I think the issue here is not to parse what it means to have boots on the ground...

But to view our actions in Iraq within the greater picture of American globalization. I don't care if you define what we will be doing as putting "boots on the ground" because what matters most about globalism is not discrete military action, the epitomized "invasion," but all of the other forms of intervention which are ignored or explained away.

The problem is not just that we are sending more soldiers to die in Iraq. What is at issue is how this action speaks to a greater philosophy of economic and military imperialism that cannot be singularly justified by the requests from the Iraqi government.

We have to identify where the tipping point exists for an institution like Iraq so that meaning behind our overall actions dictates anti-interventionism. In other words, it is not this singular event alone that worries me but instead what it may become and how it is representative of our corrupt history.

Some will say I have nothing to worry about. I counter that with overwhelming evidence of US foreign economic and military policy for decades upon decades. What does this evidence describe? A continuous series of economic and military interventions in foreign nations which took place for the sole purpose of ensuring American politico-economic interest. What happens in so many of these interventions? Complete and utter failure. And not simply a failure where the nation falls back to its ground state but a failure where there is almost total societal collapse and what grows out of this is either a morally bankrupt puppet state or a state which is much more our enemy than what we helped to depose.

What is happening in Iraq is not spontaneous in the sense that it was entirely predictable and, arguably, even inevitable. It is the symbolic consequence of Western capitalist incursion into as yet uncapitalized portions of the world.

We do not own the world. And the world is under no obligation to acquiesce to our own politico-economic agenda. But, at the same time and as a consequence of this, we should not owe foreign powers our political or military allegiance because of past misdeeds precisely because it becomes a vicious cycle which does nothing but further justify our own imperialist desires and produces nothing but corruption, suffering and death.

To counter our own imperialist greed, there has to be a starting point. We have to seize a given situation, where it would be easy to simply further the status quo, and tell ourselves "this is the point at which we must resist."

I'm afraid this may sound cliche but I'll say it anyway. When posed with the question "Where could we even begin?" I find comfort in the lyrics of Rage Against the Machine...

"What better place than here. What better time than now?"