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Blair and Bush planned Iraq war without second UN vote, letter shows

Five months before invasion, pair agreed to go ahead if weapons breach was revealed, according to newly released letter

Britain and the US were planning to take action against Saddam Hussein without a second UN resolution five months before the invasion of Iraq, a newly released letter from Tony Blair's office shows.

A letter from Blair's private secretary reveals that "we and the US would take action" without a new resolution by the UN security council if UN weapons inspectors showed Saddam had clearly breached an earlier resolution. In that case, he "would not have a second chance".

That was the only way Britain could persuade the Bush administration to agree to a role for the UN and continuing work by UN weapons inspectors, the letter says.

Dated 17 October 2002, it was written by Matthew Rycroft to Mark Sedwill, private secretary to the foreign secretary, Jack Straw. "This letter is sensitive," Rycroft underlined. "It must be seen only by those with a real need to know its contents, and must not be copied further."

He sent it to a number of other senior officials, including Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the UN. There is no indication that it was seen by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, who at the time was advising that invading Iraq without a fresh UN resolution would be illegal.

Rycroft's letter referred to a Downing Street meeting on the Iraqi crisis attended by Straw, the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, and the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Sir Mike Boyce. Also present were Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell; his director of government relations, Sally Morgan; his director of communications, Alastair Campbell; and his chiefforeign policy adviser, David Manning.

The meeting concluded, wrote Rycroft, that "the only way to keep the US on the UN route was for there to be a clear understanding that if [chief UN weapons inspector Hans] Blix reported an Iraqi breach of the first resolution, then Saddam would not have a second chance".

In a devastating passage, Rycroft added: "In other words, if for some reason [such as a French or Russian veto] there were no second resolution agreed … we and the US would take action."

The Downing Street letter is particularly significant considering the government's repeated emphasis in public at the time on the need for UN approval before any invasion of Iraq.

The first resolution referred to in Rycroft's letter was number 1441, passed unanimously in November 2002. Goldsmith and most of the government's legal advisers insisted a second UN resolution was needed before military action could lawfully take place.

Blair was put in an even more difficult position with Washington as, in the event, Blix never reported an unconditional breach of the first resolution.

The Rycroft letter also appears to conflict with Straw's actions at the time. A statement recently released by the Chilcot inquiry revealed that in October 2002 Straw told his French counterpart, Dominique de Villepin, that US acceptance of the wording of the first UN resolution "implied" a further one was required.

The statement was written by Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign Office's top legal adviser, who also opposed the invasion. It also disclosed that Greenstock had told his US counterpart that Britain would state publicly after the resolution was passed "that there needed to be a second resolution".

The issue is at the heart of the deep and continuing arguments over the legality of the invasion. Goldsmith originally advised Blair and Straw that the first UN resolution did not provide sufficient legal cover for war.

Goldsmith said he changed his mind in February 2003 after Bush's legal advisers told him on a US visit that they had agreed to the wording of 1441 only because it had not crossed their "red line" – the clear message was that, as far as the US was concerned, no new resolution was needed.

Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London, said: "The letter of 17 October 2002 is consistent with the conclusion that the prime minister wanted to proceed to action with the US on the basis of a single security council resolution, irrespective of what the law required, and ignoring the views at the time of the Foreign Office legal adviser and the attorney general."

According to Wood's statement to the Chilcot inquiry, Straw told the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, "that we needed a second resolution and that it was extremely unlikely we could find a legal basis without it".

Sands said: "It reflects the widespread view that what became UNSCR 1441 would not authorise military action without a second resolution. His latest statement shoots a very big hole in the arguments of Messrs Goldsmith and Straw, and one wonders why they ultimately failed to reflect its contents in their words and actions."

Blair and Bush planned Iraq war without second UN vote ...

www.theguardian.com

The True Cost Of The Iraq War

Huffingtonpost : Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.
Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan.

And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?
The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.
Afghanistan

The Iraq invasion diverted our attention from the Afghan war, now entering its 10th year. While "success" in Afghanistan might always have been elusive, we would probably have been able to assert more control over the Taliban, and suffered fewer casualties, if we had not been sidetracked. In 2003 -- the year we invaded Iraq -- the United States cut spending in Afghanistan to $14.7 billion (down from more than $20 billion in 2002), while we poured $53 billion into Iraq. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, we spent at least four times as much money in Iraq as in Afghanistan.

