On March 20, 2003, the United States launched its much-hyped invasion of Iraq with the "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign. Seven years, $3 trillion, and over 1 million Iraqi and 5000 coalition deaths later, what is the result? The war has brought nothing but tragedy and human suffering to all but its powerful architects - the military-industrial complex, Big Oil, AIPAC, the neoconservatives. The war in Iraq is a festering sore on the American body politic and a stain on the consensus of international law that has prevailed since World War II. The Nuremberg Trials, it turns out, were only for show - victors' justice that had little to no bearing on the actual conduct of world military powers, as the following decades would prove. From the vantage point of 2010, the sinister motivations behind the Iraq War are more transparent than ever.
No less a figure than former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that the much-ballyhooed "threat" of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was merely the most convenient pretext for launching a war he and his fellow neoconservatives from the Project for a New American Century had long craved. "The truth," said Wolfowitz, "is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." The spectre of WMDs falling into the hands of terrorists was an ideal weapon in the Bush administration's arsenal of rhetorical trickery. In the hysterical atmosphere of post-9/11 America, it pushed millions of people who should have known better into becoming war supporters.
I should know. The Iraq War, like 9/11, was a crucial marker on my road to becoming a journalist. The 2001 attacks were history-changing events that the media re-played over and over, pontificating on the possible ramifications. From that day onward I was glued to the television set and followed the news with unprecedented fervour and interest. However, my education in news and politics at this point was superficial and, as time would illustrate, hopelessly naive. As the Bush administration's focus (and that of its media lapdogs) turned to Iraq, I found myself swayed by contemporary voices who dangled the bogeyman of Saddam Hussein passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. At this time I was 17 and my family subscribed to the conservative National Post, naturally a very pro-war newspaper. Despite its right-wing slant, I still maintain the Post to be well-written, if politically perverse. But at this important point in world history, I readily accepted its writers' justifications for war.
After all, if the powerful U.S. military could initiate regime change in Iraq, it might set the stage for a larger flowering of democracy in the Middle East. Yes, as embarrassed as I am to admit it now, I essentially adopted the neoconservative fantasy vision of the invasion of Iraq leading to a democratic Middle East. Perhaps it was that post-9/11 atmosphere, when 89% of Americans approved of George W. Bush's performance as president, but I was still in the mindset that the terrorist attacks had united Americans. There was a reason Bush was so popular at this time; his simplistic, black-and-white version of world events was the comfort food Americans craved. Yet their blind trust would have incredibly destructive consequences. Surely, I thought, leading politicians and the mainstream media couldn't be lying when they made such grave and substantive accusations...could they?
As I said, I was a little naive.
Certainly now, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to say the Iraq War was a mistake and more. In that sense, it was a learning experience for me. The buildup to the war was the low point of the corporate media, in which the final break of the Fourth Estate with its supposed ideals became complete. Barely even pretending any longer to check government power, the war helped expose pampered TV pundits as the mindless sycophants they were. Rather than challenging government spin, they merely repeated it and offered the most vivid example to date of stenographic journalism. As Glenn Greenwald has eloquently written, today's mainstream media is largely composed of royal courtiers who delight in court gossip to the exclusion of substantive policy issues. If you're wondering why the American media is so dead set against accountability for Bush administration officials complicit in torture and other war crimes, the answer is obvious: most prominent media figures cheered on those same crimes. They are as guilty as the politicians.
What really caused the Iraq War? The fact that Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world, we were always assured, was purely coincidental. Of course, it was obvious even before the invasion that the war was all about oil. The global economy runs on petroleum, and the United States is one of the largest consumers of that precious resource. From an American perspective, it is absolutely vital to maintain the country's dominance over Middle Eastern oil supplies in the face of up-and-coming competitors like China.
While the American government in 2003 was assured of oil from Saudi Arabia - based on a special relationship wherein the U.S. turns a blind eye to Saudi human rights abuses while the Saudis keep the oil flowing - Iraq was a different story. Saddam Hussein had been a key American ally during the Reagan years - symbolized by special envoy Donald Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam Hussein - but Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait changed everything. President Bush the Elder, who had substantial business relationships with the Kuwaiti ruling family, immediately changed his tune and, embracing the opportunity to display U.S. military dominance in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, launched a full-on media campaign against the "new Hitler". The American-led multinational coalition stopped short of removing the Ba'athist regime when the flow of Kuwaiti oil was again assured, but Saddam remained a gadfly to American and Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. Sanctions imposed on Iraq by the Clinton administration killed half a million Iraqi children - a price Secretary of State Madeline Albright coldly said was "worth it" - but had the effect of strengthening Saddam's power rather than diminishing it.
The prospect of military force in the service of regime change thus became an ever more attractive option to hawks in the American government. Emboldened by the United States' status as sole superpower after the end of the Cold War, the self-proclaimed "masters of the universe" glowingly spoke of America in the imperial terms of Ancient Rome. The promise of "peace dividends" and cuts in defense spending that followed the Soviet collapse quickly ran up against the institutional inertia of the military-industrial complex, which came up with new excuses to keep the tax dollars flowing - chief among them terrorists and "rogue states", targets of official propaganda even before 9/11.
