Kerry Visits Iraq Satrap

Obama sent Kerry to Iraq to meet its new leaders, Washington’s satraps, and talk about how to reconstitute Iraq’s military. While in the region, Kerry will visit several other provincial governors heads of state in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. No mention made of visiting Israel, but then that’s not necessary since Israel is in Washington anyway. Kerry said that the U.S. would commit its own ground forces to fight IS if “something very, very dramatic changes.” This shows that Iraq or what’s left of it is something of a province or a U.S. protectorate, so that satrap is more or less accurate for Iraq’s new leader.

All of this is a small part of what U.S. intervention entails. In financial terms, the U.S. issues a call option whereby certain of its resources and forces can be called into action as situations overseas dictate and as U.S. leaders decide to engage.

There is literally no end to interventionism. The road leads all the way around the world and back again, endlessly. The first Bush did an Iraq War in 1990, and that was already 30 years after the U.S. planned a coup against Iraq’s then leader, Qasim.

The U.S. has been at this in Iraq for 54 years now. Similar stories can be told in other places. To what end? What good has come of any of it? The headline “Kerry says U.S. troops might deploy to Iraq if ‘something very, very dramatic changes’” really is nothing new in the long-term context of continual U.S. interventions and attempts to shape outcomes.

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1:42 pm on September 10, 2014