"Taken together, these latest measures paint a telling picture of what a "free Iraq" will look like: the United States will maintain its military and corporate presence through 14 enduring military bases and the largest US embassy in the world. It will hold on to authority over Iraq's armed forces, its security and economic policy and the design of its core infrastructure - but the Iraqis can deal with their decrepit hospitals all by themselves, complete with their chronic drug shortages and lack of the most basic sanitation capacity. (The US health and human services secretary, Tommy Thompson, revealed just how low a priority this was when he commented that Iraq's hospitals would be fixed if the Iraqis "just washed their hands and cleaned the crap off the walls".) "
IOW, if the Americans and Israelis have their way, the populated areas of Iraq will be turned into a gigantic Gaza, with the Crusaders lobbing bombs at them from their desert bases.
It's the continuation of the Clinton sanctions/bombing regime.
>From Naomi Klein's Guardian article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1184993,00.html