Congresswoman Barbara Lee Comments on Administration Announcement of Policy toward Iraq

[BuyingThyme]

Congresswoman Barbara Lee Comments on Administration Announcement of Policy toward Iraq
03/02/09

For Immediate Release
March 2, 2009


Washington, DC - Congresswoman Barbara Lee issued the following statement in response to President Obama’s speech last week regarding U.S. policy toward Iraq:

“As one of the co-founders of the Out of Iraq Caucus I opposed the Iraq war and occupation from the beginning and have spent nearly seven years working to extricate the United States from this fiasco.

“I welcome President Obama’s pledge to the American people to end the war and withdraw all combat troops by August 31, 2010.

“However, I am deeply troubled by the prospect that President Obama’s plan contemplates leaving up to 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. It is far from clear how or why troops deployed for combat operations will be viewed differently by Iraqis simply by designating them as ‘support’ troops. Ending the war and occupation means redeploying all troops and all military contractors out of Iraq. It also means leaving behind no permanent bases and renouncing any claims upon Iraqi oil.

“I look forward to working with my colleagues and the Administration to hasten the day when war and occupation of Iraq is ended and all American troops and military contractors have been withdrawn and reunited with their families and loved ones.”

http://lee.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=57&parentid=35§iontree=35,57&itemid=1496

[stillcool]

1. Never happen...

I would think quite a few thousand would be needed for the embassy and permanent bases alone. Plus, what are the chances Iraq will have an air-force anytime soon?

[BuyingThyme]

2. It doesn't take three years to train a police force.

It takes a few weeks.

You are buying into a series of big lies. And the fact that you support permanent bases in the country you destroyed is very sad.

[stillcool]

3. I'm not buying into any lies....

and I don't 'support' any of it. It's who we are and what we do, and to think otherwise is 'buying into a series of lies'. And who's talking about training a police force...I said "Air-Force"..you know with planes, and bombs.

[BuyingThyme]

5. Most of the people around here are buying into Obama's lies about Iraq.

They actually believe he has a plan for getting out. He doesn't. He wants to stay. He has already scheduled three more years of occupation. Nobody around here ever would have fallen for this garbage under Bush.

I figured with your support of permanent bases and all, you were on board with the Obama plan. I apologize if I was mistaken.

[stillcool]

6. I don't know how you read 'support'...

when all I stated was the fact that we have permanent bases and the largest embassy on the planet in Iraq. We are there for very specific reasons, and we are not going anywhere unless forced to by outside influences. I don't blame Obama one bit, but then, I kind of would like to see him live out his term.

[BuyingThyme]

7. The only way the bases are permanent is if we stay permanently.

I think we should leave very soon.

[stillcool]

8. but that's not realistic...

that's not who the United States is. If we were going to leave, we never would have gone in. The prize is too big, and there are way too many global interests invested in the United States. Jimmy Carter was the first President who declared it U.S. policy to intervene with military force if necessary, should any U.S. interest be threatened in the Middle-east. The Empire that has taken over a hundred years to build, does not cease because a person is elected President.

[BuyingThyme]

9. I believe in a different kind of government than the one you believe in.

[stillcool]

10. Believe in? What about the government we have...

and have had from our inception? Does that just go away, because you don't 'believe' in it?

[BuyingThyme]

11. It went away a little after Vietnam.

[robdogbucky]

14. Carter the first?

Are you serious? Do you really believe what you typed or do you have some other agenda in this discussion?

Here is a brief overview of US intervention (military and otherwise) which precedes Jimmy Carter:


1945-1955:
REPLACING RIVALS AND WAGING WAR
ON NATIONAL LIBERATION

1946: President Harry Truman threatens to drop a "super-bomb" on the Soviet Union if it does not withdraw from Kurdestan and Azerbaijan in northern Iran.

November 1947: The U.S. helps push through a UN resolution partitioning Palestine into a Zionist state and an Arab state, giving the Zionist authorities control of 54% of the land. At that time Jewish settlers were about 1/3 of the population.

May 14, 1948: War breaks out between newly proclaimed state of Israel, and Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria, who had moved troops into Palestine to oppose the partition of Palestine. Israeli attacks force some 800,000 Palestinians--two-thirds of the population--to flee into exile in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. Israel seizes 77 percent of historic Palestine. The U.S. quickly recognizes Israel.

March 29, 1949: CIA backs a military coup overthrowing the elected government of Syria and establishes a military dictatorship under Colonel Za'im.

1952: U.S.-led military alliance expands into the Middle East with Turkey's admission to NATO.

