> Permanent U.S. military installations are being built in Iraq.
> No attempts are being made to rebuild the infrastructure for civilian
> life. Those military bases do not require a functioning Iraq, since chaos
> in the cities (occasionally quited by killing a few 10 thousands) would
> not
> touch the bases ...the U.S. could have maintained Can Ranh (sp?) Bay
> permaently while letting the puppet regime in Saigon be overthrown. Cf.
> Guantanamo.
[...]
> Every snicker at Bush, every argument of the ABBs, ...has played into the
> hands of a ruling class that can
> now throw Bush to the wolves and smugly exercise control over access to
> mideast oil. No invasion of Iran. No expansion of the war....There will
> not be a left until (it) realizes deeply the necessity of breaking off
> from the DP...Cheap potshots at the RP must cease.
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I think both the Bush administration and the bipartisan Congress would love
to see a major drawdown of US ground forces, with the military commitment
restricted, as you say, to periodic forays by Iraqi-based US gunships and
special forces supporting government forces in the field. The Republicans
would especially love to see this happen before the mid-term elections next
year. I also think such a development would take whatever steam there
currently is out of the US antiwar movement.
But there are some big ifs here which you might be overlooking. For such to happen the insurgency will have to collapse or at least be isolated within the Sunni community, allowing for the infrastructure to be repaired, the electricity to come back on, the streets to become safe, jobs to be created, and the oil to flow. As things stand now, the greater prospect is for an Iraqi sectarian civil war and continuing chaos, from which the US won't be able to disengage.
I don't agree the US can tolerate such "chaos" so long as their bases are secure. The US, above all, requires a STABLE Iraq. If there is widespread intercommunal fighting, there is no assurance US bases will not come under attack; they were attacked in Lebanon, as you know. But more to the point the US wants to dominate the region and its oil, and bringing the insurgency under control is essential. It's doubtful the Kurdish and Shia militias can do this on their own, and the US will not likely want to see its patronage replaced by Iran's, raising the spectre of a wider regional war. This seems to me the basic conundrum the US faces in Iraq.
I don't think the Guantanamo analogy really holds. The base was there before Castro, and it would have been an unnecessary major humiliation for the US to have abandoned it after the revolution. It's a dagger pointed at Cuba, but US forces haven't ventured forth from it to control the country. I don't think it was primarily political conditions in the US that prevented the establishment of a US naval base in Vietnam, but the fact that, as in Cuba, the revolutionary army had triumphed and the US had been defeated. Cam Ranh Bay wouldn't have been sufficient to dominate Vietnam. By the same token, if the US and its proxies are unable to defeat the insurgents, having permanent bases also won't amount to much if they can't secure the rest of the country.
The Republican neoconservatives gave too much strategic weight to Iraq and underestimated the resistance and chaos an invasion would face. The Democrats and the US military and security establishment did not suffer from these illusions, but reluctantly (and sometimes bitterly) closed ranks behind the Bush administration when US ground troops were committed. As many on the list have pointed out over the past week, a US left won't be built around foreign policy issues alone or even primarily; it has to arise organically from within around domestic ones affecting the material interests of the mass of the US population. Exhortations to the masses to to break with the DP because of its pusillanimity over Iraq might well resonate with disaffected Democrats and independents, but it won't be sufficient to cause a rupture until the DP is tested and found wanting in response to deteriorating conditions at home.