Our friend Chalabi has been visiting in Washington, renewing old acquaintances and providing reassurance. In particular, he is reported to have assured the American Enterprise Institute that when things settle down the Americans will be able to withdraw to their permanent bases in Iraq.
Was he supposed to let that cat out of the bag? Are the permanent bases for ICBM missile installations so far along that everyone who needs to know (Russia, China, Iran, Mongolia) knows and it's time to let the American people in on why their children have been dying in the Persian Gulf?
Or has Chalabi, who's got little credibility anyway, been sent to test the waters with this little bomb-shell--that the plan is to keep American troops in Iraq for the forseeable future--which, if it's not well received, can be denied on the basis that Chalabi doesn't know what he's talking about?
Anyway, it's been increasingly clear to me, even though the permanent bases (which Rumsfeld has defined as not permanent in the traditional sense) have been scaled back from the original fourteen to four, that the invasion of Iraq was intended to achieve by force what two decades of negotiating with Saddam Hussein hadn't been able to achieve--a staging area for the American military from which an aray of ICBM (Intercontinental Balistic Missiles) would be able to intercept the boost phase (when the missile is going up, rather than coming down) of anything unfriendlies might want to send our way. The unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty by the United States, soon after Bush took office, set the stage.
Perhaps, considering that China hasn't raised any objections yet and has merely supported the designation of Central Asia as a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, they're OK with the missiles as long as they aren't carrying nuclear warheads. But, how are they going to tell? How will they tell that these WMD aren't being snuck in as I write? There aren't any international monitors snooping around Iraq since the country was given a clean bill of health. "No weapons of mass destruction there."
Does that phrase ring a bell? It's what Bush said as he was "searching" around the Oval Office in that hilarious skit, looking for weapons of mass destruction under his desk. Some people thought it was a joke that was in very bad taste. But, in fact, if you consider that the President of the U.S. has an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction like nobody else, able to be dispatched at the push of a button, then the skit was yet another example of something being hidden in plain sight. And the joke was that Saddam Hussein, whose country was being destroyed in the hunt, didn't have what Bush, in his pristine office, was planning to take in. What a grand diddle that was.
Is it going to work? Are the American people going to be satisfied that their children died to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? I doubt it. Because Americans, though they prefer their heros to be alive, are willing have some dead heros, if the living can be satisfied that their deaths were worth-while--that the people they died for are going to be grateful. And that's something that's not going to happen in Iraq, any more than it did in Vietnam.
The argument that "Acquiring long-range ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction will increase the possibility that weaker countries could deter, constrain, and harm the United States" (1) just isn't going to carry much weight when the leadership of the United States has just demonstrated to the nations of the world that, like the Soviet Union before it, it's a lot weaker already than anybody thought.
(1) http://www.cia.gov/nic/testimony_WMDthreat.html
For a historical perspective:
http://www.fas.org/rlg/991117.htm