Reply #60: K & R

[Jcrowley]

American dignity
So far, what have the US invasion and occupation of Iraq led to - other than a staggering bloodbath, killing fields galore and a secret landscape of detention centers and torture chambers?

As a start, an already badly battered Iraqi economy was turned into a looting ground for Bush administration crony corporations and thoroughly wrecked. (Tall Afar, for instance, is considered a US "success" story when it comes to security, though part of the city is now a "ghost town" of rubble, and unemployment there is estimated at almost 70%.)

The Iraqi education system is in tatters; the medical system in ruins; basic social and urban services almost undeliverable; oil production barely up to pathetic prewar levels (if present-day figures are even real, which is in doubt); the position of women now disastrous; child malnutrition on the rise; and well over a million Iraqis have fled their homes in a country of only 26 million people.

In addition, national sovereignty has been destroyed; the national police system is on its last legs, its ranks well stocked with men loyal to various murderous Shi'ite militias; a Sunni insurgency rages ever more violently; a Kurdish form of independence seems ever more likely (though inconceivable to neighboring states); corruption is rampant; and a central government, whose sway doesn't reach most streets in its capital, is now considered "the least accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East". (The Interior Ministry alone "reportedly employs at least 1,000 ghost employees, whose wages amount to more than $1 million a month".)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=141003