Fort Iraq: On April 2, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski appeared on C-Span’s “Q&A,” and gave a long and very frank interview about her 20-year military career, her work at the Pentagon and the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Besides very clearly articulating her reasons for opposing the war, Kwiatkowski did a good job of connecting the dots between neoconservatism, the military-industrial complex and the administration’s rush to war.

She also said the U.S. is in Iraq to stay:

I think, for guys like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, a lot of the neoconservatives, even George W. Bush and certainly Cheney, the vision is that we are not really a republic anymore. We’re certainly not a limited state. We are the world’s most important and all-powerful state, and that we have certain rights. Yes, we have certain responsibilities, but I think the rights are what drive them. And those rights include the right to do what we want, to get what we need, to have what we want to have.

I think that’s what it is and, you know, we’ve built very massive mega-bases, permanent. These are permanent military bases in Iraq. We’ve done that in other places, as well, in the Middle East, but certainly these — this construction project in Iraq — in fact most of the [reconstruction] money has been for military construction of [facilities] for our use. I think that’s a big part of it, shifting our footprint.

‘We’ve built the bases, and we’re not leaving Iraq.’
— Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski

And certainly, even long before George W. Bush, the Pentagon has been interested in, from a global perspective, shifting and reshaping our global military footprint, and Mesopotamia is just absolutely, you know, wonderful. It is the most strategic location. I don’t care if you’re talking about water, trade routes, oil, our neighbors, our friends, people that may be threats in the future that we want to leverage. Iraq is perfect for all those things. And so, from their perspective, from the neoconservative perspective, there is this geopolitical reshaping that needs to go on, and Iraq is part of that. And so, we make the decision and we do the thing, and we did the thing. And we’ve built the bases, and we’re not leaving Iraq for the, you know, for all that.

Now, there is the kind of universal value-driven issue with the neo-conservatives about global democracy and that everyone has a right to self-government, but that to me seems very, very superficial because, certainly, you look at our allies, and of course this has been brought up numerous times. But, I mean, the friends that we have are those that do what we say, and if they’re Saudis or if they’re guys like Musharraf, who conducted a military coup, or other people that are less than savory and they’re not Democrats, that’s OK if they do what we need to do.