From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Wed Jul 01 2009 - 23:25:35 EDT
consortiumnews.com
Iraq: A Bitter Strategic Failure
By Robert Parry
July 1, 2009
President Barack Obama and Iraqi leaders may try to sugarcoat the bitter
pill for the United States by talking up the achievements of the six-year
occupation, but the public celebrations by Iraqis marking the American
pullout from Iraq’s cities tell the painful story of a U.S. strategic
failure.
Essentially, the Iraqis are serenading the American withdrawal with an
Arabic version of “Na-na-nah-na, na-na-nah-na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”
Yes, it’s true that 130,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, many shifted only
miles to heavily fortified bases on the cities’ outskirts, but the
withdrawal from the cities – which Obama promises will be followed by a
pullout of all combat troops by next August – has the distinct feel of an
end game.
Those scenes of joyous Iraqis also represent another blow to the grandiose
neoconservative scheme that sought to use sophisticated U.S. military power
to tame the Middle Eastern countries that were regarded as hostile to
Israel.
The U.S. invasion in March 2003 had other motives as well – from George
W. Bush’s personal animus toward dictator Saddam Hussein to making sure
Iraq’s oil resources would be available to U.S. oil companies – but
perhaps the principal goal was the projection of American power deep into
the Arab world, to strike at enemy states beyond Israel’s limited
military reach.
Some of the neocons who helped formulate Bush’s Iraq War strategy had cut
their teeth in the 1980s on Ronald Reagan’s interventions in Central
America, which used a compliant Honduras as a staging area for assaults on
leftist-ruled Nicaragua and against peasant insurgencies in nearby El
Salvador and Guatemala.
Viewing the Central American outcome as a success – despite the
horrendous death toll – some of these neocons, such as Bush’s deputy
national security adviser Elliott Abrams, sought to apply those lessons to
the Middle East, with Iraq playing the role of Honduras.
Neocon Dreams
In the neocon dreams, the invasion of Iraq would transform it into an ally
of Israel and a base for pressuring regime change on other hard-line Muslim
states, especially Syria and Iran.
A favorite neocon joke in 2003 was to ask whether to next hit Damascus or
Tehran, with the punch-line, “Real men go to Tehran.”
Then, once President Bush had compelled regime change in Syria and Iran,
the neocons hoped support would dry up for Hezbollah in Lebanon and for
Hamas in the Palestinian territories, freeing Israel to dictate terms to
its Arab adversaries and thus bring a form of enforced peace to the region.
In early 2004, as the Iraqi insurgency was already gaining strength, I
encountered this scheme while talking to a leading neocon intellectual who
told me that he had heard from his friends inside the Bush administration
that the invasion of Syria was just around the corner.
But the violence in Iraq and the Bush administration’s inept war strategy
soon made it clear that there would be no invasion of Syria – and that
“real men” wouldn’t make it to Damascus or Tehran at least not
anytime soon.
Of course, these realpolitik motives behind the Iraq War were rarely even
hinted at publicly, but this neocon idea of the United States achieving
military dominion over the Middle East was always at the center of the Bush
administration’s thinking. It was in line with the imperial ambitions of
the Project for the New American Century, which foresaw permanent U.S.
military domination of the planet.
However, the human catastrophe unleashed by this neocon plan is hard to
overstate. More than 4,300 U.S. soldiers have been killed along with
estimates of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Also, more than 30,000
American troops were wounded or maimed.
And it is far from over. In the past few weeks, sectarian violence has been
on the upswing, with bombs killing scores of Iraqis.
Yet, in part because of all this sacrifice, the public can expect
politicians and pundits – especially those who cheered on the war – to
insist the bloodshed was somehow worth it, that some good was achieved,
that it was the right thing to depose and execute Saddam Hussein even if he
didn’t have those weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraq is in a
better place than it was.
There is also the argument that the neocons achieved some measure of
success for their private goal by crippling Iraq as a nation state and thus
weakening the overall strength of Israel’s Arab enemies. Yet, even that
“achievement” must be balanced against the increased resentment of
Israel and the United States throughout the region.
Uglier Reality
Yet, any happy talk about limited successes obscures a much uglier reality.
Beyond the death and devastation, another casualty has been the delicate
structure of international law, which couldn’t stop President Bush and
his “coalition of the willing” from setting their sights on a weak
nation and unleashing hell on its people.
