Dreyfus on Iraq sovereignty
Posted here Saturday, February 21, 2004 at 4:46:28 PM 
The question of Iraq sovereignty is important and may bring to light more of Bush motives.
Does the United States want to have permanent military bases in Iraq? Does a camel sleep in the desert? Hardly mentioned in the hubbub about the June 30 handover date in Iraq, and the scramble to put together an Iraqi, umm, "government" by then, is this basic fact: more than anything else, the Pentagon wants to stay in Iraq for years, maybe forever—you can't have an empire without an imperial presence. But if and when Iraq gets sovereignty handed to it, whatever rump authority takes power on July 1 will own the country.
Right now, Washington owns it. The question is: what will be the relationship between the U.S. occupation force—which, after all, isn't going to vanish on July 1—and the sovereign Iraqi authority?
At the stroke of that midnight, the legal basis for the American occupation will go poof. So for the Pentagon, it's urgent to secure a so-called "status of forces" accord in Iraq. But the Pentagon's plans for that agreement, and its plans for military bases in Iraq, are still murky, and no one is quite sure who's working on them or how they will be imposed on—that is, negotiated with—the Iraqis.
This link to the Freyfus Report is worth reading
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