By Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg, San Francisco Chronicle
There are people in Washington … who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they’re looking for 10, 20, 50 years in the future … the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that 10 years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq.
-former President Jimmy Carter, Feb. 3, 2006
For all the talk about timetables and benchmarks, one might think that the United States will end the military occupation of Iraq within the lifetimes of the readers of this opinion editorial. Think again.
There is to be no withdrawal from Iraq, just as there has been no withdrawal from hundreds of places around the world that are outposts of the American empire. As UC San Diego professor emeritus Chalmers Johnson put it, “One of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave.”