The Iraq Disaster Looms Big: But Don’t Tell That to the Petraeus September 2, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, War.Tags: al-Maliki, allawi, David Petraeus, Iraq, iraq corruption, iraq economy, iraq surge, Iraq torture, Iraq war, iraw withdrawal, neocons, robert parry, roger hollander, sofa agreement
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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?
US General David Petraeus, pictured, for his comments asserting the Islamic
republic is becoming a “thugocracy”, saying such terms are only used by
“thugs.”
al-Rubaye
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.
roger hollander 
Headlines or Not, the Iraq War is Not Over September 7, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, War.Tags: civilian casualties, Iraq, Iraq mercenaries, Iraq war, iraq war cost, iraw withdrawal, phyllis bennis, roger hollander, troop withdrawal
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Published on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 by Institute for Policy Studies
It might seem like cause for celebration after reading the New York Times headline, “Iraq War Marks First Month with No U.S. Military Deaths.” But the smaller print on the page reminds us why celebrating is not really in order: “Many Iraqis are killed…” The cost of this war is still way too high — in Iraqi lives and in our money.
With so much attention and so many billions of our tax dollars shifting from Iraq to the devastating and ever more costly war in Afghanistan, it is too easy to forget that there are still almost 50,000 U.S. troops occupying Iraq. We are still paying almost $50 billion just this year for the war in Iraq. And while we don’t hear about it very often, many Iraqis are still being killed.
There’s an awful lot of discussion underway about the massive cuts in the Pentagon’s budget that may be looming as part of the deficit deal. But somehow few are mentioning that those potential cuts from the defense department’s main budget don’t even touch the actual war funding — this year alone it’s $48 billion for Iraq and $122 billion for the war in Afghanistan.
Just imagine what we could do with those funds — we could provide health care for 43 million children for two years, or hire 2.4 million police officers to help keep our communities safe for a year. Or we could create and fund new green middle-class jobs for 3.4 million workers — maybe including those thousands of soldiers we could bring home from those useless wars.
Barack Obama, back when he was a presidential candidate, promised he would end the war in Iraq. In 2002, he called it a “dumb” war. The U.S. role in the war has gotten smaller but it sure isn’t over. And it hasn’t gotten any smarter. A year ago Obama told us that all combat operations in Iraq were about to end, that “our commitment in Iraq is changing from a military effort” to — what exactly? The 50,000 or so troops still in Iraq are there, we are told, to train Iraqi security forces, provide security for civilians, and, oh yes, to conduct counterterrorism operations. Apparently “counterterrorism operations” don’t count as part of a military effort?
Even worse, the Obama administration, following its predecessor’s footsteps, is clearly committed to keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the December 31, 2011 deadline agreed to by the Bush administration and Iraq back in 2008. That agreement was supposed to be absolute — it called for all U.S. troops to be pulled out by the end of this year. (There were loopholes, of course — the agreement said all Pentagon-paid military contractors had to leave too, but didn’t mention those paid by the State Department, so guess which agency is taking over the check-writing to pay the thousands of mercenaries preparing to stay in Iraq for the long haul?)
But now the Obama administration is ratcheting up the pressure on Iraq’s weak and corrupt government, pushing Baghdad’s U.S.-dependent leadership to “invite” U.S. troops to stay just a little bit longer. Iraq’s elected parliament, like the vast majority of the population, wants all the troops out. But democratic accountability to the people doesn’t operate any better in Iraq than it does here in the U.S. So the Iraqi cabinet made its own decision, without any messy consultations with their parliament, to “open negotiations” with Washington over how many and how long U.S. troops would continue occupying their country.
Of course it’s good news that no U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq in August. The bad news is that scores of Iraqi civilians were killed. We don’t know exactly how many – the Pentagon says it doesn’t do body counts. But we know some of them. According to IraqBodyCount.org, 36 Iraqi civilians were killed in the first five days of the month. Just on one day, August 15, the New York Times reported 89 Iraqis killed, another 315 injured in apparently coordinated attacks. And on the last day of the month, August 31st, at least seven Iraqis were killed, another 25 wounded. And those are just the ones we know about.
The Iraq War isn’t over. It still costs too much in the lives of Iraqi civilians and in U.S. taxpayer dollars. We still can’t afford dumb wars. We need to bring those 50,000 troops and those fifty billion dollars home. And the way to do that is to follow the money: keep the pressure up on the links between our economic crisis and the costs of these illegal, useless wars. It’s really dumb if we don’t.
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Phyllis Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her books include Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer, Understanding the U.S.-Iran Crisis: A Primer, and most recently Ending the Iraq War: A Primer. If you want to receive her talking points and articles on a regular basis, click here and choose “New Internationalism.”