Panetta's folly: New Secretary must accept that U.S. is leaving Iraq

[Divernan]

Panetta's folly: New secretary must accept that U.S. is leaving Iraq
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Editorial

Americans have a right to be startled and even angered to see new Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta in Iraq virtually begging the Iraqis to request U.S. troops to stay on after the current end-of-the year date for their withdrawal.

There is in place a firm agreement, called a Status-of-Forces Agreement, negotiated in 2008 between President George W. Bush and the Iraqi government. It provides for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. There currently remain some 46,000 in country and they should be packing with less than five months to go.

Mr. Panetta has instead been pushing the elected government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, whose ascent to power was to some degree engineered by the United States, and with whom the Bush administration negotiated the withdrawal schedule, to swing around and request U.S. forces to stay.

It is entirely unclear why he is doing this. The American people are certainly very tired of the now 8-year-old-plus, moth-eaten war in Iraq, which the United States launched on false premises in the first place -- nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and fictional Saddam Hussein regime ties to al-Qaida. It has cost, so far, more than 4,400 U.S. lives and billions of dollars. Fifteen more Americans died in Iraq in June.



Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11195/1160287-192.stm#ixzz1S4hhqBET

[Demeter]

1. Iraq and Afghanistan are now Officiallly CIA Wars

as are the undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya.....and so forth. It makes a patriot sick.

[Divernan]

2. And the drums of US war are now being directed at Syria.

Oh, excuse me, it's not really a war if we just kill people with unmanned drones and have no US boots on the ground.

The MIC has to operate under a national flag - they would really prefer if they could just declare war completely on their own - but they have to have some country with suckers, I mean taxpayers, to foot the bills and provide the cannon fodder.

When the Roman Empire was dying, it abandoned its far flung outposts, and shrunk its borders. Here in the US, we continue to maintain our troops all over the globe - or at least in those parts where it is financially advantageous to the MIC and other US corporate interests to do so.