It is hard to believe that we would be embroiled in a bloody conflict in Afghanistan today if we had devoted the resources there that we instead deployed in Iraq. A troop surge in 2003 -- before the warlords and the Taliban reestablished control -- would have been much more effective than a surge in 2010.

Oil

When the United States went to war in Iraq, the price of oil was less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around that level. With the war, prices started to soar, reaching $140 a barrel by 2008. We believe that the war and its impact on the Middle East, the largest supplier of oil in the world, were major factors. Not only was Iraqi production interrupted, but the instability the war brought to the Middle East dampened investment in the region.
In calculating our $3 trillion estimate two years ago, we blamed the war for a $5-per-barrel oil price increase. We now believe that a more realistic (if still conservative) estimate of the war's impact on prices works out to at least $10 per barrel. That would add at least $250 billion in direct costs to our original assessment of the war's price tag. But the cost of this increase doesn't stop there: Higher oil prices had a devastating effect on the economy.
Federal debt

There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.
As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis -- and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.
The financial crisis

The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home. Meanwhile, war spending provided less of an economic boost than other forms of spending would have. Paying foreign contractors working in Iraq was neither an effective short-term stimulus (not compared with spending on education, infrastructure or technology) nor a basis for long-term growth.
Instead, loose monetary policy and lax regulations kept the economy going -- right up until the housing bubble burst, bringing on the economic freefall.
Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.

The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.

* * *
Reimagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America's standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger. The question today is: Can we learn from this costly mistake?

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, was chairman of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. Linda J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. They are co-authors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes

What Exactly Does a Journalist Throwing a Shoe at Bush Mean?

Media organizations are trying to make sense of the shoe-hurling incident

By Dan Gilgoff

Posted December 16, 2008

Is the so-called shoe insult an Arab custom, a Muslim one, neither, or both?

The question has surfaced as news organizations struggle to make sense of the shoe-hurling Iraqi journalist whom President Bush encountered at a Baghdad press conference over the weekend.

Many of the media's explanations have saddled the episode with cultural and religious meaning, noting that Muslims consider shoes to be ritually unclean and remove them before entering mosques. But Middle East scholars say shoe abuse appears to lack distinctly Muslim or Arabic origins and that some widely disseminated interpretations of the weekend run-in probably go too far.

"It's one of those cases where we're trying to make it a lot more alien and bizarre than it actually is," says Jamal Elias, a University of Pennsylvania religious studies professor who specializes in Islam. "The journalist was disgusted with something Bush was saying, and he acted out. I can't imagine if you go to a press conference with George W. Bush they let you carry too much with you, so he took off the one thing he could hurl—his shoe."

Elias notes that the shoe insult appears in Islamic literature as early as the 12th century. A hagiography of a Sufi saint published around 1600 claimed that the saint showed his spiritual superiority to a levitating person by making his own shoes levitate even higher and whacking the levitator's head with them.

Most Middle Eastern Muslims remove their shoes before entering a house, not just a mosque, suggesting the custom is more practical than religious. "Taking off shoes when entering a mosque or home is not a religious rule," says Jonathan Brown, assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Washington. "It's just the etiquette that's developed around cleanliness, etc. In fact, Muslims can actually pray with their shoes on. But you can imagine what that would do to the carpet of a major mosque."

Shoe insults aren't limited to the Arabic or Muslim worlds. In South Asian countries like India, Hindus—as well as Muslims—have a custom of humiliating people by parading them in public wearing a garland of shoes.

Even more basic shoe etiquette varies throughout the Muslim, Arabic, and Asian worlds. For instance, it's considered rude in Arabian Gulf nations to sit with a leg lifted or folded over one knee, lest one expose others to the soles of his or her shoes. But that custom is much less widely practiced in other nations in the region, like Egypt.

Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina, says that the meaning of the recent shoe incident is probably more universal than has been acknowledged. "We saw on CNN and BBC a ton of articles offering instant 'anthropological insights' on how the shoe touches the earth, and is the lowest part of the body," he wrote in an E-mail message. "What if in an American context someone had thrown a shoe at Bush? Would we see that as a sign of great love for the President?"

• Read more on the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at President Bush.
• Read more by Dan Gilgoff.

Iraqi Cabinet agrees deal for US troop pullout by end of 2011

Iraq’s Cabinet today approved a deal with the United States that sets out a timetable for all US forces to leave the country within three years.

The text, which also allows Baghdad to order an inspection of any US aircraft or vehicle that it has reason to suspect of transporting unauthorised weapons or people in or out of Iraq, will be submitted to Parliament in the next 24 hours for a final vote.

