But if offshore drilling can be euphemized into "deep-sea exploration," if massive layoffs can be called firing is "rightsizing" and the dismemberment of companies can be called "unlocking shareholder value," and of course if a troop escalation can be compared to an electric power "surge," then I guess we're supposed to find it perfectly acceptable that 50,000 American troops left behind in Iraq, possibly for those 100 years John McCain once fantasized about, be called a "residual force."
That, anyway, is how Barack Obama is choosing to characterize its alleged pull-out from Iraq, to be completed in 21 months. Leaving behind 50,000 troops means that there would be more "residual" U.S. troops in Iraq than there will be in Afghanistan even after the 17,000 additional troops Obama ordered for that hopeless theater are added to the current total of about 23,000. No wonder right-wingers who quake at the notion that American soldiers aren't deployed everywhere they possibly can are rejoicing. They know that this is no withdrawal. They know that it has all the ambiguity of a Mona Lisa smile.
It reminds me of the way Israel portrayed its own withdrawals from Lebanon over the years. The favored term, between 1983 and 2000, when it pulled back from occupying more than a third of the country down to a band a few miles deep along the Israeli border, was not "occupation." No, that sliver was referred to as "Israel's security zone." Media obliged. Even then, Israel found (as it still does in the West Bank and Gaza) that an occupation by any other name, and of so much as a square mile of another sovereign nation, is still an occupation. It finally withdrew entirely in May 2000.
The Obama administration and its new friends on the Republican right are congratulating themselves on working out what looks like the ideal compromise: an Iraq withdrawal that isn't quite a withdrawal (you wouldn't want to leave that new $1 billion embassy undefended, would you? Talk about an American real estate asset losing value), an occupation redefined as a "residual," an enduring expense, in lives and dollars and Iraqi resentments, recast as a favor of "limited missions" to the host nation: won't these guys be training new Iraqi recruits? Won't they be distributing soccer balls on Sundays? Won't they be building cultural bridges?
Obama in his speech at Camp LeJeune today even allowed himself a "Mission Accomplished" florish like George W. Bush's on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Obama said: “Let me say this as plainly as I can. By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”
You'd have thought that he'd have learned that lesson. Just because you declare a combat mission over doesn't mean the people who don't want you there will agree, as the last six years' death toll, still tallying victims, suggests. Especially when you leave 50,000 troops where they never belonged to start with.
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