2012

Just say that Obama wins the presidency, who really thinks that the US will be out of Iraq by the 2012 election?

I think it is possible, but only as a response to far graver events, but even then I think it unlikely. Each FU is being carefully set up to provide a narrative of success that will make withdrawal seem foolhardy. The money that flows to the politicians and big media is being funded largely by the war, and no one wants to get off the gravy train.

Tom Engelhardt, of TomDispatch, does to the situation in Iraq what he does so well, refute the lies and bullshit that are regurgitated by the media, and sum up the real situation in Iraq:

Given the situation of Iraq more than five years after the invasion, to speak of this urge to surge and its results as "success" or as "good news" is essentially obscene. Think of Iraq instead as a cocked gun. It's loaded, it's held to your head, and things are improving only to the extent that, recently, it hasn't gone off.

Iraq itself is wreckage beyond anything that could have been imagined back in March 2003; liberation is, by now, a black joke; the Bush administration's "benchmarks" for Iraqi success remain largely unmet, and still we keep "liberating" that land, still we keep killing Iraqis in prodigious numbers. A Vietnam-style body count, once banished by an administration that wanted no reminders of the last disastrous American counterinsurgency war, is now back with a vengeance, even if violence is down. These days, in its statements, the U.S. military is counting scalps almost everywhere there's fighting in Iraq.

A Great Lie of History

"We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people." This was one of the great lies of history. And all the while, the price of oil -- the one product Iraq has and, in present conditions, can't get at adequately -- continues to soar. There is no "good news" in any of this, unless you happen to be an undertaker, nor is there any end to it in sight.

Read it all, it's a necessary counterpoint to Obama's wholehearted swerve to give unquestioned support to the national security state and all that it implies. America might now be against the war, but it does not matter. Their betters, that is, their leaders have decided that it must continue, the addiction to oil, crooked money, and domestic control mechanisms allows no retreat, and no rethinking.