1953: The CIA organizes a coup overthrowing the Mossadeq government of Iran after Mossadeq nationalizes British holdings in Iran's huge oilfields. The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, is put on the throne, ruling as an absolute monarch for the next 25 years--torturing, killing and imprisoning his political opponents.

1955: U.S. installs powerful radar system in Turkey to spy on the Soviet Union.

1956-1958:
UPHEAVAL AND INTRIGUE IN EGYPT,
IRAQ, JORDAN, SYRIA & LEBANON

July 1956: After Egypt's nationalist leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, receives arms from the Soviet Union, the U.S. withdraws promised funding for Aswan Dam, Egypt's main development project. A week later Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal to fund the project. In October Britain, France and Israel invade Egypt to retake the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower threatens to use nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union intervenes on Egypt's side; and at the same time, the U.S. asserts its regional dominance by forcing Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from Egypt.

October 1956: A planned CIA coup to overthrow a left-leaning government in Syria is aborted because it was scheduled for the same day Israel, Britain and France invade Egypt.

March 9, 1957: Congress approves Eisenhower Doctrine, stating "the United States regards as vital to the national interest and world peace the preservation of the independence and integrity of the nations of the Middle East."

April 1957: After anti-government rioting breaks out in Jordan, U.S. rushes 6th fleet to the eastern Mediterranean and lands a battalion of Marines in Lebanon to "prepare for possible future intervention in Jordan." Later that year, the CIA begins making secret payments of millions a year to Jordan's King Hussein.

September 1957: In response to the Syrian government's more nationalist and pro-Soviet policies, the U.S. sends Sixth Fleet to eastern Mediterranean and rushes arms to allies Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia; meanwhile the U.S. encourages Turkey to mass 50,000 troops on Syria's northern border.

1958: The merger of Syria and Egypt into the "United Arab Republic," the overthrow of the pro-U.S. King Feisal II in Iraq by nationalist military officers, and the outbreak of anti-government/anti-U.S. rioting in Lebanon, where the CIA had helped install President Camille Caiman and keep him in power, leads the U.S. to dispatch 70 naval vessels, hundreds of aircraft and 14,000 Marines to Lebanon to preserve "stability." The U.S. threatens to use nuclear weapons if the Lebanese army resists, and to prevent an Iraqi move into the oilfields of Kuwait, and draws up secret plans for a joint invasion of Iraq with Turkey. The plan is shelved after the Soviet Union threatens to intervene.

1957-58: Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA agent in charge of the 1953 coup in Iran, plots, without success, to overthrow Egypt's Nasser. "Between July 1957 and October 1958, the Egyptian and Syrian governments and media announced the uncovering of what appear to be at least eight separate conspiracies to overthrow one or the other government, to assassinate Nasser, and/or prevent the expected merger of the two countries." (Blum, p. 93)

1960: U.S. works to covertly undermine the new government of Iraq by supporting anti-government Kurdish rebels and by attempting, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Iraq's leader, Abdul Karim Qassim, an army general who had restored relations with the Soviet Union and lifted the ban on Iraq's Communist Party.

1963: U.S. supports a coup by the Ba'ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam Hussein) to overthrow the Qassim regime, including by giving the Ba'ath names of communists to murder. "Armed with the names and whereabouts of individual communists, the national guards carried out summary executions. Communists held in detention...were dragged out of prison and shot without a hearing... y the end of the rule of the Ba'ath, its terror campaign had claimed the lives of an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 communists."

1966: U.S. sells its first jet bombers to Israel, breaking with 1956 decision not to sell arms to the Zionist state.

June 1967: With U.S. weapons and support, Israeli military launches the so-called "Six Day War," seizing the remaining 23 percent of historic Palestine--the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem--along with Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Syria's Golan Heights.

September 17, 1970: With U.S. and Israeli backing, Jordanian troops attack Palestinian guerrilla camps, while Jordan's U.S.-supplied air force drops napalm from above. U.S. deploys the aircraft carrier Independence and six destroyers off the coast of Lebanon and readies troops in Turkey to support the assault. The U.S. threatens to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union if it intervenes. 5000 Palestinians are killed and 20,000 wounded. This massacre comes to be known as "Black September."

1973: The U.S. rushes $2.2 billion in emergency military aid to Israel after Egypt and Syria attack to regain Golan Heights and Sinai. U.S. puts forces on alert, and moves them into the region. When the Soviet Union threatens to intervene to prevent the destruction of Egypt's 3rd Army by Israel, U.S. nuclear forces go to DEFCON III to force the Soviets to back down.

