The real US legacy in Iraq

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-210114.html



The real US legacy in Iraq
By Nick Alexandrov
Jan 21, '14

US press coverage bemoaned the "loss" of Fallujah. The Iraqi city was the casualty earlier this month of "a resurgence by Islamic militants in western Iraq", Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times, a reminder "that the war is anything but over". Baker's colleagues, Yasir Ghazi and Tim Arango, described a "city under siege, its morgue filled with bodies and people running low on food, water and generator fuel"; other US reporters and analysts were quick to remind their readers that Fallujah has been the site of slaughter in the past - of Americans.

This "powerfully symbolic city", Liz Sly explained in the Washington Post, was "where US forces fought their bloodiest battle since the Vietnam War" - "American soldiers paid dearly" there, the Wall Street Journal noted - while liberal Post columnist David Ignatius recalled that, in Fallujah, "hundreds of Americans were killed or wounded in the last decade fighting the jihadists". Who else, other than fanatical extremists, would the well-meaning US government target?

The answer, as some still remember, is the general Iraqi public, whom the US government targeted indiscriminately in recent decades, ending hundreds of thousands of lives.

Keeping first to Fallujah, we can observe that Washington's assaults in April and November 2004 reduced a city of more than 435,000 residents (in the UN's conservative, pre-occupation count) to rubble: a UN Emergency Working Group estimated that "40% of buildings and homes" there were "significantly damaged" in the end, "while another 20% sustained 'major damage'", and "the remainder were 'completely destroyed'", political scientist Neta Crawford writes. Crawford, quoting Bing West's No True Glory, relates how a top US general, arriving in Fallujah after the November 2004 attack, "looked up and down the streets, at the drooping telephone poles, gutted storefronts, heaps of concrete, twisted skeletons of burnt-out cars, demolished roofs, and sagging walls. 'Holy shit,' he said."