Relying on false intelligence and laughable legal theories, Bush justified
launching what the New York Times may call an “unnecessary war” but
what was in reality a “war of aggression,” what the Nuremberg Tribunal
after World War II deemed “the supreme international crime differing only
from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated
evil of the whole."
And Bush’s “war of aggression” did unpack many of those other crimes
from the “accumulated evil of the whole,” including the slaughter of
civilians and extensive use of torture and sexual abuse against Iraqis who
dared to resist their nation’s occupier.
While those crimes were underway, major U.S. media outlets avoided stating
the obvious because any recognition that Bush waged “a war of
aggression” would force other conclusions, such as the need to subject
him, his senior advisers and some foreign allies (i.e. Tony Blair) to a war
crimes tribunal.
The big news organizations also didn’t want to admit their own complicity
in this crime since almost everyone in American journalism, who wanted to
keep a comfortable seat at the Establishment’s table, either endorsed the
enterprise or kept quiet.
So even today – more than five months after Bush left office – it’s
still much easier to dismiss what happened as “unnecessary,” to cite
the pre-war “intelligence failures,” and to criticize Bush primarily
for his tactical misjudgments in planning an effective occupation -- not
committing enough troops and not having a detailed enough post-invasion
plan.
Accusing him of criminality is much trickier. After all, in the view of the
mainstream news media, war crimes are something that “rogue states”
commit, petty tyrants from Rwanda or Yugoslavia who can then be dragged off
to The Hague and put on trial.
Such humiliations are not for the former “Leader of the Free World” and
his subordinates (nor for an ex-British prime minister). Instead, Bush gets
to settle down with a fat pension, to be cheered at Texas Rangers baseball
games, and to give paid speeches seated next to another former President,
Bill Clinton.
At this point, chances of any serious accountability look slim to none.
Though a vocal supporter of international law, President Obama has made it
clear that he won’t tolerate any serious investigation of the Bush
administration’s crimes. Obama says he wants “to look forward, not
backward.”
As part of that ducking of the past, Obama also can be expected to avoid
describing the war as a failure. That would only provoke Republicans and
right-wing pundits to accuse him of defeatism and “apologizing for
America.”
Instead, to protect the withdrawal’s political flanks, Obama will pretend
that the sacrifice of American troops achieved great things in Iraq.
Deferring Truth
Under Obama’s approach, the truth of the bloody misadventure must be
deferred as the 130,000 U.S. troops continue the schedule for departure,
with combat troops to leave by next August and the final pullout of all
troops by the end of 2011.
Still, some on the Right are already blaming Obama for this impending U.S.
defeat in Iraq, even though it was Bush who accepted the
“status-of-forces agreement” that set the timetable for the departure
from the cities and for the final withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Bush had hoped to negotiate a SOFA that would permit an open-ended American
occupation, thus locking his successor into an indefinite continuation of
the war. But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a series of escalating
demands regarding setting a timetable for a full U.S. withdrawal.
To get any SOFA at all for allowing American troops to remain legally after
the end of 2008, Bush was forced to accept a deadline for the U.S. pullout,
something that he had long resisted. The irony was that Bush’s desire to
use the SOFA to cement a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq had the
opposite result.
Given broad Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation, Iraqi political
factions decided to position themselves as defenders of the nation’s
sovereignty, not as American puppets.
The likely outcome in Iraq now appears to be the departure of U.S. forces
with Washington left with little to show for its investment in blood and
treasure. As the Washington Post reported on June 30, “there is little
talk among U.S. commanders and diplomats of engineering a victory in the
2½ years they expect to remain here.”
As for Iraq, it seems doomed to continue as a country plagued by sectarian
divisions. The Shiite majority can be expected to firm up ties with
neighboring Shiite-ruled Iran; the Sunnis will remain resentful over their
reduced status; and the Kurds will insist on their autonomous region in the
north.
Whether a meaningful democracy can survive long amid these tensions – and
after years of horrific violence – is doubtful. More likely might be a
Balkanization of the country into sectarian enclaves or the emergence of
another strongman in the mold of Saddam Hussein.
For the United States, memories of its military intervention in a country
halfway around the world may fade gradually into history, swallowed by the
shifting sands of the ancient land of Mesopotamia, another chapter of
failed imperial overreach in that region, a long and bloody saga dating
back to Biblical times.
Despite the terrible price in lives, money and prestige, little may remain
of Bush’s macho adventure besides the eventual recognition of a painful
strategic defeat for the United States.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous
Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and
Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books,
Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq
and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also
available there