Barack Obama, desperate to serve U.S. imperialists for four more years, is spinning their worsening predicaments as his personal triumphs. “As promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year....After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” Obama boasted on October 21.
But there’s no way U.S. rulers will not protect Exxon Mobil’s $50 billion investment in Iraq’s oil fields. Thirty-nine bases there still remain in U.S. hands. Furthermore, “The U.S. embassy in Baghdad already houses thousands of…officials and troops and contains 21 buildings in a space over 100 acres….The State Department is looking to spend upwards of $30 billion on Iraq over the next five years — around one-fourth of the Department’s…global operations budget” (Huffington Post, 9/26).
Meanwhile, Iraq’s Maliki regime is revoking the U.S. license to kill there. “The issue of immunity for U.S. troops appears to have been the key factor in the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw…. Iraqis...did not want to grant it because of high-profile killings of civilians....The U.S. said for any troops to remain in Iraq, they’d have to be granted full immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts” (National Public Radio, 10/24/11).
Guarding Exxon’s Oil Wells Means Boots on the Ground
But not all the GIs will be home for the holidays. Many will be part of the Obama administration’s plans “to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf,” including “new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran” (NY Times, 10/30; see box this page). Obama’s threat to reinvade Iraq contradicts his peace pronouncement.
The U.S.-led war for the Middle East’s vast energy resources remains far from settled. When they invaded in 2003, U.S. rulers envisioned six million barrels of crude gushing daily from Iraqi wells by 2006. Last year, they upped the potential bonanza to 12 million barrels per day. But persistent violence keeps actual flow around 2.9 million; on October 27, bombs killed 32 people in Baghdad. Exxon Mobil just invested $50 billion to boost production from Iraq’s massive West Qurna field. Expect a quick return of U.S. forces if violence menaces that project.
Meanwhile, oil bosses from the U.S. and other NATO countries are flocking like vultures to post-Qaddafi Libya. More than 40,000 U.S.-directed NATO bombing and strafing runs wiped out at least 25,000 Libyan civilians. The self-congratulating liar Obama, eyeing re-election, touted his dreams of more such lucrative, “bloodless” victories on the Tonight Show: “Not a single U.S. troop was killed or injured, and that, I think, is a recipe for success in the future.”
But Obama’s imperialist handlers, including the Pentagon and Exxon, don’t buy what he’s peddling to the public. In mid-October, the top-level Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank that enlists dozens of serving military officers, released a report titled “U.S. Ground Force Capabilities through 2020.” The piece undercut Obama’s vote-seeking falsehood by noting that “every post-Cold War president has come into office vowing to avoid large, costly foreign interventions requiring tens of thousands of ‘boots on the ground,’ only to have their hand forced by unforeseen events.”
The Fall of “Arab Spring”
CSIS indicates how close the Arab Spring came to necessitating an outright U.S. invasion — and still could. “If Egypt’s uprising had threatened to disrupt the Suez Canal and key oil networks...only ground forces would have been capable of seizing and protecting the 300-plus miles of critical infrastructure.” In other all-too-plausible, near-term scenarios, “Precarious governments in nuclear North Korea or Pakistan, should they falter or break down, would similarly create immediate, large-scale crises to which ground forces would be highly relevant.” In either of these cases, the potential U.S. battlefield foe could employ both nuclear weapons and more than one million soldiers.
In short, as the October 30 New York Times article indicates, Obama’s “exit” from Iraq is actually an expansion of the U.S. military in the energy-rich Middle East, with the build-up to “secure” Iraq lasting at least another ten years (see box). As long as imperialism fuels its profit-driven rivalry for the world’s resources and exploited labor, war is inevitable. Only communist revolution that destroys capitalism, profits and bosses — and erects a society in which workers share all the value that they, and only they, produce — can free the international working class from the horrors of endless wars.J
Obama’s Iraq ‘Exit’ Expands U.S. War Machine
Obama’s “exit” from Iraq is more a game of musical chairs. Far from scaling down its war machine in the region, U.S. imperialism will be expanding it. According to the NY Times (10/30), “The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws…troops from Iraq….[which] could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.”
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta noted that the United States had 40,000 troops in the region, including 23,000 in Kuwait” (NYT). None of this includes the tens of thousands of CIA and U.S. contract mercenaries now flooding Iraq. In addition the Pentagon “is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.”
The Obama White House “is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qater, the United Arab Emirates and Oman….trying to foster a new ‘security architecture’ for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense” (NYT).
None of this is exactly new. From 1991 up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the “U.S. Army kept…a full combat brigade in Kuwait year-round, along with an enormous arsenal ready to be unpacked” should even more troops be called to the region.
How long will this military build-up last? “The U.S. will have to come to terms with an Iraq that is unable to defend itself for at least a decade,” wrote Adam Mausner and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
No, U.S. imperialists are in no way “exiting” this energy-rich area. They will be aiming to preserve their dominance over Gulf oil supplies and pipelines until communist revolutionaries throw them out.