March 28, 2008

Beyond Baghdad: Five Years after

By Mowahid Hussain Shah
March 2008 marks the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion and occupation of Baghdad. 
The scorecard thus far makes grim reading.
On May 1, 2003, President Bush called it “Mission Accomplished”. But 2008 reveals that it is far from that. At the five-year anniversary, the conflict remains unpopular in the US. A new USA TODAY/Gallup poll – which is the latest analysis of public opinion toward the Iraq war – finds that 60% of Americans call the US invasion of Iraq a mistake. 
The humanitarian crisis in Iraq remains grave. According to the Wall Street Journal, about four million Iraqis have been uprooted by the violent aftermath of the invasion. 4000 US servicemen have already lost their lives. 
Iraq is costing the US national exchequer $12 billion a month, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-author of a new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” It may be pushing America into a recession, which two out of three Americans already believe is underway. BBC-TV reported on March 13 that outside Los Angeles, tent cities have sprung up to shelter those who have become virtual refugees in their own land, as an estimated 60,000 homes have been lost to bank foreclosures. To view the story, please click the following link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7290000/newsid_7293500/7293507.stm
The insurgency shows no sign of tapering off, despite the surge in US troops. NATO ally, Turkey, is facing a rise in anti-American sentiments with Turkish troops increasingly willing to make incursions into northern Iraq against the Kurds. Syria and Iran have been drawing closer. Israel has been unable to quash Hezbollah and Hamas. Gaza, according to US Presidential candidate Ralph Nader, is the “world’s largest prison with 1.5 million inmates, many of them starving, sick, and penniless.”
The fallout from Iraq has radicalized the region. Iran has been regionally empowered. And Admiral William Fallon, the head of US Central Command – the top American commander in the Middle East – has resigned because he opposed the Bush Administration’s Iraq strategy as well as the constant saber-rattling over Iran, which inflates the threat of Tehran to justify military action.
In the words of the London Observer: “The Middle East is less secure and less stable now than in 2003.”
Militarily, the Iraq conflict has depleted the US, and psychologically it has weakened it. Anglo-American clout and credibility has been diminished. 
Iraq has accelerated the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice in the West. The loose and lavish use of labels like “Islamic”, “Islamist”, and “Jihadist” to categorize violence has not helped. Nor has the constant refrain about “where are the moderate Muslims” and “why don’t Muslims condemn terrorism”. It seeks to establish a false perception of guilt by association – that is, bracketing innocent Muslims with violence, and holding them collectively responsible for acts with which they have no connection whatsoever.
The combination of hubris, avarice, and over-smart schemes has its own way of imploding. Much of the underlying assumptions of the Iraq takeover were based on future projections – which may have looked impressive and attractive on PowerPoint presentations but, in effect, were proven fraudulent – in particular the one about finding WMDs. These projections have now been exposed as neo-Con fantasies which, if at all they existed, existed only in the thin air of the stratosphere. The neo-Cons continue to shamelessly dodge responsibility for the disastrous consequences of their policies. 
Another glaring failure was that of the well-funded think-tanks and the mainstream media which became, in effect, willing enablers and cheerleaders of the Bush-Cheney march to a Middle East quagmire. Already burdened and inflamed by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the Middle Eastern soil was ill-prepared to handle and absorb an additional occupation situation.
In this scenario, the OIC predictably has remained toothless and gutless. 
There is an inherent and self-defeating flaw in the overall Western strategy toward the Muslim world. Through its actions, first, it fuels the flames of militancy and then, it turns around to fight the fires it had fanned.
It hasn’t worked because it can’t.