Business as Usual in Iraq

[unhappycamper]

Business as Usual in Iraq
by Marjorie Cohn
Published on Monday, September 13, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Last week, President Obama ceremoniously announced that U.S. combat operations had ended in Iraq. As Democrats face an uphill battle in the upcoming midterm elections, Obama felt he had to make good on his campaign promise to move the fighting from Iraq to Afghanistan. But while he has escalated the killing in Afghanistan, it’s business as usual in Iraq.

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Obama put the cost of the wars at $3 trillion, an awesome sum that could well be used to provide universal health care, quality education, and improved infrastructure to create jobs in this country. But he overlooked the cost of treating our disabled veterans, many of whom return with traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder. “There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt,” Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes wrote in the Washington Post. “The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war,” they added.

Regardless of how Obama tries to spin his message about the disaster the United States has created in Iraq, 60 percent of Americans think the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent believe it wasn’t worth sacrificing American lives, and only one quarter feel it made us safer. The majority of Iraqis also oppose the U.S. occupation.

As I ponder events unfolding in Iraq, and Obama's efforts to explain them to us, I am reminded of the highly decorated Marine Corps General Smedley Butler. Nearly 70 years ago he declared that, "War is a racket." He was referring to the use of Marines in Central America during the early 20th Century to protect U.S. corporations like United Fruit, which were exploiting agricultural resources in that region. In my view, the Iraq war had a similar purpose – to secure the rich Iraqi oil fields and make them available to corporations that will continue to feed America's petroleum addiction.

In a more honest speech, Obama would have said we successfully removed a leader who was unfriendly to American geopolitical and economic interests and replaced him with people beholden to U.S. money and materiel. U.S. forces have been downsized and re-branded. The “enduring presence posts” (new nomenclature for U.S. bases in Iraq) will ensure that we maintain hegemony in Iraq. Mission accomplished.