[D66] Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq: Prelude to wider war

[Antid Oto]

Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq: Prelude to wider war
27 October 2011

While promoted by President Obama and his apologists as the fulfillment of a
campaign promise and a turn toward peace, the US military’s forced withdrawal
from Iraq only sets the stage for new and bloodier conflicts.

Obama’s announcement from the White House last Friday that all US troops will be
out of the country before the end of the year followed Washington’s inability to
secure from the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki approval of
legislation granting US forces blanket immunity from Iraqi law.

Such impunity is a minimal condition demanded by the Pentagon for US military
deployments all over the world. However, so bitter are the experiences of the
Iraqi population with a whole litany of war crimes—from the torture chambers of
Abu Ghraib to the barbaric siege of Fallujah—that no major Iraqi party could
afford to be identified with extending such protection to the American military.

The claim that the impending withdrawal is the fulfillment of a campaign promise
goes well beyond putting a good face on a bad situation. The December 2011
withdrawal date was set not by Obama but by the Bush administration in a Status
of Forces Agreement negotiated with Baghdad in 2008.

While Obama won the election in large part by posturing as an antiwar candidate,
like his Republican predecessor he fully intended to renegotiate this agreement,
keeping behind as many 20,000 US troops (later scaled down to a proposal for as
few as 3,000) as “trainers” and “advisers.” To that end, he sent a continuous
stream of cabinet secretaries and senior US military brass to Baghdad in an
arm-twisting exercise that failed.

“The tide of war is receding,” Obama declared in a flight of rhetorical fancy
during his announcement last Friday. On the contrary, the water is rising, and fast.

The eight-and-a-half-year war in Iraq, a criminal act of aggression launched on
the basis of lies, has claimed the lives of over a million Iraqis together with
nearly 4,500 US troops, while costing Washington over $1 trillion. It has turned
into a debacle for US imperialism, which has been unable to install a reliable
puppet, has seen oil contracts go to its rivals in China and Russia, and faces
growing Iranian influence over Baghdad’s policies.

Yet Washington has by no means abandoned the predatory aims that led to war. The
drive to war arose fundamentally out of the historic decline of American
capitalism, which has only deepened with the US and world economy plunging into
the greatest crisis since the Great Depression. In the attempt to offset the
loss of its position as the world’s top manufacturer and its previously
undisputed dominance over the affairs of world capitalism, US imperialism has
turned increasingly to militarism as a means of exerting hegemony over strategic
regions, markets and resources.

The US is by no means leaving Iraq to its own devices. On the contrary, it is
leaving in place some 16,000 US personnel, including CIA operatives and a
mercenary army of some 8,000 security contractors under the control of the State
Department. Meanwhile, negotiations are continuing to reach a deal with Baghdad
on a military training mission.

An article by one Michael Knights, a Pentagon consultant specializing in Iraq,
published by Foreign Policy suggests another alternative for securing American
dominance. The article voices concern over the fate of the Iraqi army in the
wake of the US withdrawal and the threat posed to US interests by growing
Iranian influence.

Knight writes that, “for many [Iraqi] officers, the solution is another
autocrat.” He quotes one as saying, “Weapons and training are needed but first
politics must be fixed by a strongman, only then can an army emerge.”

Describing the army as “a sacred vessel in which Iraqi nationalism burns
brightly” and the institution “least susceptible to Iranian influence,” Knights
concludes: “Though the road ahead will be tough, the ties forged in battle by
the US and Iraqi militaries are worth fighting for.”

Little needs to be added to turn this piece into an explicit argument for a
US-backed coup to bring a new version of Saddam Hussein to power as a means of
resolving the crisis created by the overthrow and murder of the old one.

Obama’s proclamations about peace being at hand were followed in short order by
bellicose threats from both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta directed against Iran.

“Iran would be badly miscalculating if they did not look at the entire region
and all of our presence in many countries in the region, both in bases [and] in
training, with NATO allies, like Turkey,” Clinton told CNN last Sunday.

Panetta was even more explicit, pointing to some 40,000 US troops stationed
throughout the Middle East (23,000 across the Iraqi border in Kuwait) within
striking distance of Iran. “So we will always have a force that will be present
and that will deal with any threats from Iran,” he said.

In the wake of Obama’s saber rattling over a bizarre “terrorist plot” that
supposedly implicated Teheran, these warnings signal a further ratcheting up of
US threats of military force against Iran. Washington is already campaigning to
win Europe’s support for imposing sanctions on the country’s central bank, a
form of economic blockade that rises to the level of an act of war.

Even more ominously, Panetta cast the impending withdrawal of US troops from
Iraq as “a turning point” in the reorientation of US strategic power toward the
Asia-Pacific region, directed against China.

Speaking at Yokota Air Base outside Tokyo, Panetta referred to a list of threats
in Asia that he said required more attention as the US pulls its troops out of
Iraq. Prominent among them was that of “rising powers,” an illusion to Beijing.

He expounded on this theme in an opinion piece written for a Japanese newspaper,
stressing that the US and Japan face a common threat from China. “China is
rapidly modernizing its military,” he wrote, “but with a troubling lack of
transparency, coupled with increasingly assertive activity in Asia and the
Pacific.” In reality, China’s military budget is less than one-sixth that of the US.

The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya have been waged to assert
hegemony over key oil producing regions not so much to meet America’s own needs,
but rather to secure strategic advantage by controlling vital resources needed
by American capitalism’s economic rivals, chief among them China. Now Washington
is turning increasingly toward direct confrontation with China itself.

Thus, the debacle in Iraq has produced not a “receding tide of war,” but the
threat of far greater military conflagrations.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/pers-o27.shtml