[Peace-discuss] More Obama lies on Iraq war

[C. G. Estabrook]

  "...by playing the sectarian and ethnic cards, [the US government] also 
prevented the emergence of a national resistance movement and a humiliating 
Vietnam-style pullout. The signs are it wants to create a new [?] form of 
outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region. 
The struggle to regain Iraq's independence has only just begun."

The US isn't leaving Iraq, it's rebranding the occupation
Obama says withdrawal is on schedule, but renaming or
outsourcing combat troops won't give Iraqis back their country
o Seumas Milne
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 August 2010 21.30 BST

For most people in Britain and the US, Iraq is already history. Afghanistan has 
long since taken the lion's share of media attention, as the death toll of Nato 
troops rises inexorably. Controversy about Iraq is now almost entirely focused 
on the original decision to invade: what's happening there in 2010 barely registers.

That will have been reinforced by Barack Obama's declaration this week that US 
combat troops are to be withdrawn from Iraq at the end of the month "as promised 
and on schedule". For much of the British and American press, this was the real 
thing: headlines hailed the "end" of the war and reported "US troops to leave Iraq".

Nothing could be further from the truth. The US isn't withdrawing from Iraq at 
all – it's rebranding the occupation. Just as George Bush's war on terror was 
retitled "overseas contingency operations" when Obama became president, US 
"combat operations" will be rebadged from next month as "stability operations".

But as Major General Stephen Lanza, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told the 
New York Times: "In practical terms, nothing will change". After this month's 
withdrawal, there will still be 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, 
"advising" and training the Iraqi army, "providing security" and carrying out 
"counter-terrorism" missions. In US military speak, that covers pretty well 
everything they might want to do.

Granted, 50,000 is a major reduction on the numbers in Iraq a year ago. But what 
Obama once called "the dumb war" goes remorselessly on. In fact, violence has 
been increasing as the Iraqi political factions remain deadlocked for the fifth 
month in a row in the Green Zone. More civilians are being killed in Iraq than 
Afghanistan: 535 last month alone, according to the Iraqi government – the worst 
figure for two years.

And even though US troops are rarely seen on the streets, they are still dying 
at a rate of six a month, their bases regularly shelled by resistance groups, 
while Iraqi troops and US-backed militias are being killed in far greater 
numbers and al-Qaida – Bush's gift to Iraq – is back in business across swaths 
of the country. Although hardly noticed in Britain, there are still 150 British 
troops in Iraq supporting US forces.

Meanwhile, the US government isn't just rebranding the occupation, it's also 
privatising it. There are around 100,000 private contractors working for the 
occupying forces, of whom more than 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly "third 
country nationals", typically from the developing world. One Peruvian and two 
Ugandan security contractors were killed in a rocket attack on the Green Zone 
only a fortnight ago.

The US now wants to expand their numbers sharply in what Jeremy Scahill, who 
helped expose the role of the notorious US security firm Blackwater, calls the 
"coming surge" of contractors in Iraq. Hillary Clinton wants to increase the 
number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 
to 7,000, to be based in five "enduring presence posts" across Iraq.

The advantage of an outsourced occupation is clearly that someone other than US 
soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq. It also helps get round 
the commitment, made just before Bush left office, to pull all American troops 
out by the end of 2011. The other getout, widely expected on all sides, is a new 
Iraqi request for US troops to stay on – just as soon as a suitable government 
can be stitched together to make it.

What is abundantly clear is that the US, whose embassy in Baghdad is now the 
size of Vatican City, has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon. One 
reason for that can be found in the dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq's 
biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies, 
including three of the Anglo-American oil majors that exploited Iraqi oil under 
British control before 1958.

The dubious legality of these deals has held back some US companies, but as Greg 
Muttitt, author of a forthcoming book on the subject, argues, the prize for the 
US is bigger than the contracts themselves, which put 60% of Iraq's reserves 
under long-term foreign corporate control. If output can be boosted as sharply 
as planned, the global oil price could be slashed and the grip of recalcitrant 
Opec states broken.

The horrific cost of the war to the Iraqi people, on the other hand, and the 
continuing fear and misery of daily life make a mockery of claims that the US 
surge of 2007 "worked" and that Iraq has come good after all.

It's not only the hundreds of thousands of dead and 4 million refugees. After 
seven years of US (and British) occupation, tens of thousands are still tortured 
and imprisoned without trial, health and education has dramatically 
deteriorated, the position of women has gone horrifically backwards, trade 
unions are effectively banned, Baghdad is divided by 1,500 checkpoints and blast 
walls, electricity supplies have all but broken down and people pay with their 
lives for speaking out.

Even without the farce of the March elections, the banning and killing of 
candidates and activists and subsequent political breakdown, to claim – as the 
Times did today – that "Iraq is a democracy" is grotesque. The Green Zone 
administration would collapse in short order without the protection of US troops 
and security contractors. No wonder the speculation among Iraqis and some US 
officials is of an eventual military takeover.

The Iraq war has been a historic political and strategic failure for the US. It 
was unable to impose a military solution, let alone turn the country into a 
beacon of western values or regional policeman. But by playing the sectarian and 
ethnic cards, it also prevented the emergence of a national resistance movement 
and a humiliating Vietnam-style pullout. The signs are it wants to create a new 
form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and 
region. The struggle to regain Iraq's independence has only just begun.