Opinion Editorials, June 2007
June 2007 Opinion Editorial Links
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Open-Ended US Occupation of Iraq Finally Admitted
By William Hardiker
ccun.org, June 13, 2007
For the duration of the US war in Iraq the Bush Administration has venomously denied that America's strategy was anything other than one of disarmament, liberation and (incredulously) democratization. American officials have long tried to make the point that the US presence in Iraq will not be a permanent or long one. Any accusations of long term occupation have been consistently denied.
This was articulated in characteristic style by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in an April 2003 press conference when he stated that any suggestion that the United States is planning a permanent military presence in Iraq is "inaccurate and unfortunate", adding, "I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed at any meeting....The likelihood of it seems to me so low that it does not surprise me that it's never been discussed in my presence, to my knowledge. I think any impression that is left, that the United States plans some sort of a permanent presence in that country, I think is a signal to the people of that country that's inaccurate and unfortunate, because we don't plan to function as an occupier, we don't plan to prescribe to any new government how we ought to be arranged in their country". That makes things pretty clear- more or less.
This week we start to get a whiff of that which was never really in doubt. White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters that the President is now modeling the future of his "bloody" fiasco in Iraq on the fifty year US experience in South Korea. Troops are to be deployed for the long haul in order to provide, in Snow's words, "a security presence" and to serve as a "force of stability". The length of that commitment? "A long time", Snow said. Tens of thousands of US troops have been deployed in South Korea since 1953.
Are any surprised? In 2003 The New York Times reported that, "the US is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region". The report referred to one such base at Baghdad's international airport, another near Al-Nasiriyah in the south, the third at the H-1 airstrip in the Western desert, and the forth at Bashur AB in the north. Can any doubt that for strategic and corporate reasons a permanent US military presence in Iraq was always the agenda of the Bush cabal?
But then surprise it may well do. Has anyone bothered to inform Iraqi officials of the the Bush Administration's long overdue but now official confession regarding it's Neo-Imperialist strategy in Iraq?. If Iraqi's are united in one thing only, surely it is that they do not wish to live under open-ended occupation.
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