False promise

John CHERIAN

The US occupation of Iraq is not really over as claimed by President Obama, and peace and stability remain a distant hope

President Barack Obama’s speech on August 31, formally announcing the end of the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq, has been interpreted in the United States and elsewhere as the closure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

In his speech, Obama said, “The American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”

However, more than 50,000 American troops remain positioned in five huge “enduring” military bases and in the major cities of Iraq. The US embassy in Baghdad is as big as the Vatican and needs round-the-clock military protection. Twenty-four Black Hawk helicopters and 50 bomb-resistant vehicles are permanently posted there. The American Ambassador to Iraq boasted that along with the Great Wall of China, the US embassy in Baghdad is among the few human structures that can be seen by the human eye from outer space.

President Obama stressed that the American soldiers remaining in Iraq were not ‘combat troops’ but were solely there ‘for advising and assisting Iraq’s security forces, supporting Iraqi troops in targeted counter-terrorism missions and protecting our civilians’. Out of the 50,000 troops, some 4,500 special operations forces will continue to engage directly in military operations.

Along with them are the ubiquitous ‘contractors’, numbering around a hundred thousand. In fact, a few days after Obama’s speech, American troops were engaged in a firefight with the Iraqi resistance to ward off an attack on an Iraqi military outpost. The US military spokesman in Iraq told the American media that despite the President’s assertions, ‘in practical terms, nothing will change in Iraq’.

Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institute noted in The Washington Post on August 22 that US troops will ‘still go into harm’s way’, ‘American pilots will still fly combat missions’ and ‘American Special Forces will still face off against Iraqi terrorist groups in high-intensity operations’. Very few Western commentators bother to remember that the previous administration of George W. Bush had to agree to the timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq after signing the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government.

The issue of American troops in Iraq had become a political hot potato for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Many of the constituents in the ruling coalition had threatened to withdraw their support to the government over the issue. The US policy of torture, extraordinary rendition, targeting of civilian homes and gunning down of innocent civilians had made the presence of American troops in Iraq highly unpopular among most Iraqis.

In his speech, President Obama praised all the unjust American wars, including those in Vietnam and Iraq. During his campaign for the presidency, he had characterized the Iraqi war as ‘dumb’. The US is estimated to have spent more than $750 billion on the war in Iraq alone, a factor that played a substantial role in the country’s economic decline. This figure was compiled by the US Congressional Research Service.

The Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and the Harvard academic Linda Bilmes have said that the probable cost of the war in Iraq will exceed $3 trillion. In a recent article in The Washington Post, the two economists said that their earlier estimate of $3 trillion could in fact be too low.

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