Romney, Obama avoid Iraq

This folk music video from the USA says about itself:

David Rovics: Operation Iraqi Liberation (Oil)

David performs one of his songs about the War in Iraq, “Operation Iraqi Liberation (Oil)” in Port Townsend, WA at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

By Dan Froomkin in the USA:

Remember Iraq? Romney, Obama Fail To Make War Major Part Of Campaign

Posted: 10/09/2012 5:56 pm EDT Updated: 10/10/2012 3:12 am EDT

WASHINGTON — In his major foreign policy speech on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said the “costly gains made by our troops” in Iraq are now eroding due to President Barack Obama’s “abrupt withdrawal.”

That was largely the extent of his comments on a war many historians consider the most disastrous in modern times and the most significant foreign policy legacy of the last Republican president, George W. Bush.

Romney didn’t elaborate on the “gains,” nor did he address whether he thought the cost was appropriate — $3 trillion in borrowed money, nearly 5,000 dead U.S. servicemembers; and as many as half a million wounded or otherwise damaged veterans. Romney also left unclear what he would have done differently if faced with a pro-Iran Iraqi government demanding a U.S. ouster and brandishing an agreement signed by Bush himself. He didn’t indicate whether he intended to send more troops back to Iraq.

And yet it was more than either candidate had said about Iraq in a long time. Less than a year after Obama ordered the last American troops out, Iraq has barely been an issue in the presidential race.

But the U.S still maintains a significant diplomatic presence there, in the form of the largest and most expensive embassy ever built. Iraq is at long last becoming a geopolitical force in the region — but an increasingly authoritarian one, closely allied with Iran.

And perhaps most significantly, Romney’s own foreign policy speech was vetted by a team of foreign policy advisers heavy with the same neoconservative ideologues responsible for the U.S. presence in Iraq in the first place. Those include former U.N. ambassador and famed unilateralist John Bolton; Robert Joseph, a former National Security Council official who included the false claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger into Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address; Eric Edelman, who was former Vice President Dick Cheney‘s national security adviser; Dan Senor, head of public relations for the Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq]; and many others.

“Iraq is relevant in all sorts of ways,” said Peter Van Buren, a former State Department officer who wrote a satirical book blowing the whistle on Iraqi reconstruction efforts. “The first way of course is that those who don’t follow history are doomed to repeat it.”

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company: The 2000th member of the American military recently died in Afghanistan. There are two more presidential debates, and the question that needs to be posed to Romney and Obama is: “Why are we killing the kids that don’t need to die?” See here.

Don’t Ask and Don’t Tell: Six Critical Foreign Policy Questions That Won’t Be Raised in the Presidential Debates: here.

Dina Rasor, Truthout: Mitt Romney hopes to raise the defense budget by $2 trillion in order to purchase more Cold War-style weapons that have no relevance to our modern security threats: here.

Richard D. Wolff, Truthout: Obama and most Democrats are so dependent on contributions and support from business and the rich that they dare not discuss, let alone implement, the kinds of policies Roosevelt employed the last time US capitalism crashed: here.

Related articles

• The Right Disappeared The Iraq War. We Can’t Let Them. (thedailybanter.com)
• Obama and Romney: War Is Peace! (socioecohistory.wordpress.com)
• ‘Moderate Mitt’: Neocon Trojan Horse (consortiumnews.com)