COMMENTARY:

Withdrawal Symptoms

In violation of international law, Bremer started issuing orders on how the Iraqi economy would be run and who would get what. Bremer began to organize what the Bush administration wanted for the whole region---privatization. Never mind the fact that Bremer’s illegal orders also created the basis for the current civil war in Iraq. Insofar as different ethnic groups would stand to benefit more than others from the new arrangements, it was clear that some groups would be cut out all together. The Bush-supported Maleki government is a propped-up hoax that is unrepresentative of the interests of millions of Iraqi citizens who have been disenfranchised within their new “democratic” state.

Foreign-owned businesses and enterprises would be empowered to ignore the limitations imposed by a now-defunct Iraqi Constitution that prohibited the sale of the nation’s resources to foreigners. In short, profits were to be had as the Bush administration pushed for a Free Trade Area (FTA) that would extend throughout the Middle East. It was not really designed to bring democracy, in the sense of a political opening for the unrepresented and excluded of the region. Rather, it was a democratization of Iraq’s oil resources so that privatized firms, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, could capitalize on new economic arrangements that leave the Iraqi people with growing unemployment and deprive them of the oil revenues of their own nation. Iraq may have as much as 300 billion barrels of oil untapped. With oil headed toward $70 dollars a barrel, the oil wealth of Iraq could be worth as much as $21 trillion. Here we have the real rationale of an endless occupation.

Never mind the fact that over 60 percent of the American public wants the war to end now. That is what the November 2006 elections were supposed to be about. Those elections gave the Democrats a mandate to develop a spine and stand up to the Liar-in-Chief about the Iraq War. What happened? They started to play politics with the Republican rope-a-dope strategy of “support our troops.” Never mind the fact that real support for the troops would be to bring them home after four tours of duty and keep them alive from the bullets and RPG launchers that have come to symbolize the nature of the civil war.

What was the plan to begin with? Was it to remove WMDs? Was it to spread democracy in the Middle East? Or was it really another chance for the West to play the “Great Game”---try to control Eurasia and all of the oil down to the Persian Gulf? Some historians and commentators track the strategy back to the late 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter announced the Carter Doctrine in a State of the Union message. It was a declaration in the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine. If any nation or power should seek to cut off American access to the oil supplies of the Middle East, military action would be taken in order to forestall or eliminate such a threat. Bush has merely fulfilled what the Carter Doctrine promised.

The Bush effort has not succeeded, however, because the course it has taken in Iraq amounts to what the policy wonks call a “failed strategy.” That simplistic analysis conveniently ignores the dirty truth that the grand strategy of the Great Game is one of imperialism and establishing American hegemony over not only the Middle East, but also the rest of the globe. For if the U.S. can deny the Russians and Chinese access to new energy sources, then the U.S. can put a stop to the threat of two potential rivals, or Hegemons, that might be capable of moving in on America’s control of both the Middle East and the world.