It is unclear, however, whether MPs will give the status-of-forces agreement the green light, with some political factions opposed to any such accord and others demanding that the text be put to a public referendum.

In a sign of ongoing volatility on the ground, a suicide car bomb killed 15 people, including 7 policemen, and wounded 20 in a town north of Baghdad. The attack in Jalawla is the latest in a series of large bombings to rock Iraq in recent days.

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Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister, is confident that the security agreement will be ratified before a major religious holiday from November 25.

“All the bets are on getting the approval,” Mr Zebari told The Times.

The deal must be signed by the end of the year when a United Nations’ mandate authorising the presence of foreign troops in Iraq is due to expire.

Mr Zebari added: “We think it is a good agreement for Iraq and the United States and something that we will be able to defend.”

He was speaking after a one-and-a-half-hour Cabinet meeting, where the pact was discussed and passed by 27 of the Cabinet’s 37 members, nine were absent.

The decision is a major breakthrough in a process that has dragged on for months, with both US and Iraqi negotiators forced to make compromises.

In the latest hurdle, Iraqi ministers sent the text back to the US side last month, demanding a number of amendments. As a result, the final draft contains two key changes, according to Fawzi Hariri, Minister for Industry and Minerals.

Firstly, the deadline for the withdrawal of some 146,000 US troops from Iraq is set for December 31, 2011. Soldiers will also pull out of towns and cities to larger bases outside these urban areas by next summer.

Secondly, the accord will enable a joint US-Iraqi team to co-ordinate an inspection of any US military vehicle that the Iraqi Government has reason to suspect is being used to move unauthorised entities, such as weapons or people.

“If we have intelligence that things are being smuggled in or out of the country, or persons are being taken in or out unauthorized … then the US side will agree for an inspection,” Mr Hariri told The Times.

Among other tricky areas, the accord gives Iraq the right to try US soldiers in the case of serious crimes committed off-duty and off-base. It also prohibits the US from using Iraqi territory to attack neighbouring countries such as Iran and Syria.

Mr Hariri was very upbeat on the passage of the document through the Cabinet and said he was “quietly confident” it will be approved by Parliament

“It is a great day for the standing of the new Iraq and the new democratically elected system of Government,” said the minister, a Kurd.

“We were occupied in 2003 and today we made an agreement with the occupying force under international law to depart our country having contributed to the stability of the country and the economy.”

It remains to be seen whether the draft will pass through the 275-strong Parliament, but it is sure to generate a lively debate.

Abdulkareem al-Samarrai, a senior member of the Sunni Muslim al-Tawafuq bloc said: “I believe there will be strong discussions about the agreement because the Parliament is not the same as the Cabinet … There are many blocs in the Parliament and not all of them have members in the Cabinet."

His political group wants the public to vote on whether or not to accept the pact in a referendum. “This agreement will affect Iraq for a long period, so it should be the people who decide their fate,” he added.

In contrast, Hadi al-Ameri, leader of the Badr organisation, one of the main Shia Muslim groups in the ruling coalition, said this week Iraqi politicians felt it would be easier to accept the pact after the election of Barack Obama, who favours withdrawal.

Followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric, however, remain opposed to the accord. Iran, which wields influence in Iraq, is also against it.

Failure to approve the pact by the end of the year will force the Iraqi Government to return to the United Nations Security Council to request an emergency extension of the troop mandate.

Britain must also sign an accord with Iraq on the status of its 4,100-strong contingent largely based in the south of the country.

Iraqi Cabinet agrees deal for US troop pullout by end of 2011
Times Online

Deal Signals Return of Foreign Firms to Iraq's Oil Fields

China National Petroleum Corp. Signs $3 Billion Agreement

By Amit R. Paley

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 28, 2008; 3:51 PM

BAGHDAD, Aug. 28 -- Iraq and China signed a $3 billion deal this week to develop a major Iraqi oil field, the first major commercial oil contract here with a foreign company since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The agreement calls for the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. to begin producing 25,000 barrels of oil a day, then gradually increasing to 125,000 a day, according to Asim Jihad, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry.

The contract revamps a deal the Chinese company had inked in 1997 with Saddam Hussein to develop an oil field in Wasit province, south of Baghdad near the Iranian border. But unlike that deal, which called for China to share in the revenues, the current contract is based on a fixed-fee structure.

