US-Iraq: An "Enduring" Relationship

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http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php?id=36494&cat_id=1

THE WORD "enduring" crops up a lot in connection with the US adventure in Iraq. As soon as the US army occupied the country in 2003, it began work on fourteen "enduring" (i.e. permanent) military bases to turn it into an American bastion at the head of the Gulf.

President George W. Bush and Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have signed an agreement to forge an "enduring" US-Iraqi relationship once the United Nations mandate that currently authorises the US presence in the country expires at the end of next year.

The UN mandate that provides a legal justification for the current "multinational" force in Iraq was a desperate attempt to paper over the fact that the organisation's most powerful member had launched an unprovoked invasion of another country.

The Security Council could not defy or condemn the United States – Britain and the US would both have vetoed such a move – so it chose to give it some diplomatic cover instead. But the next extension of the UN mandate, to the end of 2008, will be the last.

The "coalition" of other countries that contributed troops to the occupation of Iraq is melting away: the new Australian government is going to bring its troops home, the Japanese parliament has ended the country's naval support for the Iraq mission (the soldiers had already left), and Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown is searching for a tactful way to pull all the British troops out. snip

We need not dwell on the unequal status of the American and Iraqi participants in this negotiation, with 160,000 American troops in Iraq and Prime Minister al-Maliki unable, as he put it last year, to "move even a battalion without American consent."