Jim Webb

My thoughts yesterday on the occupation of Iraq were inspired by Senator Jim Webb's response to GWB's veto of the war spending bill.  I thought to myself, "what inspired brilliance!  This guy should run for president!"  Jim Webb is the junior senator from Virginia who ran as a democrat in the last election.  I recall there was a minor dust up when conservative tight-sphincters found blue passages from some of Webb's novels and suggested that anyone with such a lurid imagination wasn't morally qualified to hold elected office.  Of course, he won anyway. 

To parse the language here is very interesting.  During Vietnam, which was a war, the government called it a "police action" or "conflict" in order to lessen the impact of the onus of a continuing military intervention overseas.

Having learned its lesson from Vietnam, now they sell the conflict in Iraq as a "war" even though it's clearly not a war but rather a police action, i.e. it is trying to stablize and pacify a nation hell bent on tearing itself apart.  Webb is using the correct terms to describe what's really going on there.  There is no "war" because there is no "enemy."  You can't go to war with an invisible enemy or an invisible feeling of discontent or a general feeling of ill will or an attitude of disrespect toward the U.S.

Bring our troops home.  Struth!