RNA - Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend is talking about a planned troop rotation coming up in September, saying despite predictions of an end to the ISIL war, US troops should stay. Townsend’s comments about the US having a long-term military presence in Iraq is in keeping with other Pentagon officials, who have tried to blame the rise of ISIL between the end of the 2011 occupation and the 2014 reinvasion on the lack of US ground troops, despite the US having a substantial presence.
Townsend insists that the US troops would have to stay long after the ISIL war, specifically to train up the Iraqi military again, and to make sure they can actually fight off future insurgencies. There’s no indication how long this would take. Other officials, however, have envisioned a more or less permanent US military presence, claiming that the only way Iraq can be kept intact without collapsing into another immediate war would be for the US to have a number of troops.
This poses a great danger to Iraq’s democratic future. A more or less permanent military presence would be disturbing on its own, but taken together it represents an unprecedented attack on Iraq’s right to sovereignty and self-determination under UN Charter and International Law. The comments by the Pentagon officials, in particular, appear to mark the beginning of a permanent suppression campaign as well, based on spreading lies about how Iraq cannot stand on its own feet without America to justify enacting policies that support the occupation, and make independence and self-determination more difficult.
But Iraqis are sick and tired of America’s wars and occupation without end. They want the Trump White House to stop ramping up a stealth escalation of US military involvement across the Middle East. The deepening military involvement has accelerated in recent weeks. The US will dispatch more troops to Afghanistan, and even more than that to Syria.
In Yemen, the United States is escalating its direct and indirect support for the Saudi air assault too, leveling that impoverished country. As fighting intensifies, civilian casualties and refugees are rising, more and more are driven from their homes, and hunger and deadly diseases such as cholera are spreading as health systems break under the strain. Seventeen million Yemenis suffer from lack of food, while a cholera epidemic infects another child every 35 seconds.
The bottom line remains that America is an actor that brings war, destruction and calamity, and that US troops cannot and should never be allowed to stay in Iraq long after ISIL has been defeated. It’s a recipe for calamity:
By one estimate the United States has been at war 214 out of the 228 years since the Constitution took effect — that’s 94 percent of the time. Contrary to popular misconception, the war state did not begin in 1945. From the start, war was an acceptable means to national policy ends, whether to open markets or to install friendly regimes. This record is shameful and criminal when you calculate the predictable butcher’s bill, including the killing of noncombatants — not to mention the destruction of scarce resources that would have made all people better off in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and a host of other North African countries.
At any rate, a more or less permanent occupation of Iraq means further civilian deaths, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, no-fly zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer, et al. It means Iraqis cannot trust the open sky, or any open street near the gates of the US military tower. It means they cannot trust the future or have faith that the awful past will not return to disturb them.
A more or less permanent occupation means Iraqis will have to live out their lives under US military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from an airstrike or an Apache attack. Surely, it’s a crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at an American checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in a secret American prison in the middle of the Levant, just a random arbitrary death.
Last but not the least, a more or less permanent US military occupation means every day Iraqis will die - and the world will watch in silence. As if their deaths were nothing. All this and more leaves no choice for the Iraqi people and government but to resist, stand against all this death and indifference, keep their humanity and dignity, and refuse to surrender to US military suppression and terrorism. Iraq can be kept intact after ISIL defeat and without the US having a number of troops there permanently.
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