Independent UK: Five years after the invasion, the totality of our failure is clear

[marmar]

Leading article: Five years after the invasion, the totality of our failure is clear
Wednesday, 19 March 2008


Five years on, let us take the high road. When the invasion of Iraq was conceived, it was as an experiment in the transforming force of a confident superpower; an evangelistic Tony Blair trotted on behind. Removing a dictator was only to be the start; the objective was a benign and democratic Middle East – an environment in which Israel and the Palestinians could make peace, and energy exports were plentiful and secure.

Even now, the removal of that dictator remains the single attainment of an enterprise that was always as flawed in its genesis as in execution. Iraq is a war-torn and wasted land. Estimates of its civilian dead range from almost 100,000 to more than 10 times as many. More than two million of its people have fled. The indiscriminate killings may have slowed, but ethnic cleansing continues apace.

Any semblance of democracy is confined to the Kurdish region – as it was before the war. The government and parliament are corralled in the Green Zone, walled off from the citizens they are supposed to serve. Neither the central government, nor the 150,000 US troops, have been able to match even the inadequate supplies of power and clean water that Saddam Hussein made flow in his day. Iraqi police and armed forces are still nowhere near up to standard or strength.

Over five years, the US has lost almost 4,000 troops, with 30,000 wounded – a toll of grief and suffering that is already influencing the course of US politics. At 175, the number of British dead might seem modest; as the price of involvement in a war that was unjustified and unnecessary, any figure would be too high.

Nor is the south that we British have handed back to the Iraqis the model of peace and tolerance that we had hoped to bequeath. Plagued by warlordism and riven by sectarianism, it is now left pretty much to its own devices. Yet they are still seen as holding a necessary line, now that the rest of the foreign coalition, such as it was, has departed. The Poles and Australians were the last to leave – both essentially voted back by disgruntled domestic electorates. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-five-years-after-the-invasion-the-totality-of-our-failure-is-clear-797759.html

[Old and In the Way]

1. Totality of Failure

Otherwise known as the Presidency of George W. Bush. The British Press gets it...wonder why ours can't?