The Iraq Disaster Looms Big: But Don’t Tell That to the Petraeus

Consortium News / By Robert Parry

Iraq continues its drift toward a failed state, and the strategic winner from
the invasion looks to be Iran. So why is Washington celebrating Gen. Petraeus?

September 1, 2011  |

Top Iranian officials have lashed out at
US General David Petraeus, pictured, for his comments asserting the Islamic
republic is becoming a “thugocracy”, saying such terms are only used by
“thugs.”

Photo Credit: AFP/File – Ahmad
al-Rubaye

As Gen. David Petraeus retired from the Army on Wednesday, he received a
17-gun salute and was hailed across the U.S. news media as the strategic genius
who organized the “successful surge” in Iraq and similarly achieved gains
against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He is now off to run the CIA.

However, the less glorious truth about Petraeus’s much-heralded “surge” in
Iraq was that it cost the lives of almost 1,000 more U.S. soldiers, inflicted
more violence upon the people of Iraq and will likely only have achieved a delay
in a U.S. military defeat of historic proportions. Much the same could be said
for Petraeus’s “surge” in Afghanistan.

The Iraq surge’s primary accomplishment may have been to spare President
George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their neocon advisers the
embarrassment of having invaded and occupied Iraq, only to see a bloodied U.S.
army essentially kicked out by the Iraqis. The surge put off the forced
withdrawal of the American military at least until President Barack Obama’s
watch.

Washington’s still-influential neocons are now pressing for a revised “status
of forces agreement” with Iraq that will allow some U.S. “advisers” to remain in
Iraq after the end of the year. That way, the image of the last American troops
racing to the Kuwaiti border in December 2011 – much as Soviet troops retreated
from Afghanistan in 1989 – won’t be so stark.

But even the fig leaf of several thousand left-behind U.S. trainers won’t
change the strategic reality of a major neocon-driven disaster.

Another measure of that American failure in Iraq could be found Thursday
in a
Washington Post op-ed by former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who paints
his own bleak picture of what life is like in Iraq after the eight-year U.S
occupation.

Allawi, who also heads the largest political bloc in Iraq’s legislature,
frames his op-ed as an appeal for more economic and political support from the
United States but does so in the context of describing a devastated nation. He
writes:

“More than eight years after Saddam Hussein’s regime was overthrown, basic
services are in a woeful state: Most of the country has only a few hours of
electricity a day. Blackouts were increasingly common this summer.

“Oil exports, still Iraq’s only source of income, are barely more than they
were when Hussein was toppled. The government has squandered the boon of high
oil prices and failed to create real and sustainable job growth. Iraq’s economy
has become an ever more dysfunctional mix of cronyism and mismanagement, with
high unemployment and endemic corruption.

“Transparency
International ranks Iraq the world’s fourth-most-corrupt country and by far
the worst in the Middle East. The promise of improved security has been empty,
with sectarianism on the rise.”

False Promises

Allawi also cites the false promises of democracy:

“Despite failing to win the most seats in last year’s elections, Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki clung to power through a combination of Iranian support
and U.S. compliance. He now shows an alarming disregard for democratic
principles and the rule of law.

“Vital independent institutions such as the election commission, the
transparency commission and Iraq’s central bank have been ordered to report
directly to the office of the prime minister. Meanwhile, Maliki refuses to
appoint consensus candidates as defense and interior ministers, as per last
year’s power-sharing agreement.

“The government is using blatant dictatorial tactics and intimidation to
quell opposition, ignoring the most basic human rights. Human
Rights Watch reported in February on secret
torture prisons under Maliki’s authority.

“In June, it exposed the
government’s use of hired thugs to beat, stab and even sexually assault
peaceful demonstrators in Baghdad who were complaining about corruption and poor
services. These horrors are reminiscent of autocratic responses to
demonstrations by failing regimes elsewhere in the region, and a far cry from
the freedom and democracy promised in the new Iraq.

“Is this really what the United States sacrificed more than 4,000 young men
and women, and hundreds of billions of dollars, to build? The trend of failure
is becoming irreversible.”

So what is going on here? How can the U.S. media hail Petraeus’s “successful
surge” and write about “victory at last” in Iraq when it appears that the
Bush-Cheney-neocon intervention has created what amounts to a failed state in
Iraq?

The answer seems to be a political one. Since nearly everyone who was in a
position of authority in Washington in 2003 supported the invasion of Iraq –
including most leading lights of the national press corps – no one wants to face
up to their responsibility for the death and defeat.

To do so would require painful self-reflection. Washington’s
best-and-brightest would have to admit that they didn’t measure up to the moral
and intellectual task of resisting the Bush-Cheney-neocon plans for aggressive
war, what the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunals deemed the “supreme
international crime.”

In an honorable world, there would be resignations in disgrace from the
pro-war politicians and pundits. In a just world, there would be international
tribunals enforcing accountability on the perpetrators and their accomplices, as
the Nuremberg judges promised even for leaders of the victorious Allied nations
if they committed aggressive war like the fascist Axis powers did.

Since neither exists – not an honorable world nor a just one – Washington
political/media establishment simply keeps up a positive spin. Bush and Cheney
get to live out their retirements in peace and comfort, Petraeus gets a 17-gun
salute, and the neocons retain their influence and their lucrative think-tank
jobs in the nation’s capital.

There even appears to be a good chance that the neocons will ride back into
power in 2013 behind another tough-talking Texan, Gov. Rick Perry.