Staying in Iraq - Democratic Underground

WilliamPitt

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Mon Apr-05-04 12:25 PM
Original message

Staying in Iraq

Edited on Mon Apr-05-04 12:37 PM by WilliamPitt

These are the numbers out of Iraq: 616 American soldiers killed, 18,000 medical evacuations of wounded American soldiers, 102 non-American coalition soldiers killed, more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 billion spent. There are no numbers available for the number of Iraqi civilians wounded.

These are the numbers out of the Bush White House, first put forward by George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union Address and which remain even today on the White House website: 26,000 liters of anthrax in Iraq, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin in Iraq, 500 tons of sarin and mustard and VX gas in Iraq, 500 tons being 1,000,000 pounds, along with 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents. None of this, not one little bit of it, has been found.

This White House webpage, titled ‘Disarm Saddam Hussein,’ which parrots Bush’s 2003 speech, likewise claims that Iraq is seeking uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear weapons program. It claims, as Bush did in his speech, that Iraq possesses mobile biological weapons labs. It claims, as Bush did in his speech, that Iraq enjoyed an operational relationship with al Qaeda terrorists during the rule of Saddam Hussein. The Niger claims were proven to be an embarrassing lie, the mobile weapons labs were revealed to be weather balloon launching platforms sold to Iraq by the British during the Reagan era, and no proof whatsoever has been put forth to establish a connection between Hussein and al Qaeda.

This is what the numbers say: Every reason put forth to justify the invasion of Iraq has been proven to be either be a wretched exaggeration or an out-and-out fabrication. The number of dead and wounded in the American invasion of Iraq is appalling, and the amount of money we have spent and will continue to spend on this misadventure is staggering. It was White House spokesman Ken Adelman who said on December 6, 2001 in a CNN interview, "I don't agree that you need an enormous number of American troops. Saddam's army is down to one-third than it was before, and I think it would be a cakewalk." It has been anything but.

Because the Bush administration has gone out of their way to block media access to Dover Air Force base where American casualties are brought home from Iraq, because the Bush administration has gone out of their way to block media access to Walter Reed hospital in Washington and Fort Stewart in Georgia where thousands of badly wounded American soldiers have been convalescing after coming home from Iraq, because the Pentagon has changed the term ‘body bag’ to ‘transfer tube,’ because of all this and more, many Americans are not fully aware of how dangerous it is to be an American in Iraq.

Four Americans were dragged from their car, shot, stabbed, dismembered and hung from a bridge in Falluja. The brutality of this attack sent a shockwave across America as the images of bodies burned beyond recognition hanging above cheering crowds found their way onto the pages of American newspapers. The reaction made it painfully clear that the American people had forgotten we were in a war, that war does terrible things to human bodies, and that the Iraqi people are not, in fact, welcoming us with open arms. It was also the first time many Americans found out that non-military contractors, also known as mercenaries, are in Iraq to shore up the security shortfalls.

The last several days in Iraq have seen a spiraling of violence and horror that has taken many Americans by surprise, mostly because those Americans have been relying on the Bush administration for the straight dope. The images of butchered Americans were bad enough, but the sudden explosion of violence from the Shi’ite community in Iraq has unnerved the America people in a way we have not seen since the Tet Offensive. Fighting raged in Baghdad, Najaf, Nasiriyah and Amarah as supporters of Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr simultaneously threw themselves at American forces. Many American soldiers have been killed, and scores of Iraqis have also died.

How is this possible? Didn’t Don Rumsfeld and the Bush administration people say the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms as liberators? How did our involvement in Iraq come to look suspiciously like the eternal spiral of bloodletting that takes place between Israel and the Palestinians? Again, the surprise comes because the American people have been relying on the Bush administration for the truth, an act of faith that has been proven time and again to be a very bad idea.

The population of Iraq is divided into three groups: The Shi’ites (60% of the population), the Sunnis (23% of the population), and the Kurds (17% of the population). Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, and his Ba’ath Party was dominated by Sunnis. During his rule, this minority group dominated the country and oppressed the Shi’ites. The Kurds in the north waged their own separate battle for an independent nation, clashing with Turkey as often as they did with Hussein.

When Bush came in promising democracy to Iraq, the Shi’ites rejoiced because they are the majority, and the basic one-person-one-vote principle of democracy pretty much guaranteed that they would get to run the country. Unfortunately for them, the Bush people never actually intended for democracy to take root in Iraq, because they knew the Shi’ites would use democracy to elect a fundamentalist regime with ideological ties to Iran and then throw democracy out the back door. For a time, the Shi’ites were willing to cooperate with the American occupiers because they thought democracy was coming. Shi’ite Ayatollah Sistani counseled patience to his people, but that patience has ended. The Shi’ite people are now listening to Muqtada al-Sadr and killing as many Americans as they can find.

The words ‘total failure’ do not capture the enormity of this American action in Iraq during the last year. Why do we stay? Why would we stay?

This, in the end, is the ultimate failure of George W. Bush and his people. There were no terrorists in Iraq before the invasion, but they are there now. There was no open warfare between the religious factions in Iraq before the invasion, but now blood runs in the streets. Bush and his people ballyhooed the ‘international coalition’ that participated in this invasion, but the truth is we are all alone. We slapped down the United Nations to such a degree that this body, which could help us by replacing our troops with a true international coalition, wants nothing to do with us. That hardly matters, because the Bush administration wants nothing to do with them.

If a magic wand was waved and Bush decided to pull our soldiers out of Iraq, the nation would collapse into a bloodbath that would make Rwanda look like a picnic by comparison. Muqtada al-Sadr and his radical followers would take the nation, and Iraq would become a terrorist stronghold much the way Afghanistan did after we abandoned that nation to its fate in 1989. The entire Middle East would become destabilized. The wobbly House of Saud could fall and place all that oil into the hands of Wahabbi fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden. The chaos could reach all the way to Pakistan, where radical fundamentalists would love to topple that government and come into possession of that nation’s battery of nuclear weapons.

There is no simple solution. An immediate withdrawal will set the stage for an incalculable slaughter in an Iraqi civil war, more terrorism against the United States, half a dozen more wars in the Middle East, the world’s petroleum falling into the hands of al Qaeda, and the potential for Pakistani nukes in the hands of bin Laden. Staying in Iraq, conversely, will bring us more dead and wounded American soldiers, more dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, billions and billions more dollars poured onto the sand.

The only solution involves a long-term strategy. Bush must be defeated in November, and a new administration that does not get its jollies by urinating in the faces of the international community must be elected. That new administration must pull out all the stops to bring a true international coalition into Iraq, so the American soldiers who inspire such demonstrable hatred from the Iraq people can be rotated home.

The money being wasted on this Iraq misadventure must be rerouted to fighting actual terrorists like the ones who bombed the trains in Madrid. International money-laundering loopholes used by terrorists to fund attacks, loopholes which were left open by American Congressmen beholden to corporations like Enron which use those same loopholes to steal from stockholders, must be closed. The list goes on and on.

None of this is guaranteed to work by any stretch of the imagination. The truth is we cannot stay in Iraq, and with our current leadership in America, we will not leave. Even after Bush is defeated in America, our forces will remain in Iraq until the international community decides to come and rescue us. Make no mistake, it will be a rescue.

This will be the legacy of this administration. Bush and his people have hung this heavy millstone around our necks, and we are sinking