American Imperialism

Part I: Iraq

Type the phrase “Iraq War” in Facebook’s search box. The majority of the results are students protesting the war. It’s no surprise, in Newsweek’s poll last week an overwhelming 73% of Americans approve of “removing most U.S. Troops from Iraq by the end of next year” (1). In fact, Barack Obama’s victory in the Democratic Primary could be attributed to his support of ending the War in Iraq 16 months after his inauguration. It’s an opinion that’s become as mainstream as Bush-bashing.

Obama has finally unveiled his plan. He touts it as a plan that will be responsible in keeping with our commitment to rebuild Iraq and his promise to remove American troops (2). That’s great, 12000 troops is a big deal, right? There’s no doubt that this is an important reduction, but it’s nowhere near the impressive 50000 troops we’re leaving behind as a peace keeping force.

We need to ask ourselves why we need those troops to stay behind in the first place. It was easy to believe that Bush was there for imperialist reasons– establishing a U.S. Military presence to oversee an oil rich reason– but that line of thinking should not fly with the people who voted for Obama. The rationale we’re hearing for this residual force is to keep down insurgent violence, but is this really an effective tactic? According to our own Counterinsurgency Field Manual, this could be accomplished by “meeting the population’s needs, expanding secure areas, politically isolating the insurgents, training and equipping Iraqi forces, securing the borders and so on” (3). Perhaps that’s what Obama and the Pentagon have in mind for those 50000 soldiers, but honestly, is an occupation really going to win their hearts and minds? Ron Paul dissected this recently, and states his point far better than I ever could:

According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it… 50,000 troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States (4).

(1) http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm
(2) http://tinyurl.com/washingtonpostiraqdrawdown
(3) http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3056/counterinsurgency_101/
(4) http://tinyurl.com/ronpauliraq