The Winner’s
Curse Is Alive and Well in Iraq
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, US
It
took less than three weeks for the US to win the
war in Iraq and all of the last three years to
hang on to the winnings. Iraq continues to defy
those pundits who had expected Saddam’s
removal would be followed by a warm welcome for
the liberators and to the successful installation
of a democratic, pro-American government.
Since the war began, 2,563 American and coalition
troops have died in Iraq and 17,269 have been
injured. Three months after holding parliamentary
elections, Iraq does not have an elected government.
Infighting among sectarian militias has brought
the country to the brink of civil war, something
that deeply worries the American ambassador to
Iraq.
The Doonesbury cartoon script recently featured
a conversation between US troops in Iraq and their
division commander. The two-star general yells
into his bullhorn, “Everyone clear on this?
We’re here in Iraq to prevent a war from
breaking out.” A soldier asks, “Sir!
Yes, Sir! If there is a civil war, what side are
we on?” The general replies, “The
good side! We’d still be fighting evil,
soldier.” The conversation then peters out
as the soldier asks him to identify the good side
and the general stumbles, prompting another soldier
to say, “It’s not easy, like in Vietnam.”
A third one says, “Check that.”
US Secretary of State Condi Rice has conceded
that “thousands” of tactical mistakes
have been made in Iraq but insists that it “was
the right strategic decision” to invade
Iraq and topple Saddam. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony
Zinni, who led the US Central Command from 1997
to 2000, has challenged this view and called for
the resignation of US Secretary of Defense, Donald
Rumsfeld.
Similar sentiments have been expressed by retired
Maj.-Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training
the Iraqi military after the conquest and by retired
Lt.-Gen. Greg Newbold, who was the Pentagon’s
top operations officer just prior to the war.
Newbold calls Rice’s statement outrageous,
since it blames the war’s failure on soldiers
who are fighting resolutely. On the plane of grand
strategy, i.e., the “battle of ideas,”
even Rumsfeld has conceded that the US is doing
poorly, “If I were grading, I would say
we probably deserve a D or D+ as a country.”
Iraq, the idée fix of the Bush administration,
threatens to be the undoing of the Republican
Party in the November elections. Evidence has
surfaced that soon after the terrorist attacks
on 9/11, the White House decided to proceed with
plans to attack Iraq. This view has been cited
by many individuals, including retired US Army
General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of
Iraq. In his autobiography, American Soldier,
Franks says that the president asked him to present
a plan to invade Iraq in October 2001.
The war has taken a toll on Bush’s domestic
standing. An AP-Ipsos poll shows that nearly 70
percent of Americans believe their country is
headed in the wrong direction, up from 57 percent
just a year ago. Only 35 percent approve of Bush’s
handling of the war in Iraq. Bush’s overall
job rating is 36 percent, on par with President
Johnson’s at the height of the Vietnam War.
The president has responded by saying that he
does not govern based on the polls. While welcoming
criticism on his decision to invade Iraq, he bristles
at suggestions that he went to war over false
pretenses. Apparently, anyone saying that that
war was fought to preserve American access to
Middle Eastern oil supplies or to enhance the
safety of Israel is not an American patriot.
Seeking to empathize with communities that have
lost loved ones, Bush’s new mantra is, “No
president wants to go to war.” But, as retired
Gen. Wesley Clark, former supreme commander of
NATO, noted during the last presidential campaign,
this was an elective war. The former head of the
Nuremberg Commission that was established at the
end of the Second World War is much more direct.
He has called the decision to invade Iraq a war
crime.
A growing segment of American public opinion now
sees the war as being the biggest bait-and-switch
campaign in American history. Had the White House
said the war was being fought for bringing democracy
to Iraq, that it would cost hundreds of billons
of dollars, kill thousands of Americans and require
that American troops be stationed there for a
decade, it is highly unlikely that bills to prosecute
the war would have sailed through Congress.
While Bush has paid a price domestically for having
waged war on Iraq, it is America that is paying
a price globally. Just about every survey indicates
that Anti-Americanism is on the rise, and not
just in the Muslim world. The sympathy that America
had earned after 9/11 has been squandered at the
alter of pre-emptive war. Former Soviet leader,
Mikhail Gorbachev, widely regarded as a friend
in the US, cautions America not to become intoxicated
by its position as the world’s only superpower.
He says that America wishes to impose its will
on the world but that it “needs to get over
it. It has responsibilities as well as power.”
The world has watched as a war that was fought
to bring “freedom, liberty and democracy”
has instead yielded a Dystopia of lawlessness
and hopelessness. American troops have killed
thousands of suspected insurgents and detained
more than 100,000. Lt.- Gen. Peter Chiarelli,
the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, concedes
that for every insurgent that is picked up, a
new one is created. Coalition sources quoted in
the Economist magazine say that while the US military
won’t acknowledge it, American troops have
killed over 250 innocent people at vehicle checkpoints
alone. According to Iraq Body Count, the war has
killed a total of 36,000 Iraqi civilians. So,
if the real objective was regime change, why were
American and British commandos not sent in to
take Saddam out?
There can be little doubt that Operation Iraqi
Freedom has failed. It has replaced Saddam’s
tyranny with that of an indefinite and chaotic
occupation. The quality of life in Baghdad has
plummeted. As Congressman Murtha of Pennsylvania
put it, America is no longer part of the solution.
Iraq has never been an easy country for invaders,
as Winston Churchill found out three years into
the British occupation at the end of the First
World War. The best way forward for the US is
to declare victory, turn over the responsibility
for governing Iraq to the UN, and bring the American
troops home within the Bush presidency.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
