On Iraq Troop Withdrawals, The Emperor & His Wannabe Heir Have No Clothes

What’s a warmonger to do?

The Iraqi government is feeling its oats because of a semblance of stability on the military front, there is a chance that provincial elections in the fall might bring some calm to the fractious political front, and a security agreement that gives Washington the ranch and Baghdad sloppy seconds will be DOA unless it is rewritten to respect Iraqi national sovereignty and includes a U.S. troop withdrawal timetable.

Worse still, President Bush and John McCain find themselves in an exceedingly uncomfortable position because Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and his security surrogates and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama seem to be on the same page regarding that timetable.

But then the Iraq war has never really been a war of liberation for Bush and the man who would represent a third Bush term. Any doubt about that was removed yesterday when the White House rejected out of hand any kind of timetable.

The war, of course, has been about advancing America’s agenda in the Middle East. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was just a pretext for foisting the neocon wet dream of democracy on a bunch of people who worship a false God and wear funny clothes.

The welfare of Iraq has been well down a priority list that includes a slew of military bases from which Iran can more conveniently be subverted, target practice for thugs from Blackwater and other U.S. security firms ostensibly guarding diplomats, awarding tens of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected U.S. corporations to supply troops with six bucks a pop Coca-Colas and contaminated water, opening the door to rapacious U.S. oil giants to suck up Iraq’s vast untapped oil wealth, and of course scratching Israel’s back.

Bush will soon be back at his own ranch searching among the scrub brush for his squandered legacy, but this turn of developments is particularly inconvenient for McCain, who in response to a question posed at a Council on Foreign Relations confab in 2004 regarding what should happen if a sovereign Iraq government asked the U.S. to withdraw its troops, said:

“Well, if that scenario evolves then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. . . . I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.”

McCain is pretty much at sea without cue cards, so this was a typically mumble-jumble response, but it was about as unambiguous as he gets.

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