Lobe: Neo-Cons Make Their War Aims in Iraq Clearer

[laststeamtrain]

Neo-Cons Make Their War Aims in Iraq Clearer
Jim Lobe

Since the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki began making increasingly clear that it wanted a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops, neo-conservatives have been making increasingly clear that they want none of it, and that their hope all along was to establish a permanent military presence to assert U.S. power in the heart of the Middle East.

Their position has become more explicit over the course of the last three weeks as Maliki, combined with McCain’s attacks on Obama’s withdrawal plan, effectively moved the debate over how long U.S. troops would stay in Iraq — and for what purpose — in a direction that is causing growing unease among the hawks inside the administration and out. Since then, not only has the Bush administration signed on to a “time horizon” demanded by Maliki, but Maliki himself effectively endorsed Sen. Obama’s proposed timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat troops by mid-2010. Finally, Sen. McCain, the neo-cons’ candidate, allowed (however cluelessly and however much he has since tried to confuse the issue) that the 2010 timetable was “pretty good”, subject, of course, to “conditions on the ground.”

This evolution appears to be deeply troubling to the neo-cons, not so much for the reasons they most often cite — that a democratic transition in Iraq is too fragile to endure the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops and/or that a resurgence of sectarian violence and even civil war would deal a devastating blow to U.S. (already severely diminished) credibility and influence in the region (although that is indeed a major neo-con worry) — as for the concern that Washington will lose Iraq as a base from which to project its military power in the region, particularly against Iran.

<more>

http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=174