The announcement of the deal comes two months after Western oil companies came close to an agreement with the Oil Ministry to return to Iraq. Those deals were for technical contracts that involved supporting production. The China agreement is a so-called service contract that is much more lucrative.

Jihad said the technical contracts, which were originally to be finalized June 30, have been postponed because of disagreements with the Western concerns, including Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total.

Most of the major oil contracts are to be awarded in the next year and a half through a process with 35 companies identified by the Oil Ministry, he said.

The deal with the Chinese company came early because of the pre-existing deal before the U.S-led invasion and to rebut concerns that the U.S. government was manipulating the process to benefit American corporations, he said.

"We hope this will refute all the rumors that say the American companies are the only ones benefiting from the American occupation," he said.

The contract requires China to build a major electrical station in the area to boost Iraq's overworked power grid.

The deal still requires the approval of the Iraqi cabinet, which the Oil Ministry hopes will come as early as next week.

source: Deal Signals Return of Foreign Firms to Iraq's Oil Fields Washington Post, United States

Putin's Revenge for Kosovo and Iraq in Georgia

By wagering on NATO's lack of military options to confront Russia's actions in Georgia, and by controlling the bottleneck of energy flow to Europe through the Caucasus pipelines, Russia's new ruler Vladimir Putin has nearly put the finishing touches on America's downfall from its status as the world's only superpower, a process that began with its war in Iraq, or at least that is what he thought. Putin has wagered on Washington's military being tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on Europe's internal division regarding the results of the US's unilateral adventure in Iraq. He has estimated that the US would lack the political and diplomatic influence, and that it would lose its prestige upon abandoning, in practice, democracy's spoiled child in Georgia, President Mikheil Saakashavili.

The US's decision regarding Russia's confrontational strategy (instead of giving priority to partnership) has its perspectives and implications not only in the context of bilateral relations between the two countries, or on the relationship between NATO and Russia's neighbors in the Caucasus. It also affects the position and status of the US all over the world, including the Gulf region with its oil and gas, and the Middle East with its conflicts.

Astonishment and verbal protestation will not be sufficient for a man of steel such as Putin, with his Soviet background, Russian nationalism, vast oil resources, and strategic oil partnerships with the likes of China and Iran. Retreating to the front, or escaping to the back, is the impression accompanying American and European responses, deepening the impression that the US has become a paper tiger, and Europe a wildcat that toys with the tiger but fears the Russian bear in its own home, which is why it will not dare to be defiant.

Given such a situation, it seems to some that the unipolar era is over, that a new world order is taking shape under Russia's leadership and that the US has run out of options. Yet, what will happen if the US decides take the initiative to use Iraq, as it had envisioned, as an unparalleled military base, and to redeploy its forces by tactically withdrawing its troops to aircraft carriers, informing all those concerned that it has decided to exercise what military might it has and that its hands are not tied?

What will happen if the US informs its NATO allies that Afghanistan is their mission and their responsibility, to free US troops of the military burden and remove its reputation for having its hands tied? What if Washington decides that the partnership with Russia over resolving the nuclear crisis by offering incentives to Iran has become ineffective, as Moscow has taken itself out of the partnership and exhausted diplomacy to serve Tehran's interest in buying time and stalling while reinforcing its nuclear capabilities and expanding its influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, which the Islamic Republic of Iran has transformed into an Iranian base through Hezbollah?

The cost of these options should be considered on the basis of the cost of avoiding them. In other words, the US and Europe should carefully consider what to do with Putin's Russia, if they refuse to confront the fundamental message behind Russia's actions in Georgia, namely:

* Teaching every country in Russia's neighborhood the lesson that it must remain Moscow's friendly and obedient ally, and that it will not be allowed to become an ally of the US or a member of NATO.

* Informing Washington that it will not be forgiven for the mistake it made with Kosovo, and that revenge from Russia's perspective today is far more important than the partnership which was so important for Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Things are different now, and the scope of such revenge will not be limited to the Caucasus but will reach the US wherever it finds the need to, in the Caucasus, Iran or elsewhere.

* Taking a qualitative step forward, in the framework of its oil and gas strategy, by securing Russia's control over the bottleneck of pipelines stretching across Georgia to Turkey which supplies Europe with its energy needs. Additionally, several major European countries, such as Germany, rely on Russia's gas for over 40% of their needs. Russia has laid an important foundation for its strategic decision to regain its former grandeur, namely that of oil alliances and gas balances.

