Is Obama working to end the US war and occupation in Iraq?

The following is a guest op-ed contributed to JWN by Phyllis Bennis
President Obama announced “a new strategy to end the war in Iraq.” That sounds good – an indication that he is keeping to his campaign promises, responding to the powerful anti-war consensus in this country. But if this plan were actually a first step towards a complete end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, it would be even better than good.
A real end to the war would mean this withdrawal was the first step towards a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Iraq and bringing them home, not redeploying them to another failing war in Afghanistan. It would mean pulling out all the 150,000+ U.S.-paid foreign mercenaries and contractors, closing all the U.S. military bases, and ending all U.S. efforts to control Iraqi oil.
And so far, that is not on Obama’s agenda.
The troop withdrawal now planned would leave behind as many as 50,000 U.S. troops. That’s an awful lot. Even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thinks that may be too much. She told Rachel Maddow “I don’t know what the justification is for 50,000, at the present …I would think a third of that, maybe 20,000, a little more than a third, 15,000 or 20,000.”
Those left-over U.S. forces won’t include officially-designated “combat brigades.” But they will still be occupying Iraq. Doing what? Very likely, just what combat troops do – patrol and bomb and shoot like combat troops, even if they are not part of recognized combat brigades. Some of them might be “re-labeled” or “re-missioned” so combat actions are described as training or support. That would mean a retreat to the lies and deception that characterized this war during the Bush years – something President Obama promised to leave behind. It would also mean military resistance in Iraq would continue, leading to more Iraqi and U.S. casualties.
Last year’s U.S. agreement with Iraq calls for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by the end of December 2011, and President Obama said he intends to remove all troops. But intentions are not commitments, and the agreement can too easily be changed. Retired General Barry McCaffrey wrote an internal report for the Pentagon last year, saying, “We should assume that the Iraqi government will eventually ask us to stay beyond 2011 with a residual force of trainers, counterterrorist capabilities, logistics, and air power. (My estimate – perhaps a force of 20,000 to 40,000 troops).”
And what if the reduction in ground troops is matched by an escalation of U.S. air attacks? That means more Iraqi civilians continuing to be killed by the U.S. military. We need to withdraw all air and naval forces too – something the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated with Iraq requires, but we have yet to hear a commitment from the Obama administration.
Obama promised transparency in the contracting process, but he hasn’t yet promised to bring home all the mercenaries and contractors. That means even more windfalls for the oil companies and powerful contractors whose CEOs and stockholders have made billion dollar killings on Iraq contracts.
We should end all U.S. funding for the giant contractors– Dyncorp, Bechtel, Blackwater – that serve as out-sourced unaccountable components of the U.S. military. They were part of the torture scenes at Abu Ghraib. (Blackwater’s recent name change to “Xe” should not allow its role in killing Iraqi civilians to be forgotten.) Even as some troops may be withdrawn, we will need congressional hearings on the human rights violations and misuse of taxpayer funds by the war profiteers who run these companies. President Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo prison shows his awareness of the severity of the crimes committed there. Ending the funding of the contractors who carried out so many of those crimes should be a logical next step.
As the Obama administration seeks new ways to cut military spending, closing the 50+ Iraqi bases, particularly the five mega-bases becomes an urgent necessity. And the giant embassy-on-steroids that the Bush administration built to house up to 5,000 U.S. diplomats and officials should be closed down as a relic of an illegal war launched to maintain control of the country, people and resources of Iraq.
We know there is no military solution in Iraq. Pulling out any troops from Iraq is a good thing. But Obama’s plan falls short of his most important promise regarding the Iraq War: bringing it quickly to its end.
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Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is Ending the Iraq War: A Primer, and she contributed a chapter on Iraq policy in the just-released Mandate for Change: Policies and Leadership for 2009 and Beyond. To sign up to receive her talking points and articles, go to http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/357/t/1011/signUp.jsp?key=95 and choose “New Internationalism Project.”