The SOFA

I was, like a few others, surprised by the SOFA concluded between the US and Iraq, particularly in the area of bases. It doesn’t seem to leave much wiggle room for staying, and is overall pretty mild. (Let’s not forget though, in a moral world the US would be giving back all the enterprises it looted and paying reparations.)

Anyway, I’ve had some time to think about what the SOFA means, and unless I miss my guess, it’s a pretty clever move on the US’s part. It’s good PR around the world because it’s pretty mild, for one. But I don’t think it represents the quiet abandonment of empire – that’s only happened once in history, and there’s nothing else to suggest that the US is interested in doing it.

Really, it’s a strategic redeployment, and I think it’s happening for two reasons.

One, there’s nothing more the US can achieve on the ground in Iraq, except to get its soldiers shot up some more and have footage beamed around the world of grieving civilians. Strategic Iraqi industries have been opened up to US capital, so they’re locked in to the system unless there’s an uprising on a national scale (in which case, you don’t want troops on the ground anyway). Oil? They don’t get much of their oil from the ME these days anyway (26% of crude and 20% of all petroleum this year to September, which wouldn't be affected much by an uptick in Iraqi production), but again, US and coalition enterprises have got their snouts in the trough now. Israel? Well Iraq was never a threat to Israel anyway (as has been observed, anyone can go to Baghdad – real men go to Tehran).

Two, it frees up resources for use in the other hotspots any empire has to deal with – at the moment, the main one is Afghanistan. Iran is a maybe, and if you rain bombs down on Iran, again, you don’t want heaps of boots on the ground in Iraq.

To summarise, Iraq is broken. It’s politically closer to Iran than before, yes, but its economy is in the US’s orbit. Ask any leader who’s sold their country to Western capital how hard it is to control your own country’s direction afterward (The Shock Doctrine is great for some history here). And anyway, who knows what might happen to Iran in the next couple of years?

Disclaimer: I'm assuming here that the US is going to abide by the SOFA and not invent an emergency to circumvent it. That's always a possibility, but I think they'll take the redeployment.