Will the U.S. Ever Leave Iraq?

 
Withdrawal Won't Happen: Peel back the political theatrics, and the plain truth about the U.S. conquest of Iraq is easy to see. The Democratic majority elected to Congress on a withdraw-from-Iraq platform, has made all the necessary back room deals and sniveling public excuses necessary to assure the continued and expanded U.S. occupation of Iraq. It seems the weapons and petroleum industries bought their way in before the election, and are now pumping serious bribe money into the Democratic campaign coffers.

Let's take a look at what the U.S. has been doing inside Iraq, to help the Iraqi people prepare for independent self government.

The United States is nearing completion of 14 fortified military bases in Iraq; the Pentagon has called them "enduring bases". They include four Air Force bases, strategically sited to dominate and control Baghdad, Iraq's major oil pipelines, and its largest oil port. Smaller bases follow pipelines like Crusader forts along pilgramage routes in days of yore.

The new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, scheduled for completion this year but delayed due to incompetent construction work by a corrupt Halliburton subsidiary, is a heavily armed and fortified command compound with independent water and power facilities, built to house over 1500 full time residents and accommodate 4000 workers.

The United States declared Iraq a sovereign State in June of 2004. Compare the basic definition of sovereignty, "supreme authority within a territory", with the sovereign rights asserted by the United States over Iraq, including 97 so-called binding instructions controlling Iraqi law and internal affairs. The U.S. has asserted its authority to attack sovereign Iraqi territory and kill Iraqi citizens regardless of Iraqi government objections. By U.S. decree, American military personnel, American mercenaries, and American oil companies shall be immune from prosecution in Iraqi courts for crimes committed inside Iraq against Iraqi citizens.

Propaganda ceremonies and diplomatic lies aside, Iraq is not a sovereign nation, it is an occupied territory. This has all happened before: The British set up a "sovereign" puppet government in Iraq in the 1920s. The Iraqi people eventually revolted, threw the occupying power out, and the end result of this violent and disorderly process was... the Saddam Hussein regime.

The so-called sectarian civil war in Iraq began under highly suspicious circumstances. In September of 2005, two British SAS soldiers disguised as Arab civilians were arrested by Iraqi police, in a car loaded with weapons and explosives. The British Army used tanks to break into the jail where these unlawful combatants were being held, to retrieve them before they could be interrogated. Reports suggesting a pattern of staged terrorism designed to incite violence between Iraqi militias and religious groups may gain credibility in light of open U.S. proposals to use terrorism against "the insurgents".

The Salvador option is a name given to a proposal to recruit and train death squads in Iraq, to carry out terrorist attacks against opponents of U.S. policy. John Negroponte, the first U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, coordinated U.S. support for right-wing death squads in Central America during the Regan administration. Special Police Commandos, secret police trained by veterans of U.S. terrorist programs in El Salvador and Columbia, kidnap, torture, and murder at will. This is what U.S. taxpayers get for the $3 billion approved by Congress to recruit and train Iraqi paramilitary units.

Dozens of dead bodies are dumped daily in Baghdad, bearing mute testimony to a consistent pattern of torture and execution. Five hundred mutilated bodies dumped into the River Tigris have been washed up in two years. Corporate press reports pointedly ignore the massive scale and consistent pattern of this reign of terror; editorial policy from On High seems to be "blame the Iraqi people and move on".

190 Iraqi academics and 224 health care professionals were murdered between April 2003 and April 2006. This long term program appears to be aimed at removing Iraq's brain - the teachers and educated professional class. These people, essential to the establishment and functioning of a democratic self-governing Iraq, were initially killed by snipers at long range - no motive, no suspects. The assassins do not discriminate on the basis of religious sect or political affiliation. Today the same targeted professionals are being kidnapped and murdered by paramilitary death squads. 106 reporters and 39 journalistic support staff have also been murdered, the ultimate form of press censorship.

Saddam Hussein's last public statement before the fall of Baghdad included a threat to use a secret super-weapon against the Americans. That secret weapon was the ungovernable Iraqi people, and he lived long enough to see the any hope of a U.S. military victory fade away. Recent polls indicate that over half the Iraqi people now approve of killing "coalition forces", a.k.a. the U.S. military and its mercenary counterparts.

As Major Thomas Neemeyer, the head American intelligence officer for the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division said, "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind would be to kill the entire population."

The United States can not get out of Iraq without arming the Iraqi government adequately to assure real Iraqi sovereignty in the form of secure borders. Nor can the United States get out of Iraq without letting go of the oil industry it came to take. Given real freedom of choice, the Iraqi people would most likely reconstruct the functional aspects of the Saddam era State Socialist economy. None of the above are acceptable to any U.S. industrial interests, or to any viable faction within the DemoPublican Party. But the American people want out, and are growing increasingly impatient.

Somebody's gonna catch hell.