"It's not when we leave, but what we leave behind." - Lindsey Graham, Today Show, July 18, 2007

This is the most rhetorically savvy articulation of the recent propaganda, and it's working. It has the pithiness of the smoking gun-mushroom cloud formulation, and it is just as meaningless. Nevertheless, you know it is a completely effective little mind bomb when even many DUers echo this chord, change their position on the now ubiquitously named "premature withdrawal," and voice concern about "our" responsibility to the Iraqi people. It's not when we leave, but what we leave behind. A perfect little parallel construction employing the rhetorical figure of syllepsis: memorable, quotable, ingenious.

And it performs its function. It is now an absolute certainty in the minds of many that a non-occupied Iraq will descend into chaos and genocide. US troops have been transformed into the protectors of the population against such a descent, and their permanent presence is therefore now justified on human rights grounds. As an added bonus, the administration also gets to pretend that our departure will produce, overnight, a "terrorist safe haven," therefore smuggling the occupation's imaginary "link" to terrorism through the back door. All bases are then covered: the liberals will clutch the human rights concern like a precious Teddy Bear, while nodding gravely about national security, while the conservatives get their terrorist bogeyman, while heaving supposed human rights hypocrisy back at liberals. The administration has struggled for years to find a perfect little advertising phrase for the occupation: stay the course lost the wind in its sails only through careful and relentless counter-articulation. "Fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here" never caught the liberal imagination, not least because of its utterly despicable ethical assumptions. But "It's not what we leave, but what we leave behind." That's gold, Jerry. Gold.

And for all the liberals on this board who have been intoning the variations of this nonsense, I will say, like Brother Malcolm, "I say and I say it again, ya been had. Ya been took. Ya been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amok."