Chomsky on why we don't (or can't) leave Iraq

A few days ago Jon the Antizionist Jew excerpted this interview with Noam Chomsky on AlterNet.

Whereas Jon discussed Chomsky's comments on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, I want to talk about some comments Chomsky made later in the interview about oil interests in Iraq and what is at stake in a US departure.

About two years ago a friend of mine moved from New York City to Siena, Italy. I give her a call every other week to catch up and compare news coverage. We spoke yesterday and as per usual we ended up talking about the war in Iraq. I told her that we had to leave. Immediately.
"But we can't just leave," she told me, "look at what we've done there. We can't fix it, but what will happen when we leave?"

There are many reasons for leaving Iraq. I would even say that there are a plethora of reasons.
Since the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003:
3,161 American soldiers have been killed.

23,417 American soldiers have been non-mortally wounded.  

About 100,000 Iraqi civilians 650,000 Iraqi's have been killed. as per pontechangeo
About 2 million Iraqis have fled seeking asylum, mostly to Syria or Jordan.

An additional 1.7 million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes for safer towns and villages in Iraq.

You could also say that we shouldn't have gone in the first place, or that the mission as defined by the AUMF has been satisfied, or that we should not  choose sides in a civil war. I'm sure there are a few dozen other reasons but I won't list them here.

So why don't we leave?
According to Chomsky,

it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.

So why did we invade?
According to Chomsky the way to understand US foreign policy is by comparing it to the mafia.

International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn't pay his protection money. You have to have obedience otherwise the idea can spread that you don't have to listen to the orders and it can spread to important places.

Chomsky then goes on to apply this criterion to several US foreign policy decisions. The US attack on Vietnam, our embargo against Cuba, our aggression towards Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and against Latin America in General dating back to the Monroe Doctrine, Iraq, and now Iran are evidence of the Bush Mafioso style of foreign policy. They are examples of  sovereign nations acting in their own interest, independant of the United States, and that cannot be tolerated.

Part of the reason is strategic, geo-political, economic, but part of the reason is the mafia complex. They have to be punished for disobeying us.

Mafioso Foreign Policy in Iran

But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world's energy resources. ... That's been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources. It is not a matter of access as people often say. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. In fact if the United States used no Middle East oil, it'd have the same policies. If we went on solar energy tomorrow, it'd keep the same policies. Just look at the internal record, or the logic of it, the issue has always been control. Control is the source of strategic power.

Dick Cheney declared in Kazakhstan or somewhere that control over pipeline is a "tool of intimidation and blackmail." When we have control over the pipelines it's a tool of benevolence. If other countries have control over the sources of energy and the distribution of energy then it is a tool of intimidation and blackmail exactly as Cheney said. And that's been understood as far back as George Kennan and the early post-war days when he pointed out that if the United States controls Middle East resources it'll have veto power over its industrial rivals. He was speaking particularly of Japan but the point generalizes.

Who are the industrial rivals we now need veto power over? According to Chomsky, it is largely China, especially because they no longer fear us. Chomsky thinks of this as a rational geopolitical decision, but one that can under no circumstances be discussed publicly in the United States. Elsewhere in the interview, he points out that discussion of such crude geopolitical goals would shatter the public’s mythologized view of our leaders as always acting in a noble manner. That is, they may be mistaken or wrong, but always noble.

Applying Mafioso Foreign Policy to Iraq

In order to give some context I am going to post the two previous questions of the interviewer and then part of Chomsky's response, which comes several paragraphs later. Chomsky's responses tend to be long winded and wide ranging, sometimes the relevant quote doesn’t come for a page or two.

Shank: How can the U.S. government think an attack on Iran is feasible given troop availability, troop capacity, and public sentiment?
...
Shank: Do you think that's what the surge was for?

Chomsky first discusses US actions in Iran and the plans the US may have to take oil fields in the southern Khuzestan region. He anticipates that the US is, or would, sponsor secessionist movements in Iran in order to pressure the government.
He then moves on to Iraq:

They have created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. ... They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.

We're supposed to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true. Allowing an independent and sovereign Iraq could be a nightmare for the United States. It would mean that it would be Shi'ite-dominated, at least if it's minimally democratic. It would continue to improve relations with Iran, just what the United States doesn't want to see. And beyond that, right across the border in Saudi Arabia where most of Saudi oil is, there happens to be a large Shi'ite population, probably a majority. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back to the Mafia principle.

It [China] does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary. In particular, it's dangerous in the case of the Middle East. China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.

Chomsky is moving the debate. It’s not that we invaded Iraq to get the oil for ourselves, it’s that we need to keep it from everyone else. Because this is the only geopolitical leverage that we have – war to control resources. One could argue that this is only the result of other terrible policy decisions by the administration. Maybe if we still had a multi-trillion dollar surplus and were not counting on countries like China to finance our debt, we would have means other than warfare in our foreign policy bag of tricks.

If Chomsky is correct, and our adventures in Mess ‘O Potamia are aimed at denying resources to our industrial rivals, what are the consequences of leaving? I am not able to judge if his theory of an Shiite based Iraqi/Saudi/Iranian alliance is realistic, but if so, that results in allowing our rivals to have access to oil resources and denying access to ourselves. Are these self- fulfilling prophecies? One would have to be daft to think that China, et al do not realize that we are trying to curtail their resources. Indeed they are already acting to secure their energy supplies. Our actions to check Asian nations may have caused them to move more forcefully together.

Further, this heightens the game of economic chicken that the US is playing with its creditors. How long will a rival nation finance your war aimed at denying them their resources? Controlling the supply of oil to Asia would have tipped the scales in our favor. But now, with our military bogged down in a civil war we are even more reliant on foreign creditors.  It is not only the Democratic Congress who can defund the war, China can do so as well.

If this was an effort to get the US into a more advantageous position, it has failed spectacularly.

[All emphasis is mine, not in the original]
[I hope I am within fair use, will edit if necessary]