The Washington double speak is baffling! Since when did "the state of mind contemplated by the use of the term," have anything to do with law... unless one of the signing party's are mentally or educationally impaired?
Base-less Strategy - FCNL Issues
Base-less Strategy - FCNL Issues
Defining Permanent Bases
The administration has drawn comparisons between the structure of bases in post-World War II Germany and in South Korea after 1953 and its expectations for the longevity of bases in Iraq. Taking that as his cue, two days after Petraeus and Crocker testified before the Senate, Senator James Webb (D-VA) asked Assistant Defense Secretary Mary Beth Long to define what, in the administration's jargon, is a "permanent" base. When Long conceded that there was no such definition in her department, let alone in the administration, Webb observed that the word described not what the bases will be but what they won't be.
"Permanent," it now seems, "refers more to the state of mind contemplated by the use of the term," according to Long, rather than a physical reality. Thus administration officials can testify, as they did repeatedly during the hearing just referenced, that the United States will have no permanent bases in Iraq because their "state of mind" is that the bases are non-permanent. By extension, for every negotiation involving security commitments and the forward basing of military units (and what authorities these units might be permitted), defining the meaning of such terms as "permanent" and "commitment" becomes a recurring task. All participants in a potential agreement have to be clear as to the connotations as well as the denotations of the language used. Equally, like the dog that didn't bark in the middle of the night in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' mystery "Silver Blaze," negotiators need to agree on what is not meant by such words.
