All that's needed is a Status of Forces Agreement signed by an Iraqi government that could not survive without a continued US presence - or in lieu of that, a security situation which makes asking us to leave practically impossible in the foreseeable future - to realize the grandest aspirations of neo-conservatives and security hawks alike: a large and long-term US presence in the heart of the world's major oil producing region as we enter the age of peak oil.
Such a situation might seem ideal in the context of a new cold war with an energy-hungry China, but it would likely fuel a much hotter war against a mushrooming pan-Islamic insurgency across the Muslim world. The US would be much more secure if it took the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent in Iraq and devoted them to developing sustainable alternative energy technologies and transforming the global economic system so that our standard of living no longer depends on billions of people living on $2 a day or less, and entire world regions such as Africa and the Middle East structurally marginalized from the formal flows of money and goods in the globalized economy.
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All that's needed is a Status of Forces Agreement signed by an Iraqi government that could not survive without a continued US presence - or in lieu of that, a security situation which makes asking us to leave practically impossible in the foreseeable future - to realize the grandest aspirations of neo-conservatives and security hawks alike: a large and long-term US presence in the heart of the world's major oil producing region as we enter the age of peak oil.