So sacrosanct is the American defense budget, and so ingrained in the American psyche is the tendency to frame everything in military terms (the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror) that, following the September 11 attacks, media and politicians immediately proclaimed that America was "under attack" and "at war", with events framed in the most militaristic terms possible. The decision to invade Afghanistan, and later Iraq, was made infinitely easier by the huge scale of the U.S. military and the simple odds that, if heavily armed enough, a state will more quickly resort to violence. Protracted wars also guaranteed ever-greater sums to the Pentagon. The American military budget is now completely out of control; Barack Obama's allotted 2010 budget for defense spending is the greatest in real terms since the Second World War. With the Great Recession in full sway and the military seemingly the only government service immune from draconian spending cuts, the colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan essentially serve the role of public works projects for the military.
Political considerations cannot be underestimated in the decision to go to war. Aside from the obvious economic interests of White House oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (who guaranteed his former company Halliburton a generous supply of no-bid contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq), the Bush administration helped shore up failing domestic support by doubling down on the mythology of the heroic "war president", the resolute commander-in-chief taking the fight to the terrorists "over there, so we don't have to fight them over here." The Republicans had swept the 2002 midterms by portraying Democrats as soft on terrorism, and they capitalized on that strategy in 2004 by continuing to question Democrats' patriotism and their commitment to keeping Americans safe from terrorists (which was equated with support for the unrelated Iraq War).
The irony, of course, is that the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq was completely bipartisan from the beginning. Throughout the decade, Democrats regularly gave left cover to the Republicans by diverting public anger from the war, continually supporting right-wing Bush administration policies and stripping away any remaining civil liberties. When Democrats finally recaptured the presidency in 2008, the fundamental flaws of the two-party system became every more apparent. Obama continued or expanded virtually every criminal policy of the Bush administration. While the President has made noises about pulling U.S. "combat troops" out of Iraq by 2011, Obama has always excelled at saying big things and doing very little. If the past is any indication, we can expect this rhetorical sleight-of-hand to portend years and years of continued war.
Iraq was more than a "mistake". Those who would use that word to refer to this crime of historical proportions reveal much about their notions of morality. Establishment figures in the 1960s such as Walter Cronkite only turned against Vietnam when it became clear the war was lost. But Iraq, like its historical predecessor Vietnam, is not wrong merely because it was an ill-advised drain on American blood and treasure. Rather, it is wrong because it is a transparent war of aggression against a nation that had not attacked the United States and had nothing to do with 9/11. Nuremberg decreed aggressive war to be the supreme international crime, because it is the overarching criminal act from which all the others (torture, rendition, etc.) originate. While the U.S. government is quick to accuse other countries of aggression - such as Russia during the 2008 South Ossetia War - it is taken for granted that America and Israel alone are permitted the use of force anywhere under any circumstances.
As much as concrete economic factors - the American lust for oil, feeding the military-industrial complex - and cynical political considerations motivated the Iraq War, it is worth considering the words of that arch-purveyor of establishment wisdom, the New York Times' own Thomas Friedman - not because his words are anything other than poorly-written claptrap, but because we can tell a lot about the view of the American elite through his inane bullshit. Friedman infamously admitted in a 2003 interview with Charlie Rose that the war's noble purpose was to make Iraqis "Suck. On. This", to show the world the United States meant business. "We could have hit Saudi Arabia," said Friedman. "Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."
But even the war's original proponents must admit that it has failed on its own terms. Iraq is no Jeffersonian democracy, but an unstable cauldron of sectarian conflict riddled by corruption and bloody violence. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the war has further overstretched the U.S. military. Iran is now more powerful a regional player than before; with its main rival, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, effectively eliminated, the mullahs can more easily exert their influence on neighbouring countries. And the war has destroyed America's reputation so thoroughly - compounded by atrocities such as Abu Ghraib - that the possibility of terrorist attacks on the United States has vastly increased. The war has not made America safer, it has not made the Middle East more democratic; it has only made the world a more violent, destructive place.
The human costs of the war spit in the face of any "dead-enders" who still claim to support it. Over 1 million Iraqis have died since the war began, as well as over 5000 coalition troops. The United Nations estimates that 2.2 million civilians have fled the country since 2003. According to UNHCR figures, over 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced since the war began. The so-called "reconstruction" of Iraq is a long-running joke, a cover for the rapacious plundering of the country by American corporate interests. While doing little to help Iraqis, it has ensured gargantuan profits for politically-connected companies subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.
Seven years later, most Iraqis still cannot even depend on reliable food, water or electricity; the streets are still filled with garbage. Hundreds of civilians die every month in insurgent attacks or at the hand of coalition forces. Millions of families have been shattered, millions of children orphaned. The war continues to be a colossal drain on the U.S. treasury, diverting money from domestic needs such as health care (the lack of which actually kills 45,000 Americans per year). Anyone who defends this historical crime is either lying to themselves, profiting directly from it, or utterly incapable of empathy.
The Iraq War is, and has always been, strictly about money. Its defenders blind themselves to this simple fact - and the unimaginable suffering that greed still causes today.
No comments:
Post a Comment