Nothing’s Changed, Nothing!

Since the Iraqi War began in 2003 until the U.S. ceased its military activities this August, there have been 4,416 U.S. military fatalities (out of 4,734 total from the NATO allies), a brutal dictator (that we had supported for years before we turned on him) was deposed and executed, untold thousands and thousands of locals killed, wounded or displaced, zero weapons of mass destruction discovered and there is currently a deadlocked and non-functioning government installed under a “constitutional” process pushed on to this artificial nation of warring factions by the United States. Every day, an accelerating number of bomb blasts takes out another spate of innocent civilians as chaos reigns supreme; according to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, the civilian toll in August was 295 killed, 508 wounded.

The New York Times (8/31) looked at the mood of the people as American forces withdrew: “‘Nothing’s changed, nothing!’ Yusuf Sabah shouted in the voice of someone rarely listened to, as he waited for gas in a line of cars winding down a dirt road past a barricade of barbed wire, shards of concrete and trash turned uniformly brown. ‘From the fall of Saddam until now, nothing’s changed. The opposite. We keep going backwards.’… Down the road waited Haitham Ahmed, a taxi driver. ‘Frustrated, sick, worn out, pessimistic and angry,’ he said, describing himself.”< /P>

Kurds in the north, eying reuniting with their Turkish brethren across the border, wonder if they will ever be able to reclaim their oil fields in Kirkuk from Shiite control. Sunnis in Baghdad and the southwestern part of Iraq – once the rulers of this nation and now just a minority – wonder how to restrain and control a majority-Shiite-dominated government, where memories of brutal Saddam Hussein/Sunni repression and torture linger brightly in Shiite minds. So far, violence seems to be the only answer.

George Bush pledged in March of 2003 that the invasion of Iraq would “dramatically” improve the lot of the average Iraqi; seven plus years later, clearly that has not happened. Oh sure, there is a tad more electricity being generated, but pretty much nothing else works, and serial brownouts suggest that the electrical grid wasn’t improved that much either: “Iraq generates more electricity than it did then, but far greater demand has left many sweltering in the heat. Water is often filthy. Iraqi security forces are omnipresent, but drivers habitually deride them for their raggedy appearance and seeming unprofessionalism. That police checkpoints snarl traffic does not help…. [P]oliticians are still deadlocked over forming a government, and the glares at the sport-utility vehicles that ferry them and their gun-toting entourages from air-conditioned offices to air-conditioned homes, after meetings unfailingly described as ‘positive,’ have become sharper.” The Times. With Iran savoring its new regional role as masters of the Shiite world – and Iraq’s Shiite majority is clearly in control – I am wondering why the United States didn’t get a polite “thank you” note from Iran’s President Ahmadinejad; guess who really picked up power over the future of Iraq?! The secret (not-so-secret if you know the history of Islam and regional politics) victor in the war in Iraq is clearly Iran, which will act as the mediator among the various Iraqi Shiite factions struggling for dominance.

Simply put, Iraq does not work. Not for the citizens of Iraq or for us. Even as we leave, the marks of our failed policies are everywhere. We misdirected this conflict from the get-go; there was nothing in this war for us in the first place – the president simply needed a war to get Congress to reverse the restrictions they had placed on the office after the Vietnam War – and the real culprits in Afghanistan were permitted time to regroup as U.S. forces were siphoned off to fight the false war in Iraq… a strategy that allowed Taliban and other insurgent forces to dig themselves so deeply into the Afghan hinterland that we currently have neither the military forces nor the willing commitment to make the slightest dent in their stronghold over this Central Asian nation; we are just one more foreign invader destined to withd raw in failure now. We made our cause that much less palatable by backing one of the most corrupt regimes in global history – Hamid Karzai and his band of palm-outstretched government officials.

What did we get in return in Iraq? The enmity of the people throughout the region, the death and maiming of military and civilian personnel by the thousands, the shame of our failure to meet our own stated goals and promises, the creation of a non-functioning government and the tanking of our economy (Iraq alone appears to have added almost three quarters of a trillion dollars to our deficit). Folks told us after Vietnam that we had learned a valuable lesson about engaging in distant wars where we would inevitably be looked at a unsympathetic foreign invaders fighting an enemy zealously entrenched in ideas, religious beliefs and/or political philosophies antithetical to everything we stand for – where commitment is measured in centuries not years. We obviously did not. Slogans and one-word solutions uttered by politicians to create “meaning” to their political existence brought us back. Can we learn our lessons this time? If so, “mission accomplished.” If not…

I’m Peter Dekom, and folks really need to start reading history books!