Ten Years More in Iraq

The situation has been made clear. General David Petraeus, that honorable warrior, gave it to us straight. We’re going to be in Iraq for ten more years and maybe more,US forces could be needed in Iraq for a decade to battle insurgents, the top coalition commander said Sunday while vowing a "forthright" review in September on whether a troop surge is working.
Speaking on Fox News, General David Petraeus said there was broad recognition in Washington that Iraq's daunting challenges would not be resolved "in a year or even two years.""In fact, typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years," he said.
This of course is nothing new. Although Republican leaders like Bush and Cheney haven’t been clear on it there have been many indications that from the beginning they intended to stay in Iraq a long time. That’s why they built the largest US Embassy in the world in Baghdad. That is why they’ve built fourteen huge bases around the country to house US troops. Their true goals can be seen in the legislation that they’ve given the Iraqi Congress. These laws when passed give control and a huge share of the profits from Iraqi oil to US oil companies. The fourteen bases are to protect the operations of the Oil companies. So far the Iraqi Congress has refused to pass these laws. Many of its members claim the proposed legislation is nothing more a robbery of their countries resources.
Establishing bases around the world to protect multi-national corporate operations is nothing new. There are over seven hundred such bases. Some say that protecting corporate operations is the main function of the US military. It costs the US taxpayer over three hundred billion dollars a year and gives him very little in return.
It seems to me that this is the major issue in the 2008 Presidential Campaign. The United States has too many needs—our superstructure is falling down around our ears, our healthcare system does not provide our people with the necessary care that other country provide, our industry has been shipped overseas depriving millions of jobs, etc.—to afford to spend such large amounts to protect the operations of organizations that balk at paying the fair share of taxes. I expect the candidates to bring this problem to the attention of the citizenry and offer solutions to this problem. Especially the expenditure on the military must be cut in half. There is need for such expenditure. No other country spend a quarter of what the United States spends. Of course terrorists spend no huge sums, nor do the have large and expensive weapons.
Max Angst