12 Answers to Questions No One Is Asking About Iraq

by Tom Engelhardt

"......In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 56 percent of Americans "say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties" and this has, as the Post notes, been a majority position since January 2007, the month that the surge was first announced. Imagine what might happen if the American public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq – and of thinking in Washington. So, here, in an attempt to unravel the situation in ever-unraveling Iraq are 12 answers to questions which should be asked far more often in this country:

1. Yes, the war has morphed into the U.S. military's worst Iraq nightmare......

2. No, there was never an exit strategy from Iraq because the Bush administration never intended to leave – and still doesn't......

3. Yes, the United States is still occupying Iraq (just not particularly effectively).......

4. Yes, the war was about oil......

5. No, our new embassy in Baghdad is not an "embassy"........

6. No, the Iraqi government is not a government.......

7. No, the surge is not over.......

8. No, the Iraqi army will never "stand up".......

9. No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and fragmentation......

10. No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and civil war.......

11. No, al-Qaeda will not control Iraq if we leave (and neither will Iran).......

12. Yes, some Americans were right about Iraq from the beginning (and not the pundits, either).....

Now, as has been true for some time, a majority of Americans, another obvious bunch of know-nothings, are deluded enough to favor bringing all U.S. troops out of Iraq at a reasonable pace and relatively soon. (More than 60 percent of them also believe "that the conflict is not integral to the success of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.") If, on the other hand, a poll were taken of pundits and the inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia (not to speak of the officials of the Bush administration), the number of them who would want a total withdrawal from Iraq (or even see that as a reasonable goal) would undoubtedly descend near the vanishing point. When it comes to American imperial interests, most of them know better, just as so many of them did before the war began. Even advisers to candidates who theoretically want out of Iraq are hinting that a full-scale withdrawal is hardly the proper way to go.

So let me ask you a question (and you answer it): Given all of the above, given the record thus far, who is likely to be right? "