More proof that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail:
Arizona Senator John McCain on Sunday warned that the situation in Iraq is "unraveling" due to recent U.S. foreign policy actions there - and that a "very chaotic situation" could give way to a rise in Iranian influence in the region.
McCain, speaking to Bob Schieffer on CBS' "Face the Nation," argued that the recent U.S. military drawdown from Iraq is creating a dire situation in that country.
"It's unraveling because we didn't keep residual force there, because the President of the United States pledged to get out of Iraq," McCain said. "We could have kept a residual force there and kept some stability. And instead it's unraveling, and Iran's influence is increasing and there's every possibility you could see a very chaotic situation there."
Oh for crying out loud. That president who pledged to get us out? That was George W. Bush in 2008, you bonehead. If you had won the 2008 election (God forbid), it would have been you that would have overseen the final drawdown of troops.
There's no question that chaos still remains in Iraq. One day after the last troops left Iraq, an arrest warrant was issued for Sunni VP Tariq Al-Hashemi and just this Thursday, 73 Iraqi civilians were killed by bombs. However, I'm at a loss as to how continuing American troop involvement would mitigate that.
Worse, this just looks like yet another front to make Iran the next bogeyman to fear. George Galloway published an op-ed this week warning on just such an attempt:
Obama has officially announced what has long been known to be the new military doctrine — to draw down as many forces as possible in Europe and the Middle East and to redeploy into a more aggressive posture encircling China.
Hence the withdrawal from Iraq and the doomed attempt to exert influence there from an absurdly named “embassy” of 16,000 people including 5,000 mercenaries, which means that the private sector picks up the bill for their pensions, missing body parts and so on.
This is precisely the point. For decade after decade the US state could provide guns as well as butter in the form of rising living standards and economic growth. Now it can provide no butter. But it has every intention of providing guns.
According to its own warped logic it has no alternative.
Facing a growing China and shifting balance in the world economy, the one thing that US capitalists have is a super-abundance of guns which can be used to extract other people’s butter.
So don’t imagine that financial strictures and the strains of shifting the military balance to the Pacific mean that there is more likelihood of the US, with its allies, accepting Iran as a major, independent regional power in the Gulf — the most important oil-producing area on the planet.
The opposite is the case. It is more likely to lead them to calculate that it is better to “take down” Iran now, which is why they are concerned about Syria, in order not to leave a gigantic problem as they are forced to refocus elsewhere.
