You have just really got to be kidding me:
CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, supported by Defence Secretary Robert Gates, tried to convince President Barack Obama that he had to back down from his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months at an Oval Office meeting Jan. 21.
But Obama informed Gates, Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen that he wasn’t convinced and that he wanted Gates and the military leaders to come back quickly with a detailed 16-month plan, according to two sources who have talked with participants in the meeting.
Obama’s decision to override Petraeus’s recommendation has not ended the conflict between the president and senior military officers over troop withdrawal, however. There are indications that Petraeus and his allies in the military and the Pentagon, including Gen. Ray Odierno, now the top commander in Iraq, have already begun to try to pressure Obama to change his withdrawal policy.
A network of senior military officers is also reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and Odierno by mobilising public opinion against Obama’s decision.
Should we just have the coup now, and let the military run the nation’s affairs? I’m sure our friends on the right would be just fine with that.
Petraeus, Gates and Odierno had hoped to sell Obama on a plan that they formulated in the final months of the Bush administration that aimed at getting around a key provision of the U.S.-Iraqi withdrawal agreement signed envisioned re-categorising large numbers of combat troops as support troops
Ah, double-crossing the Iraqis. What an ethical idea.
The idea of empire dies hard. To stay in Iraq - even now, even after Petraeus seems to have succeeded in reducing the level of violence - is to embrace the idea that Iraq belongs to us. The U.S. fought for it, and deserves the prize. Unfettered access to the oil beneath the sands. To the right to use it as a large base for further imperial action in the area.
If we leave Iraq we leave behind the idea of shaping the Middle East by American force (enough of the “coalition” nonsense, there is no *&%$#! coalition anymore). We leave behind the idea of controlling the region, of stationing a very large American “police” force there to take a swing at Iran when we’re prepared to do so.
Pulling out was never part of the plan. It amounts to abandoning an imperialism which some continue to insist doesn’t exist, but which most certainly does - so long as we insist on staying.