1973-1975: U.S. supports Kurdish rebels in Iraq in order to strengthen Iran and weaken the then pro-Soviet Iraqi regime. When Iran and Iraq cut a deal, the U.S. withdraws support, denies the Kurds refuge in Iran, and stands by while the Iraqi government kills many Kurdish people.


Like I said, Are You Serious?


robdogbucky

[stillcool]

15. Are you serious? Never heard of the "Carter Doctrine"?

you know "Stated Policy"?

Blood For Oil,
Common Defense
excerpted from the book
The New American Militarism
How Americans Are Seduced By War
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Oxford University Press, 2005, paper

BLOOD FOR OIL
p180
For Cold War-era U.S. policymakers, preoccupied with Europe and East Asia as the main theaters of action, the Gulf prior to 1980 had figured as something of a sideshow. Jimmy Carter now changed all that, thrusting the Gulf into the uppermost tier of U.S. geopolitical priorities.
... U.S. strategy in the Middle East from the 1940s through the 1970s adhered to the principle known as economy of force. Rather than establishing a large presence in the region, Roosevelt's successors sought to achieve their objectives in ways that entailed a minimal expenditure of American resources and especially of U.S. military power. From time to time, when absolutely necessary, Washington might organize a brief show of force-for example, in 1946 when Harry Truman ordered the USS Missouri to the eastern Mediterranean to warn the Soviets to cease meddling in Turkey, or in 1958 when Dwight D. Eisenhower sent U.S. Marines into Lebanon for a brief, bloodless occupation-but these modest gestures proved to be the exception rather than the rule.
The clear preference was for a low profile and a hidden hand. Although by no means averse to engineering "regime change" when necessary, preferred covert action to the direct use of force; the CIA coup that in 1953 overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh in Tehran offers the best-known example. To police the region, Washington looked to surrogates-through the 1960s British imperial forces and, once Britain withdrew from "East of Suez," the shah of Iran.' To build up indigenous self-defense (or regime defense) capabilities of select nations, it arranged for private contractors to provide weapons, training, and advice-an indirect way of employing U.S. military expertise. The Vinnell Corporation's ongoing "modernization" of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), a project now well over a quarter century old, remains a prime example.
By the end of 1979, however, two events had left this approach in a shambles. The first was the Iranian Revolution, which sent the shah into exile and installed in Tehran an Islamist regime adamantly hostile to the United States. The second was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which put the Red Army in a position where it appeared to pose a direct threat to the entire Persian Gulf and hence to the West's oil supply.
Faced with these twin crises, Jimmy Carter concluded that treating the Middle East as a secondary theater, ancillary to the Cold War, no longer made sense. A great contest for control of that region had been joined, one that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini had made unmistakably clear was not simply an offshoot of the already existing East-West competition. This was something quite different.
Rejecting out of hand any possibility that the United States might come to terms with or accommodate itself to the changes afoot in the Persian Gulf, Carter claimed for the United States a central role in determining exactly what those changes would be. In January 1980, to forestall any further deterioration of the U.S. position in the Gulf, he threw the weight of American military power into the balance.
In his State of the Union Address of that year, the president enunciated what became known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region," he declared, "will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."'
From Carter's time down to the present day, the doctrine bearing his name has remained sacrosanct. As a consequence, each of President Carter's successors has expanded the level of U.S. military involvement and operations in the region. Even today, American political leaders cling to their belief that the skillful application of military power will enable the United States to decide the fate not simply of the Persian Gulf proper but-to use the more expansive terminology of the present day-of the entire Greater Middle East. This gigantic project is the true World War IV, begun in 1980 an now well into its third decade.

Enunciated by then-President Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union speech in January 1980, the doctrine defines Persian Gulf oil as a "vital interest" of the United States that must be defended "by any means necessary, including military force." Seen in this light, Bush Jr. was merely applying the doctrine when he invaded Iraq in 2003. He's not the first. President Reagan cited it to justify U.S. intervention in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 to help ensure the defeat of Iran. President Bush Sr. invoked it to authorize military action against Iraq in 1991, during the first Gulf War. And Bill Clinton, though not explicitly citing the doctrine, adhered to its tenets.
So the use of force to ensure U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil is not a Bush II policy or a Republican policy, but a bipartisan, American policy.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Oil_watch/Carter_Doctrine_Global_Oil.html

[BuyingThyme]

4. Ooops. Wrong place.

[BuyingThyme]

12. ..

[G_j]

13. K&R