Our Brothers The Syrians

In the absurdly ridiculous film, The Green Berets, there is a scene where John Wayne summons all the machismo bravado he can muster, and says with a completely straight face,

The Vietnamese want us here.

Of course that was the government mantra at the time. We were welcome guests.

Occupiers are never welcome guests. We are occupiers in Iraq. We are not liberators. We become liberators only when we leave.

For this reason, anyone who says that Lebanon is a democracy is smoking something. How can you be a free country when another countries army is hanging out in your capital city? This hasn't been lost on us, or on our former secretary of state, Colin Powell.

"We believe that the time has come for the Lebanese to be able to decide their own future without the presence of the Syrian army, which is operated from Damascus,"

The Syrian ambassador said on tv the other night and I paraphrase,

The Lebanese want us there, we would of course leave if were asked.

Sure they would.

What clever rhetoric since we have ceded the moral high ground in the world by being military occupiers ourselves. I'm sure the Syrians welcome us to the club.

President Bush said in an interview on Thursday that he would withdraw American forces from Iraq if the new government that is elected on Sunday asked him to do so, but that he expected Iraq's first democratically elected leaders would want the troops to remain as helpers, not as occupiers.


Sure we would.