It was not a war for democracy.  The word wasn't mentioned once in the President's State of the Union last year.  Instead, for the utopians and their parasites, it was what Naomi Klein calls an ongoing episode of "Extreme Makeover". http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/mai...

And in this month's "In These Times", Antonia Juhasz who is the author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy At a Time,"really nails the true plan. The article is not yet on line.  It is worth it to pick up a copy of the January "In These Times".
She reports that the Bush administration actually hired a consulting firm called Bearing Point, Inc to put together a post war plan two months before the invasion.  Bearing Point then got a $250 million contract "to remake Iraq's economic infrastructure."

As the Bush administration stepped up its war planning, the State Department began preparations for post-invasion Iraq. Meeting four times between December 2002 and April 2003, members of the State Department's Oil and Energy Working Group mapped out Iraq's oil future.  They agreed tht Iraq 'should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war" and that the best method for doing so was through Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs).

Juhasz calls PSAs "privitization lite". She also points out that the Iraq Study Group (Gee, all these working and study groups sound so academic, don't they?) "recommended that the U.S. 'assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise'".  How kind and considerate of that loveable bunch of old crooks.

But Iraq, she notes, is just the first step in a plan to have an economic makeover of the entire Middle East by creating the "U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area"(MEFTA) "to spread the economic invasion well-underway in Iraq to the rest of the region by 2013."  As Bush stated at the U.N. "Our agenda for free trade is part of our agenda for a freer world."  Yes, and the sulphur fumes began to waft across the Assembly Room.  

Part of this plan, for example, is yet another assault on what little remains of our textile industry.  "...the U.S. International Trade Commission estimates that the U.S. Oman agreement will lead to a 66 percent increase in U.S. imports of apparel manufactured in Oman...After the U.S.-Jordan FTA of 2001, "new factories arrived in Jordan to service American companies, primarily apparel firms such as Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Target and Jones New York."  And workers' abuse such as "48-hour shifts without sleep, physical and psychological abuse" can't possibly help us to win hearts or minds.

Last year we saw the Supreme Court rule in Kelo vs New London that cities could decide that if your neighborhood and home weren't up to snuff, they could bulldoze it and put up a shopping mall.  The same is true in Iraq.  Just like any snobby bunch, the White House and Neo Con gang decided that it was in the best interests of the world to level Iraq and make it into "Free Trade World".    These cynical, but incompetent looney tunes blithely brought in the bulldozers in the form of tanks, HumVees, 145,000 troops, and F-16's to make Iraq into their own image of what is "nice".  

Trouble is, like the holdouts in New London, Connecticut, the Iraqis don't want our stinking makeover.  They don't want the shopping malls with big stone monuments with the Ten Commandments written on them.  They don't want Mc Falafels or Wal-Bazaar.  They don't want to buy our stuff.  They want the electricity back on, the sewers working and the 500,000 and more Iraqis out of work to have their jobs back. They want to determine their own fate and not have our corporate idea of a perfect world shoved down their throats.   They have been struggling for decades to get out from under patriarchal rule only to have the U.S. come in as just another set of deadbeat dads bulldozing away their future.

Why after World War II did both Germany and Japan peacefully rebuild?  Thom Hartmann says it's because we offered them a better ideology.  We offered them real democracy, not crony capitalism. The Marshall plan poured tons of money in and helped create a strong and peaceful Europe and Japan.  Read Beschloss's "The Conquerors".  Roosevelt started working on a postwar plan in 1941.  It was a plan to win hearts and minds not to see how much money we could make taking over Germany's and Japan's resources.  Roosevelt was actually working out a peace plan.  America was not yet a nation determined to be a military empire, raping and plundering their way across the continent as the Allies saw the Nazis doing.

When John Edwards declared in November 2005, "I was wrong" about giving Bush the authority to invade Iraq, he called for the removal of the contractors.  

First, we need to remove the image of an imperialist America from the landscape of Iraq. American contractors who have taken unfair advantage of the turmoil in Iraq need to leave Iraq. If that means Halliburton subsidiary KBR, then KBR should go. Such departures, and the return of the work to Iraqi businesses, would be a real statement about our hopes for the new nation.

We also need to show Iraq and the world that we will not stay there forever. We've reached the point where the large number of our troops in Iraq hurts, not helps, our goals. Therefore, early next year, after the Iraqi elections, when a new government has been created, we should begin redeployment of a significant number of troops out of Iraq. This should be the beginning of a gradual process to reduce our presence and change the shape of our military's deployment in Iraq. Most of these troops should come from National Guard or Reserve forces.

That will still leave us with enough military capability, combined with better-trained Iraqis, to fight terrorists and continue to help the Iraqis develop a stable country.

To date, he is the only candidate or potential candidate who has gone to the root cause of the problem, the wholesale plundering of Iraq by multi-national corporations.  He is the only one challenging the flat earthers self-serving  economic ideas.

Seems like we need to get our priorities straight.  There's a lot of middle ground between "cutting and running" and "staying the course for as long as it takes".  It's called "common sense with a dash of protectionism." Juhasz puts forward two key demands for the new Congress.  

First, "all remaining U.S. reconstruction funds must be turned over to Iraqi companies and Iraqi workers.  SIGIR (The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction) found that when Iraq companies receive contracts (rather than subcontracts from U.S. companies), their work is faster, less expensive and less prone to insurgent attack."  

"U.S. military commanders and soldiers in Iraq have repeatedly made this demand as they have learned firsthand that a person with a clipboard or a shovel in his or her hands is far less likely to carry a gun."

"Second, U.S. Corporations must not be allowed to "cut and run."  Every U.S. corporation with reconstruction contracts in Iraq must be individually audited an each project investigated by SIGIR. Misspent funds must be returned and made available to Iraqis for reconstruction.

Get the corporations out of Iraq now, move the soldiers out of the city streets and back to their bases and then home.  We need to start to act liked responsible adults instead of the bullyboys on the block.  And stop with our foolish Neo liberal wet dreams of a lovely global market place of peace and prosperity.  We need to get over ourselves.

And since all these neo cons and neo liberals love the idea of privatizing everything, give the contractors some extra dough to cover the retreat.... Oh, sorry...I mean redeployment of our armed forces.  The last people out of Baghdad should be Blackwater security.

Addendum or P.S.: Barbara Ehrenreich has a simple idea in January's The Progressive.  

"Here's a phased redeployment" plan:  Phase one, bus the troops to the nearest funcioning airport in Saudi Arabia.  Phase Two, put them on regular commercial flights to the United States.
 According to Travelocity,the  airfare part would cost about $1500 a person (coach class), or $225 million for  $150,000 troops. If the government won't come up with the ticket price, I'm sure thousands of ordinary citizens would happily dig into their own pockets.  Hell, Id spring for first class".