President Barack Obama and his administration claim that the Iraq War is over and that the U.S. is leaving Iraq. The goal in making these claims is to win peace votes in the November election.
The truth is, however, that the U.S. is not leaving Iraq and that the war is not over. While the administration claims that all combat troops are leaving Iraq, still 50,000 troops will remain. In addition to those troops, the U.S. State Department is hiring 7,000 “security guards”—that is mercenary soldiers—and will also have 2,500 department “assignees.” In reality the U.S. is leaving behind a permanent occupying army in a country that has become in all but name a U.S. colony.
U.S. citizens were tricked into supporting the Iraq War first because they believed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, which we learned it didn’t. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which we learned it didn’t. Then President George W. Bush defended the removal of the dictator Saddam Hussein because the U.S. was going to create a democracy in Iraq, which we know it didn’t.
The American people should not be fooled again by the claims that the U.S. is leaving Iraq when in reality the Iraq War continues and forms part of a broader regional war to which the U.S. is committed for decades to come.
- Obama has not pulled the troops out of Iraq in order to bring them home, he has sent them to Afghanistan, where there are now more than 95,000 troops.
- And the U.S. continues its war in Pakistan, using drones to bomb targets there and frequently killing civilians.
- Meanwhile, in what is another front in the regional war, the U.S. continues its apparently limitless support for Israel as Israel fights the Palestinians, denying them their right to a homeland and confining them in unbearable conditions in the West Bank and in Gaza.
The United States needs to get all troops and mercenaries out of Iraq and Afghanistan now; every single soldier must come home. The U.S. must also stop its drone attacks on Pakistan with the accompanying murder of men, women and children there. America’s military support for Israel must end, and Israel must return to its 1967 borders so that both Israelis and Palestinians can coexist.
Don’t go to the polls in November to vote for Democrats because they represent a more peaceful alternative to the Republicans because it simply isn’t true. In fact, under President Obama and the Democratic Party Congress, the wars and the military budget continue to expand.
The Republicans and Democrats fundamentally share a common foreign policy driven by U.S. corporations and their lobbies. Those corporations want above all to control the world’s resources—especially oil—, world markets, and cheap labor. The U.S. military abroad is not engaged in protecting the United States, nor is it fighting for freedom. These imperial wars for resources, markets and labor don’t make us safe, they breed anti-Americanism and they create more terrorists.
The corporations and their politicians will continue to take our country into these imperial wars unless we do something to stop it. We need to build a movement against war and against militarism. Just as we marched against Bush’s war, so today we should march against Obama’s war. Let’s end the wars abroad, dismantle the 700 to 1,000 American military bases throughout the world, and build a policy of peace. The American people don’t want war, they want jobs and justice at home.
