america isn't leaving iraq any time soon. hard to imagine wanting to stay camped over some of the largest oil reserves there are. it'll be interesting to see how obama explains it.

since americans are already whining about high oil prices, i'm willing to guess they'll forgive barak for keeping a hand firmly on the oil tap.

Of course America will have permanent bases in Iraq. If Geroge w. Bush can't get them via agreement with a puppet Iraqi government then he'll get it via Executive Order (secret if necessary).

Anyone who questions that must "Hate America".

The Bush administration has wagered the future of America on achieving the pacification and reorganization of Iraq. Any withdrawal before reaching these goals will be a disaster in a multitude of ways. Not least of which, without military backing, the U.S. economy will be dealt a massive blow. The United State's hegemonic hold on creditors will be lost, maybe for good. In fact, it is foreseeable that the economic consequences of a failed war (and forced withdrawal) in Iraq may be so devestating, dwarfing even the negative impact of the war in Vietnam, that they would give rise to charges in U.S. courts, both civil and criminal, against the war's architects.

So it's easy to see that whatever illusions the current administration may suffer from, when it comes to Iraq, it is fully aware of the predicament of its own creation. One should make no mistake, the administration will continue to make decisions based upon the fully rational principal that the consequences of failing in Iraq are just impermissible.

During one of the 2004 presidential election debates, Kerry challenged Bush to renounce permanent bases in Iraq. Bush studiously declined to address the point, by rambling instead on one of his talking points. The fiasco in Iraq was then still being papered over by a pliant press, which is why the story did not get any traction.

US bases are built to last. The former US/NATO air base in Phalsbourg, France, now home to one of the French Army's helicopter regiments, has so much rebar in its concrete landing strip that the helicopters cannot rely on magnetic compasses when in its vicinity.

“I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.” - SecDef Donald Rumsfeld at an April 21, 2003 newsbriefing.

Amazing what one can get away with with a lapdog press.

Given that the main reason for starting the war in the first place was to gain control of the oil supplies, there's no way the US will be relinquishing those bases any time soon.

Of course the Bush administration (and their enablers in the MSM) will tell you that it's ludicrous to suppose that they went to war for oil - just like it's ludicrous they intended to scatter American mega-bases throughout Iraq for a long-term military occupation.

Sure, you have all read about the British Empire, 'the most powerful empire the world has ever known'... Ah Ha, enter the Doofus or George W Bush if you insist. He, his administration, and their mad dreams and dreamers... And you think you knew or know about it... A picture is worth a thousand words and we at home, here in America, see few pictures of the mad building which has been going in Iraq.

Sure, for a long time Deeply read of the Embassy, the fortress Americana, the largest in the world, the billion dollar boondoggle that will cost more than a billion dollars a year to operate. But this is small potatoes to what Team Bush has been assembling in Iraq. A Pax Americana for the ages, buildings to celebrate George W for years and years to come. Dam.. Snookered again by those Republicans.

Yes America while your country founders and your prices rise... While recession, and the banking crisis eat away at your equity and pocketbooks. While your infrastructure fails, your levies break, your rivers flood... Your money is being squandered in unbelievable fashion by George W and his Republican band of Scalawags and Con artists.

Sorry America... You should have read your Harper's in February of 2,000... And if only you had read your history. But you did not, you waved your flags and shouted slogans... And now you have been fleeced and your money, some of it anyway, much of it, gobs of it sits in the desert of Iraq. I think it is time to send every Republican in America a large big bill... Let them pay for this...They voted for it.

Why do we need megabases with Americasn fast food joints in a country we have liberated and set on the road to democracy? Is it because we are afraid that the Iraqis will cleave themselves along sectarian lines, divide up the country into ethnically cleansed zones (I forgot; we did that with the surge), or because we are afraid that our democracy outpost in the Arab world might find it has more in common with its Iranian neighbors? Or is it really now about the oil and keeping the Persian Gulf open for beeg bizness oil comapanies?

The one thing these bases are not about is U.S. national security. Unless we are afraid of the million man armed forces we are helping the Iraqis to build, and of an increasingly efficient military command structure. Once the military runs out of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists to hunt down and kill, will they stand down and let a much less effective and thoprougjly corrupt central government run Iraq? History suggests such patience will be limited. Will we act against the Iraqi military we built when it turns on the government in Baghdad?

The Brits tried this "we will take your oil and control your foreign policy" approach to Iraq in the 1930s. It failed. That the Bushies are hell bent on trying to make Iraq a subject of the U.S. just prove once again that neither the President or his people know very much about history.