think this was a momentary blip on Atrios's ideological radar, here is Atrios just the day before:

If Bush had, you know, listened to Kerry we'd already have a bigger military.

According to Atrios, this is yet another indication of the Democrats' superiority to the feckless Republicans: if only Democrats were in charge, we'd have a bigger, better military sooner.

Blah, it's a misinterpretation only in the sense that it's completely accurate.

Thanks for "assigning" this, Jonathan; I'm sorry to admit I hadn't read any of Silber's stuff before, and this is great.

There is one simple fact that he repeated that I have heard before but it never seems to sink in: the US spends more on its military than all other countries in the world combined. All I can think of is Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech, which is well-known and thus only serves to underline how no one and nothing has been able to stop this development.

Whistler Blue,

Watch this:

http://www.truemajority.com/oreos/

Not only will it sink in, in will stun.

Thank you for posting this. Congress has the power of the purse to stop the occupation but they are not using it and I think that their non action speaks very loudly. I would have been very sorry to have missed the links to Arthur Silber. Much of the focus I see in the lib blog circles is the upcoming election and very little about the corporate controlled democrats and their failure to do anything but mouth platitudes as far as the occupation of Iraq goes.

I'm pretty sure these are worth reading, because -

a)our host here tends to have good taste - why else would we keep coming back
b)the other stuff Silber has written is also powerful

but I may not have time to read them before I set off for tomorrow's Peace March in Our Nation's Capitol [in the political sense of the word - in other words, it's not on Wall Street] -

maybe I'll see you there -

I'm the white middle-aged guy with the glasses.

New Day,
Thanks for the link; I now remember that it was a True Majority gimmick that first made a point like this stick in my head, with a window shade-type scroll in a pen; I see you can buy the updated version at: http://shop.truemajority.org/product/show/5098

whistler blue, have you ever been to the UN building in NYC?

they have a nice little chart there on the visitors' tours. that chart shows that even a 1% slice of the us military budget would do a whole lot of good towards doing something sane like eradicating polio, or malaria, improving access to safe drinking water for vast tracts of humanity.

i saw that and died a little bit inside. for the first time in my life, i felt almost completely shattered.

but then they take you to the giftshop to distract you and then you forget about it all.

I agree with almost everything Silber says except that there is never a case for intervention. I hate to bring up the Nazis, but it's a compelling case - does Silber thing Lindbergh was right, and that we should have just stayed out of the war in Europe? I'm not saying that we did it to save the Jews, but would it have been wrong if we did intervene on that basis? What about Rwanda? Would intervention there have been wrong?

I just don't think you can draw a bright line like that when the fates of millions are at stake.

Though it's true, if you cross that line, even with Gandhi at the helm, the next leader could be George Bush, and take us into Iraq on the same arguments...

Shit. What's the world to do?