Why They Really Are in Iraq

Amidst all the rapidly changing "missions" and excuses, three real and deeply related reasons the Bushites are in Iraq are emerging from the pile. The obvious one is oil, and the enriching of Bushite crony corporations, now and for the immediate future. The second reason is highlighted in the Washington Post essay by Kevin Phillips Sunday:

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits -- oil and biblical expectations -- require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The final reason---the most concrete reason (in all senses of the word)--is the one that is in a sense the result of the first two, though it also has its own rationale: it is the establishment of permanent military bases in Iraq.

This is clearly well underway. In one of several recent stories, the British paper the Independent says: More than $280m (£160m) has already been spent on building up Al Asad air base, Balad air base, Camp Taji and Tallil air base, and the Bush administration has this year requested another $175m to enlarge them. These bases, which currently house more than 55,000 troops, have their own bus routes, pizza restaurants and supermarkets.I

I speculated that this was a primary reason two or three years ago, based in part on the news that the Pentagon was closing its big bases in a nervous Saudi Arabia---the presence of those bases desecrating holy lands was cited by Osama as a injury leading to terrorist attacks like 9-11.

Now several other better placed observers (including former Senator Gary Hart) are charging that these vast bases in Iraq are there for the long term. They are there to establish U.S. military presence in the region, to launch attacks against Iran and perhaps other "evil" nations thwarting Bushite corporate hegemony.

They are there to support the last U.S. domestic industry: the machinery of death and destruction. They are there and always were intended to be there to enforce an Empire built on lies and the deaths and broken lives resulting from this monstrous deceit.

If you wonder why billions have been poured into Iraq with no visible result in reconstruction or effect (the latest result being that the $200 million contract given for 142 medical clinics has resulted in only 20 clinics instead), one reason is that a great deal of that money has gone to create U.S. military bases, in order to ensure Middle East oil for the profit of crony corporations (aside from enriching crony corporations directly with the arms and construction contracts), and to enact the Rabid Fundamentalist Right vision of the Holy Land unto the Apocalypse, and to continue the last autonomous American industry, the military-industrial-political complex.

This is why the taxes we pay are being squandered and stolen, leaving us with nothing for our real needs, now and in the future.

This is why the infrastructure of Iraq was destroyed, and why the people of Iraq are living in an increasingly barbaric hell. This is why the U.S. will attack Iran, and the nation will rally around a discredited president when the missiles fly in the Middle East and the first terrorist strikes kill Americans within U.S. borders (which the Bushites are doing little to prevent)---or at least, I am almost convinced, this is the plan.

UPDATE: More on crony corporation abuse in Iraq and the missing nine billions.