Immediate Withdrawal
Not long after Baghdad fell to American troops, it was already apparent that the United States was part of the problem, not part of the solution, in Iraq; and that, as long as the American military occupied the country, matters would just get worse. Every passing month has only predictably confirmed that reality. There’s no reason to believe that the next year of our military presence will be any less destabilizing than the last.
Of course, as is now notoriously well known, the Bush administration helped such predictions along their un-merry course in a particularly heavy-handed way. At least three crucial aspects of Bush policy created a fatal brew, insuring that the complex situation in Iraq in 2003 would devolve in quick-time into today’s catastrophic tinderbox: First, there was the emphasis the President and his top officials put on the use of force as a primary response to global problems. (On this matter, they were fundamentalists.) Such an approach (when combined with the stripped-down, lean and mean U.S. military-lite Donald Rumsfeld was creating) acted as a recruiting agent for the insurgency that soon followed. Second, there was the deep-seated urge of Bush’s nearest and dearest to plunder the world, which meant, in the case of Iraq, those no-bid, cost-plus contracts to crony corporations which led to an Iraqi “reconstruction” that, in its essential corruption, deconstructed the country. Finally, let’s not forget their deepest urge of all, which was to occupy a key country smack in the middle of the oil heartlands of our planet and not depart. This guaranteed, as certainly as night follows day, both the insurgency that arose in Sunni areas and the angry feelings of Shiites toward their own “liberation.”
It is now a commonplace in Washington to point out that the Bush administration had no exit strategy from Iraq, but to this day few bother to say the obvious: It had no exit strategy because its top officials never planned on or expected to leave that country. That this was so is easy enough to chart via one of the least well-covered subjects of the period, the Pentagon’s determination to build huge, and hugely impressive, permanent military bases (called for a time “enduring camps”) in that country. As we know from a single New York Times front-page piece published just after Baghdad fell, the Pentagon was already planning four such permanent bases then. Among the hundred or so bases, encampments, and outposts of every size constructed since, they have never stopped building and upgrading a small number of them for endless future occupancy, which tells you all you need to know about their present plans to “withdraw” or “draw down” our Iraqi presence.
Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch (read more. . .)