Caitlin Johnstone today on the Rogue State’s refusal to leave:
If the initial invasion of Iraq was a violent sexual assault by a stranger in a dark alley, this one is more like an abusive husband raping his wife then making her cook him dinner.
Later, she notes the US State Department’s response to Iraq’s demand:
America is a force for good in the Middle East. Our military presence in Iraq is to continue the fight against ISIS and as the Secretary [Mike Pompeo1] has said, we are committed to protecting Americans, Iraqis, and our coalition partners. We have been unambiguous on how crucial our D-ISIS mission is in Iraq. At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership—not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East. Today, a NATO delegation is at the State Department to discuss increasing NATO’s role in Iraq, in line with the President’s desire for burden sharing in all of our collective defense efforts. There does, however, need to be a conversation between the U.S. and Iraqi governments not just regarding security, but about our financial, economic, and diplomatic partnership. We want to be a friend and partner to a sovereign, prosperous, and stable Iraq.
I’ve written myself, here for instance, on the demonstrable truth that defeating ISIS is not the priority of America and its junior partners in the middle east. Far from it. As part of his broader geopolitical analysis after the murder2 last week of General Muhammad Soleimani, political economist Michael Hudson makes the case that since Vietnam, Western “democracies” have been constrained in their ability to wage imperial wars premised on massed ground forces.
Rather, they must rely on overwhelming air supremacy (which is why Russia’s 2016 intervention in Syria was a game changer). And on regional proxy forces – Islamists absolutely included.
For her part, Caitlin sticks with the rape theme:
Just as a side note, if you ever find yourself in any kind of relationship with someone who violates your personal sovereignty in this way and then uses the sort of I’m-your-friend, this-is-for-your-own-good language used by the State Department above to justify it, run, don’t walk, out the door. Because you’re dealing with a full-fledged sociopath.
Speaking of sociopathy at its most deranged and delusional, click on this image for a gem of Alice in Genocidal Wonderland reasoning …
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- Like Dick Cheney and the Clintons, Pompeo, a right wing Presbyterian, exemplifies the revolving door between what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex and the Beltway. Says wiki: ‘In 1998, Pompeo and three other West Point friends acquired aircraft-part manufacturers Aero Machine, Precision Profiling, B&B Machine and Advance Tool & Die. Venture funding included a 2% investment from Koch Industries, Dallas-based Cardinal Investment, and Bain & Co. In 2006, he sold his interest to Highland Capital Management, its clients including Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream Aerospace, Cessna Aircraft, Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems and Raytheon Aircraft. Pompeo then became president of Sentry International, an oilfield equipment manufacturer that was also a partner of Koch Industries.’
- Corporate media slavishly echo Pompeo’s line of Soleimani planning “imminent attacks” on US personnel. Two points. One, Pompeo’s use of ‘imminent’ invokes the Bethlehem Doctrine, by which the US may take out anyone it deems a threat. If that doesn’t scare you, you are too far gone in your belief in the essential benignity of the Rogue State to be reached by reason. Two, Iraqi PM Abdul-Mahdi was to have met Soleimani the morning he was killed. Why? To discuss a diplomatic rapprochement Iraq was brokering between Tehran and Riyadh. Abdul-Mahdi told the Iraqi Parliament on January 5, the day after the killing, that Trump had personally thanked him for his peace efforts. This must have been calculated to convey that the Iranian general was safe to travel to Baghdad, even as the hit was being planned. The duplicity is chilling. Not that this exhonerates Trump’s Democrat critics, who begin their denunciations with “Soleimani was evil but …” For anyone not fully amnesiac, this from the party that cheered on Iraq’s invasion then started its own wars in Libya and Syria is a bit rich. As is the fact that such ‘liberal’ criticisms of Trump take as read the US of A’s god-given right to stay in Iraq as long as it sees fit. Which of course is the thrust of Caitlin’s post: a serial rapist so contemptuous of the law, so confident of his exceptionalist immunity from its writ – we’re an empire, we create our own reality – that he can stick around after the deed.
If Iraq were to sue the US for the massacre of over 2,000 innocent civilian and non – aligned combatants in the indiscriminate bombings of Mosel, the US as war criminals would be in hock to Iraq for $ billions. The war on Iraq was illegal and nothing more than an oil grab and country destruction and it is the US who needs to make reparation to the Iraqi people and any financial deposit by the US was at the expense of the country they invaded and now illegally occupy. There is no reason for the US to have troops stationed there as Soleimani organised Iraq’s fighting forces and trained them in fighting real terrorists(not the imagined ones the US is inventing for their own purposes)and are now more than capable of dealing with any ISIS threat.
The US is not simply a thieving and murdering regime and it goes well beyond sociopathic, it is now so rogue that it can justify all manner of evil conducted against a people for it’s own enrichment and will enlist the most barbaric and cruel mercenary and fundamentalist entities it can afford to pay in order to achieve it’s self interest.
I do hope that the Iraqis rise up against the US presence and start a body count of US personnel – it’s the only way to send this rogue regime a message saying we won’t tolerate your connivance and destructive presence.
The scariest aspect of the global situation is not that the world is ruled by gangsters – by a criminal elite with the US ruling class its head mafia “family”. It is that this “family” is under threat as never before. We saw with Gaddafi and Maduro that it will brook no challenge to its dollar hegemony, including but not confined to petrodollars. Yet that challenge is both inevitable and coming from powerful players. China and Russia are across-the-spectrum nuclear powers, giving them a range of options in responding to intimidation. Unlike, say, North Korea, their range of tactical and strategic missiles rules out any attempt to take them out with a single, audacious strike.
There’s no precedent I know of for the world’s foremost military power to sit back idly and watch its economic supremacy – on which its armed might is premised – ebb away.
We are in perilous times indeed. The more so when most people, Western intelligentsia in particular, are in evidence-defying denial of the most fundamental aspects of the realities driving an insane world order. In this they are of course aided by media. Liberal media especially, since its expensively educated consumers take its calm tones and willingness to challenge the establishment on secondary but still important matters as proof of its trustworthiness on matters central to ruling class interests.
PS not for the first time Susan – happy new year by the way – a comment from you has inspired a post. My initial reply of two days ago has morphed into Talking WW3 Blues