Is the Occupation Over?

[GRITtv]

Jeremy Scahill, Patrick Cockburn, and Kristele Younes on what the US withdrawal from Iraqi cities really means.

http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/2009/07/07/the-us-withdrawal-rebranding-the-occupation-or-changing-the-game/

[endarkenment]

1. We have not withdrawn from Iraq.

Iraq remains an occupied nation and the Iraqi government remains in a subordinate relationship to Washington.

[gkhouston]

2. I don't know. Maybe we'll find out after they finish mourning Michael Jackson on TV.

Give it another week.

[spoony]

6. Shit I thought the OP WAS talking about the Jackson memorial.

The US is being occupied by a corrupt and shallow media.

[wildflower]

3. Are you Laura Flanders?

If so, I really miss hearing you on Air America.

[readmoreoften]

4. No. And the occupation of Afghanistan and Pakistan have just begun.

We have our "strategic interests" in the Middle East. And that interest is basically turning the area into shopping malls like Kuwait and Dubai.

[Faryn Balyncd]

10. interesting that even an action intially just, has now been followed by an unjustified occupation of

......over a half decade, and shows no sign of EVER ending, even under a Democratic administration.


It has been time to leave Afghanistan for many years now.


If we don't leave, how can we ever trust our government to pursue EVEN those military actions that are JUST, if the warmongers are allowed to turn such an effort into an endless imperial occupation?

[leftstreet]

5. Iraqis have a right to shop at Wal-Mart

The US must bring them their freedoms

[Dennis Donovan]

7. Hi Laura!!

:hi: Welcome to DU!!

[Orwellian_Ghost]

8. Conquest Non-Interruptus: Keeping the Boot on Iraq's Neck

To paraphrase our question from the other day, when is a withdrawal not a withdrawal? When it is a continued occupation. The indispensible Dahr Jamail reports on the reality behind the media hoopla over the putative pullout of American troops from Iraq's cities :

We have passed the June 30 deadline that, according to a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on November 17, 2008, was the date all US forces were to have been withdrawn from all of Iraq's cities. Today, however, there are at least 134,000 US soldiers in Iraq - a number barely lower than the number that were there in 2003. In addition, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates testified on June 9 that the United States would maintain an average of at least 100,000 troops in Iraq through fiscal year 2010.

The SOFA is a sieve, and the number of US military personnel in Iraq is remaining largely intact for now. Add to the 134,000 US soldiers almost the exact number of military contractors (132,610 and increasing), 36,061 of which, according to a recent Department of Defense report, are US citizens.

While the military and most corporate media would like you to believe that from now on no US soldiers will step foot in Iraqi cities, US military patrols in them are ongoing and will continue. In addition, there has been an assumption that all US military bases within Iraqi city limits would be moved. For example, US Army Forward Operating Base Falcon, home to 3,000 US troops, is clearly within the city limits of Baghdad. But US military officials, working with Iraqis in the US-supported Iraqi government, have other ideas. "We and the Iraqis decided it wasn't in the city," a military official told the Christian Science Monitor. Thus, city lines are redrawn, to the convenience of the US military, to render certain bases and forward operating bases "outside" of Iraqi cities.

While military commanders claim to have handed over 142 military outposts around Iraq to the Iraqis, US troops will continue to occupy 320 other outposts around Iraq. Meanwhile, the Democratically controlled Congress just passed a war-spending bill that allocated over $100 billion more for the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military (and military contractors) in Iraq is busily expanding and augmenting new bases in rural areas of Iraq. In fact, they are even building new bases in Iraq.

***

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1793-conquest-non-interruptus-keeping-the-boot-on-iraqs-neck.html

[Catshrink]

9. Oh. I thought you meant the occupation of GD by the MJ obsessed.

I only wish the occupation you speak of was over -- and the war in Aghanistan as well.