Iraq: They Make It a Desert and Call It Peace
By Eric Margolis
02/10/09 -- "ICH" --
Those Wall Street financial alchemists who turned garbage
into gold must have helped John McCain prepare for his
debate with Barack Obama last Friday.
Senator McCain’s insistent claims that the US is winning the
war in Iraq thanks to his "surge" strategy are the
military-political equivalent of the junk securities that
Wall Street’s shady financiers have been selling around the
globe.
McCain successfully peddled this latest untruth about Iraq
on Friday night with skill and verve. Sen. Barack Obama
mostly let him get away with it. Obama should have skewered
McCain over Iraq and all the lies he supported to ignite
this unnecessary conflict. There is enough criminal behavior
over the Iraq War to fill a phone book. Two out of three
America’s think it was a terrible mistake.
But Obama’s gentle, professorial criticism of the Iraq war
was tepid and ineffective, leaving McCain to capture the
flag of patriotism with his reheated Cold War rhetoric.
Why didn’t Obama tell Americans that the ill-begotten Iraq
War has played a key role in the nation’s current financial
near-death experience?
Obama should also have riposted to McCain’s bombast over
Georgia: "Senator McCain, are you ready to go to war with
Russia over Georgia? That’s where your plans could lead."
The two candidates did reasonably well in the debates, and
both emerged looking presidential. But McCain seized the
jingoistic high ground by using carefully selected slogans
like "victory" and "free world," and lambasting America’s
favorite hobbyhorses, Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Russia’s Putin.
The two vied over who could more fulsomely support Israel.
McCain’s claims that the US is heading toward victory in
Iraq thanks to his inspired military leadership immediately
recalled the epic words of Pyrrhus, King of Eprius. In 281
BC, after defeating a Roman army at Heraclea in an extremely
bloody, hard-fought battle in which his forces suffered
grave losses, Pyrrhus famously exclaimed, "one more such
victory and we are ruined!"
The Red King of Epirus (modern Albania) might as well have
been speaking of Iraq. Far from the victory described by
McCain, the Roman historian Tacitus’s words are appropriate:
"they make a desert and call it peace."
That is precisely what the US has so far done in Iraq, a
small, devastated nation of only 25 million. After five
years of war, over four thousand American GI’s are dead, and
30,000 seriously wounded (some figures say 75,000), many
with incurable head injuries.
No one knows how many Iraqis have died, but estimates run as
high as one million – and this does not include the 500,000
who died from hunger and disease as a result of the
draconian US-led embargo of Iraq and the destruction of its
national water purification and sewage system by the US Air
Force in 1991.
The "surge," an addition of over 30,000 US troops to the
Iraq conflict, was not the primary cause of the sharp drop
in violence there over the past 12 months, as McCain claims,
though it did play a supporting role.
The real reason for the drop in violence and attacks on US
occupation forces lies in three other areas. First, ethnic
cleansing. The US occupation quietly abetted the ethnic
cleansing by Shia militias of millions of Sunni Iraqis. The
US took yet another page from Israel’s West Bank occupation
copybook by segregating off entire neighborhoods of Iraqi
cities with high, concrete walls, and conducting
round-the-clock house search operations.
Today, between four and five million Iraqis are either
refugees in neighboring nations or internally displaced, one
of the world’s biggest number of refugees. Most are Sunni
Muslims. The United States is wholly responsible for this
human disaster.
The US has done what it vowed to oppose: the partition of
Iraq into three weak parts: Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish. There
are now three Iraqi de facto mini-states. Breaking up Iraq
and US-approved ethnic cleansing by Shia death squads – just
the type of criminal behavior the US condemned in Bosnia and
Kosovo – has put the damper on the Sunni-Shia conflict. But
it has left Iraq a ruined state, with the Sunni region a
no-man’s land, the Shia region dominated by Iran, and the
Kurds under US and Israel tutelage.
Second, US occupation forces finally got smart and realized
it’s cheaper to buy off your foes than try to kill them all.
So the US now pays 80,000 Sunni gunmen, called Awakening
Councils, to fight resistance forces. Attacks by al-Qaida
fanatics in Iraq against fellow Sunnis opposing US
occupation drove the more moderate resistance groups into
the arms of the US.
But now, the US is handing control of these Sunni gunmen,
which were patterned on death squads in El Salvador, over to
Shia control. The US-armed Sunni militias who sought
protection against Shia government forces by siding with the
Americans are now likely to become a major new problem.
Third, the firebrand Shia militia leader, Muktada al-Sadr,
whose ragtag Mehdi Army used to fight US forces, has gone to
ground and ordered his gunmen to stack their arms. His
volte-face reflects changes in internal Shia politics but
also pressure from Iran which, fearing attack by the US,
ordered Muktada to stop his attacks.
But less violence, at least for now, does not in any way
mean victory. Polls show 75% of Iraqis want US troops to
depart. Iraq remains a nation under foreign occupation. Its
US-installed regime controls nothing but the Baghdad Green
Zone. Real power remains in the hands of the Shia and Sunni
militias, and the two Kurdish parties in their by now almost
independent state. There is still no agreement on sharing
oil.
The occupation is costing the US at least $10 billion per
month, not counting depreciation, $67 billion replacement
costs for equipment, and billions for medical care of
wounded and veterans benefits. By the end of 2008, the
supposed "cake walk" in Iraq will have cost US taxpayers $1
trillion, a good part of its borrowed from Japan and China,
making it America’s second most expensive war in history.
Half the US Army is bogged down in Iraq. This war and
Afghanistan have led the US ground and air forces "to the
breaking point," in the words of senior American commanders.
History shows that all occupation armies become brutalized,
corrupted and demoralized.
At least 30,000 Iraqi prisoners are held by the US and
routinely tortured or executed without trial. They should be
considered political prisoners. Saddam Hussein’s prisons
held less inmates. The brutality of the US occupation of
Iraq has enraged the Muslim world against America and,
according to US intelligence agencies, has created a whole
new generation of anti-American militants.
The Bush administration’s torrent of lies about Iraq and
ongoing occupation are seen around the globe as crude
imperialism worthy of the 19th-century British Raj or old
Soviet Union. Sen. Obama was at least right in the debate
when he noted that America’s image is an important factor in
national security. Today, America is hated around the globe,
thank you George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Washington’s current plans to continue ruling Iraq by means
of a puppet government and mercenary army backed by US air
power are an attempt to copy the way the British Empire
ruled Iraq and exploited its oil. But once most of the US
forces are withdrawn, Iraq may dissolve once again into
violence and chaos, or complete its process of splintering
into three mini-states, inviting intervention from its
covetous neighbors. Iran has already become the dominant
power in eastern Iraq, and Turkey, hungry for Iraq’s oil, is
watching menacingly.
I wish Obama had riposted: "Senator McCain, one more victory
like this and America is ruined. You had better think about
this as you and your neocon alter ego Joe Lieberman urge
confrontation against Iran, Hezbullah, Pakistan, Taliban,
al-Qaida, insubordinate Arabs, Russia and China."
PS: And don’t forget Venezuela, Cuba, Somalia, and Sudan.
Eric Margolis [margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com]
contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada,
is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his
website.
http://www.ericmargolis.com/
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