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Financial Collapse will End the Occupation: And it won't be "A time of our choosing"
by Mike Whitney
The US Military has won every battle it has fought in Iraq, but it has lost the war. Wars are won politically, not militarily.
Bush doesn't understand this.
He still clings to the belief that a political settlement can be imposed through force. But he is mistaken. The use of overwhelming force has only spread the violence and added to the political instability.
Now Iraq is ungovernable. Was that the objective?
“Come and see our overflowing morgues and find our little ones for us... You may find them in this corner or the other, a little hand poking out, pointing out at you... Come
and search for them in the rubble of your "surgical" air raids, you may
find a little leg or a little head... pleading for your attention.
Come and see them amassed in the garbage dumps, scavenging morsels of food... Come and see, come..."
from 'Flying Kites' by Layla Anwar
Miles of concrete blast-walls snake through Baghdad to separate
the warring parties; the country is fragmented into a hundred smaller
pieces each ruled by local militia commanders. These are the signs of
failure not success. That's why the American people no longer support
the occupation. They're just being practical; they know Bush's plan
won't work. As Nir Rosen says, “Iraq has become Somalia”.
The
administration still supports Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki, but
al-Maliki is a meaningless figurehead who will have no effect on the
country's future. He has no popular base of support and controls
nothing beyond the walls of the Green Zone. The al-Maliki government is
merely an Arab facade designed to convince the American people that
political progress is being made, but there is no progress. Its a sham.
The future is in the hands of the men with guns; they're the ones who
have divided Iraq into locally-controlled fiefdoms and they are the
one's who will ultimately decide who will rule the state. At present,
the fighting between the factions is being described as “sectarian
warfare”, but the term is intentionally misleading. The fighting is
political in nature; the various militias are competing with each other
to see who will fill the vacuum left by the removal of Saddam.
It's a
power struggle.
The media likes to portray the conflict as a clash
between half-crazed Arabs--"dead-enders and terrorists"---who relish
the idea of killing their countrymen, but that's just a way of demonizing
the enemy. In truth, the violence is entirely rational; it is the
inevitable reaction to the dissolution of the state and the occupation
by foreign troops.
Many military experts predicted that there would be
outbreaks of fighting after the initial invasion, but their warnings
were shrugged off by clueless politicians and the cheerleading media.
Now the violence has flared up again in Basra and Baghdad, and there is
no end in sight. Only one thing seems certain, Iraq's future will not
be decided at the ballot box. Bush has made sure of that.
The
US military does not rule Iraq nor does it have the power to control
events on the ground. It's just one of many militias vying for power
in a state that is ruled by warlords.
After the army conducts combat
operations, it is forced to retreat to its camps and bases. This point
needs to be emphasized in order to understand that there is no real
future for the occupation. The US simply does not have the manpower to
hold territory or to establish security.
In fact, the presence of
American troops incites violence because they are seen as forces of
occupation, not liberators. Survey's show the vast majority of the
Iraqi people want US troops to leave. The military has destroyed too
much of the country and slaughtered too many people to expect that
these attitudes will change anytime soon.
Iraqi poet and blogger Layla
Anwar sums up the feelings of many of the war's victims in a recent
post on her web site "An Arab Women's Blues":
- "At the gates
of Babylon the Great, you are still struggling, fighting away, chasing
this or the other, detaining, bombing from above, filling up morgues,
hospitals, graveyards and embassies and borders with queues for
exit-visas.
- "Not one Iraqi wishes your presence. Not one Iraqi accepts your occupation.
- "Got news for you Motherfuckers, you will never control Iraq, not in six
years, not in ten years, not in 20 years.... You have brought upon
yourself the hate and the curse of all Iraqis, Arabs and the rest of
the world... now face your agony." (Layla Anwar; 'An Arab Woman's Blues:
Reflections in a sealed bottle')
Is Bush hoping to change
the mind of Layla or the millions of other Iraqis who have lost loved
ones or been forced into exile or seen their country and culture
crushed beneath the boot heel of foreign occupation? The hearts and
minds campaign is lost.
The US will never be welcome in Iraq.
According
to a survey in the British Medical Journal "Lancet" more than a million
Iraqis have been killed in the war. Another four million have been
either internally-displaced or have fled the country. But the figures
tell us nothing about the magnitude of the disaster that Bush has
caused by attacking Iraq. The invasion is the greatest human
catastrophe in the Middle East since the Nakba in 1948.
Living
standards have declined precipitously in every area---infant mortality,
clean water, food-security, medical supplies, education, electrical
power, employment etc.; even oil production is still below pre-war
levels. The invasion is the most comprehensive policy failure since
Vietnam; everything has gone wrong. The heart of the Arab world has
descended into chaos. The suffering is incalculable.
The main
problem is the occupation; it is the primary catalyst for violence and
an obstacle to political settlement. As long as the occupation
persists, so will the fighting. The claims that the so-called surge has
changed the political landscape are greatly exaggerated. Retired Lt.
General William Odom commented on this point in an interview on the Jim
Lerher News Hour:
- "The surge has sustained military
instability and achieved nothing in political consolidation....Things
are much worse now. And I don't see them getting any better. This was
foreseeable a year and a half ago. And to continue to put the cozy
veneer of comfortable half-truths on this is to deceive the American
public and to make them think it is not the charade it is.....When you
say that the Lebanization of Iraq is taking place, yes, but not because
of Iran, but because the U.S. went in and made this kind of
fragmentation possible. And it has occurred over the last five
years....The al-Maliki government is worse off now...The notion that
there;'s some kind of progress is absurd. The al-Maliki government uses
its Ministry of Interior like a death squad militia. So to call Sadr an
extremist and Maliki a good guy just overlooks the reality that there
are no good guys." (Jim Lerher News Hour)
The war in Iraq was
lost before the first shot was fired. The conflict never had the
support of the American people and Iraq never posed a threat to US
national security. The whole pretext for the war was based on lies; it
was a coup orchestrated by elites and the media to carry out a
far-right agenda. Now the mission has failed, but no one wants to admit
their mistakes by withdrawing; so the butchery continues without pause.
The Bush administration has decided
to pursue a strategy that is unprecedented in US history. It has
decided to continue to prosecute a war that has already been lost
morally, strategically, and militarily. But fighting a losing war has
its costs.
America is much weaker now than it was when Bush first took
office in 2000; politically, economically and militarily. US power and
prestige around the world will continue to deteriorate until the troops
are withdrawn from Iraq. But that's unlikely to happen until all other
options have been exhausted.
Deteriorating economic conditions in the
financial markets are putting enormous downward pressure on the dollar.
The corporate bond and equities markets are in disarray; the banking
system is collapsing, consumer spending is down, tax revenues are
falling, and the country is headed into a painful and protracted
recession.
The US will leave Iraq sooner than many pundits believe, but
it will not be at a time of our choosing. Rather, the conflict will end
when the United States no longer has the capacity to wage war. That
time is not far off.
The Iraq War signals the end of US
interventionism for at least a generation; maybe longer. The
ideological foundation for the war (preemption/regime change) has been
exposed as a baseless justification for unprovoked aggression. Someone
will have to be held accountable. There will have to be international
tribunals to determine who is responsible in the deaths of over one
million Iraqis.
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