[Marxism] From Stan Goff

[Louis Proyect]

Written 20 days ago... the number actualized today.

Distribute widely

THE 3,000 MILESTONE

The 3,000 Milestone is the most recent essay on 
the war by Stan Goff. It is written as US troop 
fatalities in Iraq have passed 2,950, and 3,000 
will likely be reached by New Year’s Day or 
shortly after
 before the Democrat-majority 
Congress is seated on January 20th. We want 
people to use it as they see fit throughout the 
alternative media to support and bolster the case 
for immediate and unilateral withdrawl of all US military forces from Iraq.

The 3,000 Milestone

by Stan Goff

As the grim milestone of the 3,000th American 
troop death approaches in Iraq, what can we say 
about the war that hasn’t been said before?

On September 7, 2005, I wrote a lengthy 
analysis-from-afar on political and military 
developments in Iraq, called The Danger of Iraqi 
Partition. On that same day, we were approaching 
the 2,000 US-dead-in-Iraq milestone, 1,892 to be 
exact. Just as today, in the United States these 
figures of US troop deaths garner the attention 
of the media, that still pretends the hundreds of 
thousands of Iraqis dead, wounded, and displaced are a mere footnote.

It reminds one of the old Tarzan novels of Edgar 
Rice Burroughs, where the entire world exists as 
a background within which a white European male 
protagonist can have an adventure about which 
white males can fantasize. The media in the US is 
still completely the captive of the White Man’s 
Burden narrative, even though the term, “White 
Man,” has now been supplanted by “American.” This 
is evident in the reflexive valorization of 
American life over the lives of dark foreigners ­ 
which, admittedly, is necessary to sustain 
circulation and political clout in a culture of 
national chauvinism. It is also evident in the 
seeming inability to visualize any “solution” to 
the whirlwind reaped by US policy in Iraq that 
does not require the continued employment of US troops to occupy Iraq.

While this milestone will be used ­ as it should 
be in my opinion ­ to mobilize emotional support 
for the redeployment of US troops back to the 
United States and the end of the US military 
occupation of Iraq, I am going to take this 
opportunity ­ which it is ­ to introduce a more 
clinical account of what is happening with this 
war. It is fairly obvious now that most Americans 
want to be rid of this war. In a sense, then, the 
campaign to build opposition has achieved 
momentum in a direction that seems unlikely to be 
reversed. The question that arises now, and the 
one for which there is little satisfaction in 
mainstream commercialized or Democratic Party 
discourse, is what do “we” do? How do “we” get out?

The principal reason there have been no 
satisfactory answers to that question is that the 
majority of people rely on professional pundits 
and news models to acquire the baseline 
impressions of what is actually happening in 
Iraq. The account that is being propagated is one 
that is shallow, simplistic, largely inaccurate, 
and widely believed by the pundits themselves. 
They themselves are the captives of their own 
chauvinist assumptions and of the cosmic vacuums in their heads where...

FULL at http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2006/12/06/the-3000-milestone/#more-11


Stan Goff

2 New Books-

"Sex & War"
http://www.lulu.com/content/276367

"Energy War - Exterminism for the 21st Century"
http://stangoff.com/?p=400