It doesn't matter what the news from Iraq is, the official bottom line is always the same (for all our leaders, Democrat as well as Republican): we have to stay there until the job is done.
Tom Engelhardt, in a recent "Tom Dispatch," clarifies what this means by culling the recent agreement between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and finding the key word: "enduring."
As Tom forcefully demonstrates, that word points us to the true symptom of American intentions: the "enduring" bases that the Army Corps of Engineers began building immediately after the fall of Saddam, and which have "endured" through all the vagaries of the war. They have been, and continue to be, the one constant in U.S. behavior, and that constant tells us that our leaders are planning to make Iraq the headquarters for Middle East hegemony for a very long time.
Here is one forceful bit of the commentary, describing the origins of this determination to build and inhabit enduring bases in Iraq:
From the first Gulf War on, Saudi Arabia, the largest producer of energy on the planet, was being groomed as the American military bastion in the heart of the Middle East. But the Saudis grew uncomfortable -- think here, the claims of Osama bin Laden and Co. that U.S. troops were defiling the Kingdom and its holy places -- with the Pentagon's elaborate enduring camps on its territory. Something had to give -- and it wasn't going to be the American military presence in the Middle East. The answer undoubtedly seemed clear enough to top Bush administration officials. As an anonymous American diplomat told the Sunday Herald of Scotland back in October 2002, "A rehabilitated Iraq is the only sound long-term strategic alternative to Saudi Arabia. It's not just a case of swopping horses in mid-stream, the impending U.S. regime change in Baghdad is a strategic necessity."
And here is Tom's chilling conclusion about Bush Administration's ambitions for these bases:
Whatever the disasters of its misbegotten war, the Bush administration has, in a sense, itself "endured" in Iraq. Now, with only a year left, its officials clearly hope to write that endurance and those "enduring camps" into the genetic code of both countries -- an "enduring relationship" meant to outlast January 2009 and to outflank any future administration. In fact, by some official projections, the bases are meant to be occupied for up to 50 to 60 years without ever becoming "permanent."
If these bases are allowed to endure, they will be the platform for an unending (enduring?) series of skirmishes and interventions and wars to protect "America's vital interests" (read "access to oil") in the Middle East.
Iraqis are resisting this threat. In some sense, this is what both the Sunni and Shia insurgencies are all about. It is time for Americans to resist it also. If we don't reverse this policy we will be signing on to endless war.