The matter is not limited to Mikheil Saakashvili's excesses in South Ossetia or his miscalculations. It is rather about the meaning of submitting to Russia's response to what Moscow has described as adventures that must be stopped by any means necessary, including military incursion into Georgia's territories to teach it a lesson and to control the future of its pipelines. The leadership in Tbilisi, on the other hand, claims that Russia has set up a strategy of escalation and begun to provoke Georgia, and that Georgia had no choice but to defend itself.

Saakashvili has suffered great disappointment, as the US and Europe have, in practice, abandoned him. Perhaps he had believed that responding to Russia's show of power with a show of power of his own would automatically lead to partnership and accelerate Georgia's admission into NATO. So far, his wager seems to have failed on both counts.

What has taken place in Georgia constitutes a building-block in the grand Russian strategy set up by Putin in Russia's immediate neighborhood and on the international level. It would be wrong to believe that developments will be limited to the Caucasus or to Georgian territory, as Iran is the next stop in this strategy.

If Washington yields and behaves on the basis that its options are limited and costly and that it has no choice but to plead with Europe for salvation and bow down before Moscow, then the worst is yet to come. If those Americans who are angry at George Bush and his war in Iraq release their anger by rewarding Russia and Iran, and reinforcing their ability to expand, dominate, use threats and intimidation, revive the Soviet spirit, and mobilize allies on the basis of enmity to the US, it would be as if one were to chop off his nose to get back at his face.

There is now an urgent need for deepened strategic thinking regarding the American-European relationship, in the wake of the Iraq war in which the neoconservatives implicated the US. Such a war was a desperate decision which turned Iraq into a slippery step which may topple the US from its position of sole superpower. While the anger is well-founded, the challenges of the day demand far more than confining ourselves in blame and anger, and drawing lists of non-options. It is of the utmost necessity to formulate a comprehensive strategy towards Russia and Iran, at some point after the Iraq war, especially in the era of oil alliances and at a time when revenge is being employed as a fundamental political tool.

Moscow is not only taking revenge for Washington's mistake of supporting Kosovo's independence from Serbia, a measure which Moscow considered to be a direct insult, but also for the war in Iraq, of which excluding Russia from the country and its resources was a fundamental element. For two American errors, there were two Russian acts of revenge. And then there is Iran, where the matter is radically different, and where revenge takes a regional dimension, with a Russian-Iranian partnership directed against the US, based on exploiting American involvement in Iraq.

Vladimir Putin did not dwarf the US and turn it into a second-class country by his mere genius, but he intends to take advantage of the opportunity to abuse a dwarfed US to increase the possibilities of restoring Russia's grandeur. If he is met by apologies, he will move forward undeterred, supported by dangerous and violent nationalism. Only then will remorse catch up with those who focused the blame on Bush's adventures in Iraq and his mistakes in Kosovo, blame which he has certainly deserved, but without examining the designs of those benefiting from such errors and adventures, most particularly Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Europeans in turn have the responsibility of careful examination, rather than simply following the trend of chewing hatred and blame for Bush and the US. They are on the verge of the worst economic recession in a Europe dependent on Russian gas. Today they have caught a glimpse and are now familiar with who Vladimir Putin is, how he thinks and how he acts.

When Putin resorted to military force against Chechnya, the world did not take notice of his military tendency to resolve problems by undermining diplomacy. Today, and merely to spite the US, many Muslims forget that Vladimir Putin has repeatedly taken violent military stances against Muslims in Chechnya and elsewhere, and celebrate his violence to compensate for their constant failure.

If the response is silence, fear, retreat and accepting that there is no other choice but submission, it will constitute a meaningful strategic message, not only to Russia but also to Iran, allowing them to further pursue their ambitions of regional hegemony. This is not an invitation to rush to military options against Iran or to a display of power directed at Moscow. However, both options are available, if the US wishes to resort to them, at a cost.

Perhaps the developments in Georgia will lead to seriously considering early withdrawal from Iraq to redeploy American troops on aircraft carriers where the US's naval military might is unparalleled. Such a measure would put an end to the impression that the US has no other choice but to submit. Tactical withdrawal from Iraq would free Washington's hands and enable the US to act confidently at sea.

The other option could be to stop saying and pretending that Iraq is not a military base for the US, and instead to behave in the opposite manner. In other words, it is perhaps time to cause a qualitative shift in the debate over US military capabilities inside Iraq, to turn them away from the dilemma of having their hands tied and to emphasize the importance and usefulness of Iraq being, in practice, an American military base that could be activated whenever the US's needs and higher strategic interests would demand it.