> And of course liberals and too many radicals are continuing to whine that
> Bush's invasion of Iraq failed. But Bush achieved what every president from
> Eisenhower to Clinton had failed to achieve: the permanent presence of u.s.
> troops in the area.
On 2013-05-15, at 4:53 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> Yep. and i want a cookie for being right damn it. I said long ago that
> it was oil, it was to establish a military presence in the region…
1. There are no longer any US military bases in Iraq.
2. The permanent presence of US troops in the Middle East is small - about 5000 troops, mostly in the Gulf states and Turkey - and their deployment predates the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration.
2. Following the invasion, American oil companies were not given privileged access to Iraqi oil by the al-Maliki government, which awarded concessions on economic rather than political grounds. China is expected to soon become Iraq's biggest market and Chinese state-owned oil firms are partners or operators in several major Iraqi oil fields, dwarfing the presence of US oil majors who have shown little interest in developing the country's oil reserves..