Bush's Last-Ditch Bid to Make Iraq a Protectorate Isn't Fooling Anyone

George W. Bush’s efforts to salvage something from the defining project of his presidency, the cynical and disastrous war in Iraq, say much about his motivations in having started it. The lies about weapons of mass destruction have long since been exposed, as have those about the White House wanting “democracy” in the Arab world. Even before the invasion was launched in defiance of the United Nations Security Council in 2003, it was widely argued that what the Bush administration really wanted was fuller access to cheap oil and a new base from which to dominate the Middle East. Now that Washington is in the process of negotiating a “Status Of Forces Agreement” with Baghdad to regulate the US military presence in Iraq, it is becoming clearer than ever that these last two goals have topped the agenda all along and that they might be the only “achievements” (in the imperial sense) still within America’s grasp.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is under no illusions about his compatriots’ views on an agreement that would grant the Americans indefinite basing rights, make their soldiers (and their mercenaries) virtually immune to both Iraqi and international law, drain the country’s most lucrative export resource at discount prices, and possibly embroil Iraq in yet another US-led war, this time against Iran. It will not be easy for Maliki to resist the pressure being applied on him: His government is fragile, his armed forces are in the fledgling stage, and his country is still battling an insurgency. He needs help to get out of this quandary, and the Americans know it – especially since it was their actions that put him there.

Having reduced one of the Arab world’s strongest countries to political chaos and economic penury, therefore, the Americans are now using extortion to make it a protectorate in all but name. It is one of the last, desperate gambits to “justify” all the blood and treasure – both American and Iraqi – squandered already, and it almost certainly will not work. The era in which imperial powers could force smaller countries to accept permanent encroachments on their sovereignty – for instance, the larcenous arrangement under which America still retains a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – is over. In addition, Bush has nothing to offer in return: His gross mismanagement of the war, coupled with a shoddy and corrupt reconstruction effort thus far, means that there is no public appetite for a new “Marshall Plan” of the sort that rebuilt Western Europe after World War II, and Iraq has no interest in being a base for an American assault on Iran.

But Bush’s unique combination of humble intellectual abilities and hubristic political tendencies poses a great danger. In his drive to burnish his own legacy by coming away from the war with some kind of tangible gain, he is likely willing to sacrifice still more of Iraq and its people before the altar of his Republican Party and the false idols of the disgraced neoconservatives who hijacked its foreign policy. Maliki must resist, but to do so he will need friends who want to bolster his country’s independence and stability, not trade them in for their own sinister purposes.