Mods: Buzzflash email text, so I've put more than four paragraphs:Shifting Footprints and Messianic Missions: Staying In Iraq 'Till Kingdom ComeMaureen Farrell returns to BuzzFlash today to explore a vitally significant issue that only periodically emerges in the mainstream press:
the building of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq.
As one BuzzFlash reader wrote recently to us, we might have it all wrong in asserting, like most Americans now do, that Bush is losing the war in Iraq (not to mention that it was unnecessary from the get-go). From the perspective of the Busheviks, they are winning the war, our reader asserts.
Why?
Because their real goals in Iraq are quite different from their publicly stated arguments. Their real goals are controlling Middle-Eastern oil and building enormous permanent military bases in Iraq. That may also explain the billion-dollar-plus Saddam palace style U.S. Embassy the Bush Administration is constructing in Baghdad.
When you look at it from the Neo-Con perspective (and not the false propaganda reasons Bush has given for the war), the American and Iraqi deaths are just so much cannon fodder in the cause of making Iraq a virtual American protectorate.
The Busheviks may very well be keeping their eye on the prize: oil and gargantuan military bases that are built in non-urban areas difficult to attack. In short, the White House may not care about the Iraqi civil war (except so far as it affects domestic politics). In fact, an Iraq split up into three sectors might benefit the Bushevik goals of oil control and a long-term military presence.
The reader who proposed these ideas believes that the Busheviks might simply let the mayhem continue around secured oil fields and U.S. military bases, as long as the death and injury are kept out of the U.S. "footprints on Iraqi soil."
So, that may explain why we believe the Iraq War is a devastating loss, and the Busheviks -- with the Rumsfeld braggadocio -- believe that they are winning it by achieving their real goals.
CLICK LINK ABOVE FOR ARTICLE:
Remember the spring of 2003? Back when Americans were basking in promises of "cakewalks" and flowers strewn at U.S. soldiers' feet? Saddam's statue fell, the President dressed up in his flight suit, and all was well with the world. The national mood (i.e. arrogance) reverberated on television, magazines and in newspapers. What was not to love?
Then came summer, and doubts began to fester. "They kept telling that as soon as you get to Baghdad you would be going home," one soldier's wife told the Guardian in July, 2003. "The way home is through Baghdad, they said."
And though Bush promised troops would not remain in Iraq "for one day longer than is necessary," within weeks, officials began talking about "maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq."
At the time, Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, scoffed at Mr. Bush's promise. "This idea that we will be in just as long as we need to and not a day more -- we've got to get over that rhetoric," he said. "It is rubbish. We're going to be there a long time. We must reorganize our military to be there a long time."
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