Mideast will pay bill for US failure in Iraq
TEN years ago, TV viewers across the world watched US President George Bush demand the unconditional surrender of Saddam Hussein, his sons and the government he led. By the next day, these TV audiences could watch in awe as the US unleashed its digitised war machine on Iraq. Within two weeks, Bush could land on an aircraft carrier and proudly declare, “Mission accomplished!” to the soldiers assembled for the purpose.
We could be forgiven our confusion about the exact nature of the accomplished mission, but a number of things were clear. First, Iraq’s infrastructure had been well-nigh destroyed by US aerial bombardment. Second, thousands of noncombatant Iraqis had perished. Third, although Bush sounded extremely confident, the conflict he had ignited in Iraq was far from over.
The war that finally arrived in March 2003 had a long incubation in the planning rooms of Washington, DC. Like all modern wars, it was preceded by a lengthy propaganda campaign to convince the US public of the justice of the war and to persuade international opinion that the US was acting in everyone’s best interest.
Even before Bush assumed the presidency, many who then took up official positions in his administration had advocated the invasion of Iraq. Using the repetition of misinformation, they created the false impression that Iraq was behind the Septem-
‘Many of the trailer-park lads and lasses who fought the war will come home minus a finger, a leg, an arm or an eye‘
ber 11 2001 attacks on the US. Every possible inducement was also used to persuade the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to link those attacks to Iraq. An alleged meeting between one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, and Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague turned out to be a lie. A front group, named Citizens for a Free Kuwait, was established with the assistance of one of the largest public-relations companies, Hill & Knowlton. Another group, called the Council of American Muslims for Understanding, launched the Open Dialogue website, funded by the US state department. Even the much-touted Iraqi National Congress, whose spokesmen unashamedly called for the invasion, turned out to be little more than a front organisation funded by the US government.
The invasion was ostensibly to uncover and destroy the weapons of mass destruction Saddam had allegedly amassed. Throughout the build-up to the invasion and during the war itself, the huge elephant in the room was the nuclear power in the region, Israel.
The first casualty in all wars had already been ruthlessly mutilated by a compliant US media even before US boots hit the ground in Baghdad. Their Goebbelsian style was shamelessly emulated by virtually every media organisation in the West, including our own. Within days of the initial US aerial assault, they had invented a name with a profoundly racist undertone, “Ali”, as a kind of “one name, fits all” for all Iraqi officials.
Ten years later, about 5,000 US soldiers, most of them young men and women who went into the military for lack of opportunity, have died in Iraq. The Iraqi dead are numbered in the hundreds of thousands; the wounded in the millions. Not one weapon of mass destruction was found and disarmed.
Many of the trailer-park lads and lasses who fought the war will come home minus a finger, a leg, an arm or an eye; 200,000 have already returned home with post-traumatic stress disorder; 5,000 will never see their homes again. The stated aims of the war — to restructure Iraqi political institutions and unseat a dictator — have been only partially achieved. The US invasion has left the country and the region less stable and its future far less certain than before. The armed US pres- ence next door has fuelled Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
Clearly Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” were a pretext for the invasion. Had the CIA been less rigorous, September 11 would have served the Bush administration equally well. Iraq has now been reduced to a divided nation state, its military capacity destroyed and its infrastructure in ruins. Thanks to the US war, there are now only two regional powers, Israel and Iran. Of the two, Israel is the nuclear power.
To his credit, while serving as a senator for Illinois, US President Barack Obama denounced the war as “dumb”. Ironically, he is now obliged to clear up the mess made by his predecessor and to salvage what he can of US dignity. Obama has slapped down Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invitation to a confrontation with Iran and twisted his arm to apologise to Turkey. As he disengages US forces, the question arises: what did the US war in Iraq achieve?
The war has demonstrated the limits of US power. Instead of bringing a new order to the Middle East, it has stimulated instability. The “new American century” Bush and his neoconservative backers had hoped the war would inaugurate has lasted less than a decade. But the price for that failure will be exacted in the Middle East, not in the US.