AFF K IRAQ TONY 45 - WNDI 2010 Butler/Johnson 1 Iraq Iraq Affirmative SOLID AS A ROCK*K Aff Section Permanent Occupation 1AC The United States has built

WNDI 2010 1 Butler/Johnson Iraq Iraq Affirmative SOLID AS A ROCK!

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***K Aff Section*** Permanent Occupation 1AC The United States has built an imperial powerhouse on permanent occupation of territory— we have continued this trend in Iraq, where we have used language of democracy to justify totalitarian ends, with no end in sight. Salah Hassan , associate professor and director of the Honors Program in the Department of English at Michigan State University, Never Ending Occupations, New Centennial Review, Spring 2008 A military occupation that ends with the complete withdrawal of all foreign troops from the occupied territory almost always is associated with political failure, lost causes, and wasted lives . Just as the launching of an aggressive war of occupation is a messy political affair, so is the postwar situation with the looming prospect of a withdrawal that invariably raises questions about what was accomplished by the war. This last point explains the intense political anxiety about exit strategies and disengagement from the field of battle . The cessation of hostilities and the handing over of authority to a presumably sovereign government—as was the case in Iraq in 2004—may mark the end of the legal occupation, but regimes of occupation often project themselves long into the future, averting complete withdrawal, and instituting a permanent presence in the occupied territory through the establishment of garrisoned military bases that have come to characterize never-ending occupations . For the purposes of this essay, I am particularly interested in current U.S. political discourse on the occupation of Iraq and [End Page 1] discussions of the future of that particularly violent intervention that appears to have no end . I also want to suggest that the United States has a 100-year history of never-ending occupations that have contributed to contemporary views of it as an imperial power . At the core of this paper is an analysis of the political language of rights and freedom mobilized by the Bush White House to justify the war. Critics of the war have tended to dismiss the discourse of democracy as meaningless propaganda designed to conceal U.S. strategic interests in the region, but Presidential speeches, policy statements and legislation provide an important set of coordinates for analyzing the political and cultural ethos that underwrites never-ending military occupations. SOLID AS A ROCK!

WNDI 2010 3 Butler/Johnson Iraq Permanent Occupation 1AC But, this isn’t the first time—the imperial nature of occupation is part and parcel of a tradition established with the occupation of Puerto Rico, the Philippeans, Germany, Japan and now Afghanistan and Iraq, these invasions were meant to be temporary installations of democratic values, but when these countries resist they are met with mass murder and unending war.