Empire? Us?

The Independent's been dong some good work on the Bush administration' plan to leave the next president with a permanent occupation. For those who missed it, the gist of the idea was that the US wanted to keep fifty permanent military bases, all staffed with soldiers and contractors who remained immune from prosecution under Iraqi law. In case the Iraqi's got any foolish ideas about preserving their sovereignty, there was the added threat of confiscating their foreign reserves (a legacy effect of the sanctions against Sadam is that these are all held in the US), which are meant to be outstanding from court judgments against them.


Yahoo! news suggests this may not come off as smoothly as planned, which I think we can all agree is a very good thing. Unless they move to plan B and just start bombing Iran in order to justify a ramped-up military presence and four more years of madness.