Those bloody demonstrations of insecurity cast serious doubts on the planned imminent redeployment of U.S. troops. "The American role is necessary now in Iraq, not only to maintain security but to maintain political stability," Hameed Fadhel, a political science professor at BaghdadUniversity told Asia Times on Dec 15. "The Iraqi people no longer trust their politicians," added Tariq Harb, a member of Prime Minister Noori al-Maliki's State of Law alliance. Sadi Pira, a politburo member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, PUK, one of the two dominant Kurdish parties, was more vocal on maintaining the U.S. "military role" in Iraq: The latest bombings in Baghdad, along with unrest in Mosul and Kirkuk, "proves that the Iraqi forces are not able to control the cities or the borders. If the U.S. position is to extend the [stay] of the remaining coalition forces, it is not bad for Iraq," Pira told the Times.
Such statements vindicate the U.S. officials who were quoted by Reuters on December 10 as saying that the 60-day period after Iraq's election will probably reveal whether the country will tip back into sectarian bloodshed or move toward stability and peace. But more importantly, the immediate aftermath of the upcoming elections would reveal whether the U.S. troops would redeploy on time. The U.S. force in Iraq is supposed to be reduced to 50,000 by the end of August from around 115,000 now. However, the date for the end of the U.S. combat operations in Iraq is not included in a bilateral security pact signed last year, but was set by Obama as part of a pledge to U.S. voters to end the war on Iraq.
In his accepting Nobel Peace Prize speech earlier this month, Obama proclaimed a justification for war that could label him more a modern Niccolo Maichiaville than "the candidate of change," which does not preclude the extension of his country's military presence in Iraq as a hidden agenda. "The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace," Obama declared. The United States reserves the right to "act unilaterally if necessary" and to launch wars whose purpose "extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor," he said.
Could this be the hidden agenda of the United States in Iraq: i.e. to create pretexts for a permanent military presence in Iraq? Within this context it has been noteworthy that the government of al- Maliki and its security officials, when they were questioned by the parliament in closed and public sessions last week, were divided over whom to blame for the bombings: Syria and other "Arab" countries or infiltrators of their security agencies by resistance elements whom they dub as "terrorists," but they never hinted to the U.S. occupying power as a possible culprit, which maintains the capability to really infiltrate the security shield around the "Green Zone" and could be the major beneficiary of portraying the government as still incapable of maintaining law and order; this possibility was given substance, for example, by the report of The New York Times on December 11 that Blackwater gunmen, ostensibly contracted as security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan, "participated in some of the CIA's most sensitive activities--clandestine raids with agency officers," and by CIA Director Leon Panetta's briefing before Congressional intelligence committees last June about a covert "assassination program" involving Blackwater. Nor did they hint to Iran, the major beneficiary of the U.S. occupation or to voting by bombs by the political components of the U.S. engineered "political process" as they used to do since they were brought into the country by the invading armies.
The reason underlying the U.S. failure in Iraq should be sought in the fact that the United States has failed to establish a political system of its own image in Iraq and has instead created its antithesis, which deprived both its presence in the country as well as the political regime it has so far failed to install there of a legitimacy that would credibly stand on its own as an alternative to the legitimate national regime the U.S. invasion devastated in 2003, notwithstanding the fact it was labeled a dictatorship by western standards of liberal parliamentary democracy.
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