Tag: George W. Bush

One of the least reported issues in the continuing war and occupation of Iraq is that of plans for permanent military bases and a long term occupation of Iraq by the US Military. John McCain has made the statement that the US should stay in Iraq for the next 100 years.

As per CNN last month, at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, a crowd member asked McCain about a Bush statement that troops could stay in Iraq for 50 years. “Maybe 100,” McCain replied.

Let’s look at the responses from Hillary and Obama.

The two following quotes are from the CNN link noted above in the introduction.

“He said recently he could see having troops in Iraq for 100 years,” Clinton said at an Arlington, Virginia, rally last week in a line she’s repeated on the campaign trail. “Well, I want them home within 60 days of my becoming president of the United States.”

Obama took a similar tack.

“Sen. McCain said the other day that we might be mired for 100 years in Iraq — which is reason enough not to give him four years in the White House,” Obama has said on several occasions.

and the come-back from McCain…

In Baghdad, this troupe of five clowns called themselves the “Happy Family Group.” Their purpose was to bring some entertainment and relief to children whose lives had been scarred by violence and fear. They called their show, “A Child Is Just As Sacred As A Country.” By every account, the show was popular among children, an oasis of laughter in the desert of violence.  Their story over the past six months is tragic and inspiring.  It also highlights the plight of Iraqi refugees.

Picture source

The UK continues to pay for timorous Tony Blair’s white-livered decision to debase his nation as George II’s quivering lapdog.

One debt will be collected by Lofti Raissi, a British resident who last week won the right to seek monetary damages from the UK, as compensation for his groundless arrest and incarceration, on American orders, during the disgraceful Anglo-American overreaction to the attacks of September 11.

Three senior British judges held that the British government impermissibly used “unsubstantiated allegations” in a US extradition warrant “as a device to circumvent the rule of English law.”

Raissi, wholly innocent, was held in maximum-security confinement for six months, where he was twice stabbed by other inmates, while his name was foamingly bruited about in the shrieking British tabloids as a slavering 9/11 arch-fiend.

The court concluded that, to poodle up to the Americans, British police and prosecutors abused the legal process, filed false allegations, and concealed evidence, and thus Raissi may seek up to 2 million pounds in damages.

“I always say Britain is a civilised country with beautiful people,” Raissi said. “I really cherish the customs, the way of life here. But after 9/11, things changed.”

Raissi’s ordeal, below the divide.

The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal as well as The Wild Wild Left, the Independent Bloggers Alliance, The Peace Tree and Worldwide Sawdust.

Most Americans are eager to turn the page on the Bush years. Yet even as we elect a new president we’re still coming to terms with an era that has both tarnished America’s reputation and diminished its influence.

Fred Kaplan chronicles the folly of the Bush years in his new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (John Wiley & Sons).

Kaplan writes that,

“Nearly all of America’s blunders in war and peace these past few years stem from a single grand misconception: that the world changed after 9/11, when in fact it didn’t.

Certainly, things about the world changed, not least Americans’ sudden awareness that they were vulnerable. But the way the world works – the nature of power, warfare, and politics among nations – remained essentially the same.”

Note: This essay is crossposted from BlueRage and was first published before the actual presentation of the budget to Congress.  We’ve had some time to see what it contains and we’ve already heard that it is pretty much DOA.  It’s a lame-duck’s final quack with nothing for anyone.  The issue, “guns or butter,” is not going away and will only heat up as crunch time for the budget approaches this summer.  So..The Post:

It’s time to show our “support for the troops.”  The guns or butter debate will heat up in Congress over the budget for next year.  It seems that in order to support our 600 BILLION dollar defense budget, we face cuts in so-called “entitlements.”  The choice will become clear that we at home, through cuts in the social services that support US, will be asked to sacrifice so that our military will continue to be the biggest, baddest, and most expensive in the world. American Progress reports:

George W. Bush, his neo-con backers, his supporters in Congress, from both sides of the isle, the establishment media, the MIC and on Wall Street have accomplished their mission in Iraq. If there was ever any doubt about what that mission was then perhaps this article from Asia Times will make it clear. The article is rather long  and so I’ll try to provide some of the highlights here. The blockquotes are from that article.

And, as former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir – The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

It appears that John McCain might well get his wish – 100 years of US occupation of Iraq.

Iraqi Oil Minister Shahristani is described in this article as being “not too religious, not too political, not too secular and not too pro-American. He is a Shiite who was imprisoned by Saddam Husein and held in solitary confinement by Saddam Hussein for 10 years. He is now the Oil Minister of Iraq.

Shahristani finds himself in an enviable position as a creator of wealth for the Western world. He holds the key to the door that opens out to the magical world of Iraqi oil.

(Olberman in normal, Satan in italics)

And the Number two story on tonight’s Countdown, an in-studio interview with the Lord of Flies himslf, Satan, on the presidential race. Good evening sir and welcome to the show.

It’s good to be here, Keith

As I’ve previously noted, the Bush Administration has recently made clear that they have no intention of leaving Iraq, that they’re doing their best to ensure that the next president will have trouble doing so, and that Defense Secretary Robert Gates just announced that he wants to prevent our troop levels in Iraq from dropping below 130,000. Well, Reuters has this interesting news:

U.S. forces should keep withdrawing from Iraq this year without a pause, Iraq’s national security adviser said on Wednesday, disagreeing with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, whose post gives him a senior security role in the Iraqi government, said he would like to see U.S. forces draw down steadily to below 100,000 by the end of 2008.

Hmm. Wonder who will win that argument.

And al-Rubaie also had some words to which Democrats need pay close attention:

He also said he thought it was unlikely American Democratic Party candidates for president would be able to keep pledges to rapidly pull out U.S. forces if they are elected this year to succeed President George W. Bush.

Since November, Bush has been laying the groundwork to ensure that our occupation is made permanent. That will be difficult to reverse, but it’s also worth noting that both Senators Clinton and Obama offer Iraq withdrawal plans that include keeping the current “embassy,” including a force to guard it, which will undoubtedly number in the thousands. That “embassy” will be the largest in the world, and according to this Congressional Budget Office estimate (pdf), it will cost more than a billion dollars a year to maintain and secure!

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will need our support, when attempting to dismantle the structures Bush has put in place to indefinitely perpetuate the occupation; but whoever that nominee turns out to be will also need us to keep pushing for a more aggressive withdrawal strategy. That embassy must go. Unless we can have a normal embassy, with a normal embassy staff, we should have no embassy at all, in Iraq. The occupation must end, and as long as we maintain that “embassy,” our presence in Iraq cannot be defined as anything else.