Too Much Stuff: How Our Profligate Consumerism Might Keep Us in Iraq

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted November 21, 2008.

Ever since the President's surge strategy was launched in January 2007, this argument has been a background hum in the withdrawal debate. Now, it's evidently about to come front and center.

A new president will be taking office. His withdrawal plan -- he spoke of it more accurately on CBS's 60 Minutes as "a plan that draws down our troops" -- is a modest one. After those American "combat brigades" are out, it's still possible, as one of his key security advisers, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, told National Public Radio last summer, that as many as 55,000 U.S. troops might remain in an advisory capacity or as residual forces. And yet, with the Iraqis urging us on, so many of the arguments against withdrawal have fallen away, which is why, when Barack Obama sits down in the Oval Office with his top commanders, he's going to hear about all that "stuff." For those who want to drag their feet on leaving Iraq, this is the argument of last resort.

As Donald Rumsfeld so classically said, in reference to the looting of Baghdad in April 2003 after American troops entered the city, "stuff happens." How true that turns out to be. When it comes to withdrawal, the most militarily profligate administration in memory has seemingly ensured that the highest military priority in 2009 will be frugality -- that is, saving all American "stuff" in Iraq.

Irony hardly covers this one. The Bush administration may have succeeded in little else, but it did embed the U.S. so deeply in that country that leaving can now be portrayed as the profligate thing to do.

By the way, in case anyone thinks that the soon-to-be-Bush-less Pentagon has drawn the obvious lessons from its experience in Iraq, think again. It still seems eager to visit Disney World.

According to Wired Magazine's reliable Danger Room blog, military officials are now suggesting to the Obama transition team that the next Pentagon budget should come in at $581 billion, a staggering $67 billion more than the previous one (and that's without almost all the costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars being included).

But like Rumsfeld's Military Lite, the Pentagon's Military Heavy plans are likely to prove a mirage in the economic future that awaits us. Perhaps the U.S. should indeed salvage every bit of its equipment in Iraq. After all, one thing seems certain: Washington may continue in some fashion to garrison an economically desperate world, but it will never again have the money to occupy a country in the style of Iraq -- largely because the Bush administration managed to squander the American imperial legacy in eight short years.

Someday, Iraq and all those massive bases, all that high-tech equipment, all those ice-cream machines and portajohns, will seem like part of an American dream life. Money may never again rain from the sky.

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Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

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