Since my U.S. Marine son came home in one piece from Iraq (picture below), I've been taking some time off from dKos and getting used to sleeping through the night again.
Not that I'm not taking my eye off of war news -- far from it: I grieve with every casualty report -- but I've given myself permission to hang back a bit, for my health, after enduring seven months of extreme emotional stress.
But then I saw this article, "Withdrawal won't happen," by Patrick Seale in Saturday's Guardian, and noting that no one else had remarked on it, I thought it should receive a little more exposure in Kos World.
Because who can resist an "I told you so" of this magnitude?
Patrick Seale, a British writer and an expert on Middle East politics, particularly Syria, doesn't mince words:
Almost unnoticed, the war in Iraq entered a new phase last week. Laconic statements from the White House and the Pentagon confirmed what had long been suspected - the US is planning a long-term military presence in Iraq. This is a geopolitical development of the first importance. In spite of current difficulties - May was the most lethal month for American soldiers since 2004, with 119 killed - the United States firmly intends to maintain control of Iraq and its vast oil reserves. Iraq's neighbours, and energy-hungry states and oil companies, will take note.
Sure enough, Seale writes, by resorting to the ever-present tactic of fear and surprise "White House spokesman Tony Snow confirmed that President Bush wanted a lengthy troop presence in Iraq. 'The situation in Iraq, and indeed, the larger war on terror, are things that are going to take a long time,' he said."
George W. Bush wanted to invade Iraq, he wanted our troops to stay and fight despite no WMD, he wanted them to remain even after Saddam Hussein was captured, he wants them to risk their lives though Saddam is now dead and the behemoth U.S. military cannot -- will never be able to -- win a war of insurgency.
This, despite the American people wanting out.
And Seale goes on:
Such statements, and the planning that goes with them, make nonsense of the current debate - in Congress, the press and the public - about a date for withdrawal from Iraq, and whether the surge is producing results. The administration is looking way beyond that.
Indeed this makes a mockery of all our protests, our diaries, our pleas to Congress, our letters to editors everywhere.
If there were no oil in Iraq, the US would not be there.
Did not all we thinking people say just this while the drums of war were beating, just months after 9/11? Did we not shake our heads and gape as both the press and the American people were duped into invading Iraq because of mushroom-cloud threats, the need to "fight them over there so we don't fight them over here," and the itch to retaliate for the sting of being attacked on our own soil?
I most certainly did, even when my son shocked us with the news three years ago that he was enlisting in the Marines. "But you know it's about the oil," I told my son. "But Saddam needed to be taken out," he replied. "He needed to be taken out because of the oil," I said.
And WE were seen as unpatriotic.
Seen in this light, the US enterprise - for all the talk of democracy - is an unmistakable neo-colonial or imperial project such as the region suffered at the hands of Britain and France in an earlier age. Jimmy Carter was prescient when he declared last year: "There are people in Washington ... who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq ... the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region."
And what a political mess we'll still have to face on the global stage:
As early as 2004, Jessica Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington, said permanent bases would reinforce Iraqi suspicions that the US launched the war to get a hand on Iraqi oil, with a puppet government in Baghdad.
Finally, how many of us were aware of the cost and breadth of inserting a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq?
Yet the building of US military bases in Iraq continues apace, at a cost of over $1bn a year. Shortly after the invasion, the US established 110 bases in Iraq. The present plan appears to consolidate these into 14 "enduring bases" in Iraqi Kurdistan, at Baghdad airport, in Anbar province, and in the southern approaches to Baghdad. This does not point to an early US disengagement. And nor does the construction of a US embassy able to house 1,000 staff on a 100-acre site on the banks of the Tigris - the biggest US embassy in the world.
Sorry, folks, as a military mom I find this all more than a bit depressing. I'm not naive; I know what access to energy sources means to the economies of the U.S. (and Britain and the EU and China and India). I have a garden-variety MBA, and I read the New York Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times every day, the Economist each week. I know wars have been fought over less.
But I STILL can't get over the way the Bushies pushed through their oil-centric agenda on the backs and blood of our troops, capitalizing on the post-9/11 vulnerability of the Western world (save France) and profiteering from it. That no matter how much we yell and holler and write and protest and laugh and cry with Jon Stewart, we're just banging our heads against a wall of complicity, the proverbial military-industrial-political complex, more impenetrable than we can imagine.
What's to be done? I sure don't know. Do we just wait for a post-Bush era of diplomacy, while hundreds of more troops die? Does anyone, anywhere, have a plausible solution?
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OK, on a slightly happier note: for all the Kossacks who were so supportive while my son was in Iraq, here's a picture of us taken in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend: