Iraq Worse Than Ever

[davidswanson]

Two weeks ago an article in the Cville Weekly by Josh Levy ( http://tinyurl.com/3ckznf ) told us that the "surge" was going to win the "war" in Iraq. "Victory has not yet arrived," he cautioned, "and it may be years before we can mark its arrival with confidence, but we can reasonably hope to see it."

Somehow, I can't. First I would need someone to tell me what it would look like. There is no "war" in Iraq in the sense of a battle between two armies. There is an occupation of one nation's people by another nation's military. Dick Cheney told us the whole thing was only going to take a few months. Five years later we're supposed to continue this massive crime for additional years because then Levy may be able to confidently discern "victory"?

Perhaps the reason that Levy doesn't tell us what a "victory" would look like is that Bush's and Cheney's idea of victory is permanent occupation. They've discussed a Korea-like occupation of 50 years. Bush is negotiating an agreement with Maliki to allow a long-term presence. Bush recently published a signing statement announcing his right to fund permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. Fourteen such bases have already been built. The Project for a New American Century, the think tank that originally dreamed up the invasion of Iraq, was not called the Project for a Few More Years Until Victory. The whole point was to establish control of Iraq and its oil for the long term.

Senator Webb should be applauded for his proposal to take Bush to court: http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/30946

A permanent and costly occupation of Iraq is bad enough, but do we have to listen to announcements of imminent "victory" every few years for the next century? Levy admits that this is his second brush with victory anticipation already. "In 2003," he writes, "after Saddam’s swift defeat and overthrow, America seemed on the cusp of a full triumph." Well, not if you were paying any attention to the warnings of historians and generals including Eric Shinseki, not if you had heard Dick Cheney's rational explanation for why he did not invade Baghdad during the first Gulf War.

Now, "victory" sounds like a nice thing. But some 1.2 million Iraqis have died so far, 5 million have been driven from their homes, electricity and water are hard to come by, and the "surge" has brought no political solutions. While 2007 was the deadliest year yet for Americans and Iraqis, U.S. troop deaths were up again in January after a decline. Even the short-lived decline in violence at the end of last year only took us back to 2005 levels, leaving Iraq by far the hottest war zone in the world. The U.S. reduced troop deaths temporarily by using four times as many air strikes in 2007 as the year before. The results for Iraqis were not pleasant. Neither would be the now threatened Fallujah-like assault on Mosul. The financial cost of maintaining this occupation is burying our grandchildren in debt. We cannot accept more years of this in hopes of an unspecified outcome that we never asked for and our representatives in Congress never voted on.

The decline in violence in the last few months of 2007 came primarily in Anbar and Baghdad, after the U.S. abandoned the surge and agreed to an alliance with Sunnis it had been fighting. But this cannot last, because the Sunnis' goal is the complete withdrawal of US troops and mercenaries. In Baghdad, the segregation of neighborhoods by religious sect reduced violence, but the eviction of a million Sunnis created a refugee problem that is not being addressed. And the Mahdi Army declared a temporary ceasefire, but its goal - like that of a majority of all Iraqis - remains ending the U.S. occupation. Want to support democracy? Let the Iraqi people decide when U.S. troops should go home. Come to think of it, you could let the American people decide and get the same result.

[nealmhughes]

1. The faith that the "surge" is accomplishing anything is exactly that: faith.

Either the surge is accomplishing a decreased violence level, or it may be, or it isn't. How in the world could one know that one tactic has any effect at all on a dynamic society made up of individuals as well as groups?
The faith-based reports discount the de facto partition of neighborhoods by hereditary superstition, thus lessening the ability of the Guelphs to strike at the Ghibillines or the Ghibillines the Guelphs.
When the cities of Iraq are either sectarian unitary divisions or are a series of only theoretically unified quasi-independent mini-walled enclaves, then the violence is bound to decrease for a spell, US involvement or not, as this was self-realignment.
To tout the surge as an element of anything so soon for a proper analysis, and that will be hard as it is an ongoing event, is rank Occidentalism at its worst. Can one not give the Iraqis credit for anything except for their bomb making expertise?

[Time for change]

2. Why should we care about a million dead Iraqis if that means an American "victory"?

:sarcasm:


Excellent points. The purpose of the occupation is to inflate the pride of our "War President" and to contribute more $billions to his corporate cronies. That's the Bush administration's idea of "victory". When will the American people wake up and see that?

[Cant trust em]

3. Fox News vs. CNN

Something hilarious (in an ironic way) at the weekend. Fox News was running a story on how great things were going in Anbar. Then I changed the channel to CNN where their story was on an explosion that killed 22 in Baghdad.

My "someone is full of shit" alarm is going off.

[donkeyotay]

4. The surge worked. It consolidated the GOP base.

From here on out, no matter what happens, they are solidified in their belief that the courageous, pro-war stance of the patriotic GOP party triumphed over the defeatism of the dem surrender monkeys. If and when a democratic administration takes over, they will be blamed, from day one, for the inevitable price paid in extracting our nation from Dick and George's most atrocious adventure.

If they can show me how the "surge" can be temporary as its name implies, if they can hold the administration accountable for everything that went before and after, instead of pointing to a snapshot like a broken clock that happens to be right, if they can show me that the progress isn't explained by cash, then I be willing to say that it is indeed a surge and not an escalation, and that it has "worked," if that's an appropriate description of such a tenuous result at such a tragic cost.

[donkeyotay]

5. The dreaded duplicate post.

[Disturbed]

6. Iraq’s Tragic Future

Iraq’s Tragic Future
by Scott Ritter

Any analysis of the current state of the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq that relied solely on the U.S. government, the major candidates for president or the major media outlets in the United States for information would be hard pressed to find any bad news. In a State of the Union address which had everything except a “Mission Accomplished” banner flying in the background, President Bush all but declared victory over the insurgency in Iraq. His recertification of the success of the so-called surge has prompted the Republican candidates to assume a cocky swagger when discussing Iraq. They embrace the occupation and speak, without shame or apparent fear of retribution, of an ongoing presence in that war-torn nation. Their Democratic counterparts have been less than enthusiastic in their criticism of the escalation. And the media, for the most part, continue their macabre role as cheerleaders of death, hiding the reality of Iraq deep inside stories that build upon approving headlines derived from nothing more than political rhetoric. The war in Iraq, we’re told, is virtually over. We only need “stay the course” for 10 more years.

This situation is troublesome in the extreme. The collective refusal of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration’s overarching Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President Bush’s departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration’s actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president’s rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the president’s words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in view of the “success” of the “surge,” but rather holding at current levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the reality that the statistical justification of “surge success,” namely the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The “surge” never addressed the underlying reasons for Iraq’s post-Saddam suffering, and as such never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the “surge” offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.

Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead. True, there will be a plot of land in the Middle East which people will refer to as Iraq. But any hope of a resurrected homogeneous Iraqi nation populated by a diverse people capable of coexisting in peace and harmony is soon to be swept away forever. Any hope of a way out for the people of Iraq and their neighbors is about to become a victim of the “successes” of the “surge” and the denial of reality. The destruction of Iraq has already begun. The myth of Kurdish stability-born artificially out of the U.S.-enforced “no-fly zones” of the 1990s, sustained through the largess of the Oil-for-Food program (and U.S.-approved sanctions sidestepped by the various Kurdish groups in Iraq) and given a Frankenstein-like lease on life in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and occupation-is rapidly unraveling. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, present-day Iraqi Kurdistan has been exposed as an amalgam of parts incompatible not only with each other but the region as a whole.

More here: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/05/6843/