[NYTr] Beyond Disaster: Iraq War About to Get Much Worse

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

TruthDig - Aug 6, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070806_beyond_disaster/


Beyond Disaster

By Chris Hedges

The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse.  The Democrats’
decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash
their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger
forward until the mission collapses.  This will be sudden.  The
security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly
breached.[1]  Command and control will disintegrate.  And we will back
out of Iraq humiliated and defeated.  But this will not be the end of
the conflict.  It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier
and more dangerous to American interests. 

Iraq no longer exists as a unified country.  The experiment that was
Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and antagonistic patches of
the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I,
belongs to the history books.[2]  It will never come back.  The Kurds
have set up a de facto state in the north, the Shiites control most of
the south and the center of the country is a battleground.  There are 2
million Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced.
Another 2 million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan,
which now has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country
on Earth. An Oxfam report estimates that one in three Iraqis are in
need of emergency aid, but the chaos and violence is so widespread that
assistance is impossible.  Iraq is in a state of anarchy.  The American
occupation forces are one more source of terror tossed into the caldron
of suicide bombings, mercenary armies, militias, massive explosions,
ambushes, kidnappings and mass executions.  But wait until we leave.

It was not supposed to turn out like this.  Remember all those visions
of a democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous
pundits like Thomas Friedman[3] and the gravel-voiced morons who pollute
our airwaves on CNN and Fox News?  They assured us that the war would
be a cakewalk.  We would be greeted as liberators.  Democracy would
seep out over the borders of Iraq to usher in a new Middle East.  Now,
struggling to salvage their own credibility, they blame the debacle on
poor planning and mismanagement.

There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States—people
who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak
Arabic.  At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more
than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea.  And I include all
the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence
community.  Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this
would not work.  The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and
Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation.  The
war was doomed, period.  It never had a chance.  And even a cursory
knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.[4]

This is not to deny the stupidity of the occupation.  The disbanding of
the Iraqi army; the ham-fisted attempt to install the crook and, it now
turns out, Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi[5] in power; the firing of all
Baathist public officials, including university professors, primary
school teachers, nurses and doctors; the failure to secure Baghdad and
the vast weapons depots from looters; allowing heavily armed American
units to blast their way through densely populated neighborhoods,
giving the insurgency its most potent recruiting tool—all ensured a
swift descent into chaos.  But Iraq would not have held together even
if we had been spared the gross incompetence of the Bush
administration.  Saddam Hussein, like the more benign dictator Josip
Broz Tito in the former Yugoslavia, understood that the glue that held
the country together was the secret police. 

Iraq, however, is different from Yugoslavia.  Iraq has oil—lots of it.
It also has water in a part of the world that is running out of water.
And the dismemberment of Iraq will unleash a mad scramble for dwindling
resources that will include the involvement of neighboring states.  The
Kurds, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, know that if they do not get
their hands on water resources and oil they cannot survive.  But
Turkey, Syria and Iran have no intention of allowing the Kurds to
create a viable enclave.  A functioning Kurdistan in northern Iraq
means rebellion by the repressed Kurdish minorities in these countries.
The Kurds, orphans of the 20th century who have been repeatedly sold
out by every ally they ever had, including the United States, will be
crushed.[6]  The possibility that Iraq will become a Shiite state, run
by clerics allied with Iran, terrifies the Arab world.  Turkey, as well
as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel, would most likely keep
the conflict going by arming Sunni militias.  This anarchy could end
with foreign forces, including Iran and Turkey, carving up the battered
carcass of Iraq.  No matter what happens, many, many Iraqis are going
to die.  And it is our fault. 

The neoconservatives—and the liberal interventionists, who still serve
as the neocons’ useful idiots when it comes to Iran—have learned
nothing.  They talk about hitting Iran and maybe even Pakistan with
airstrikes.  Strikes on Iran would ensure a regional conflict.  Such an
action has the potential of drawing Israel into war—especially if Iran
retaliates for any airstrikes by hitting Israel, as I would expect
Tehran to do.  There are still many in the U.S. who cling to the
doctrine of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that the post-World War II
Nuremberg laws define as a criminal “war of aggression.”

The occupation of Iraq, along with the Afghanistan occupation, has only
furthered the spread of failed states and increased authoritarianism,
savage violence, instability and anarchy.  It has swelled the ranks of
our real enemies—the Islamic terrorists—and opened up voids of
lawlessness where they can operate and plot against us.  It has
scuttled the art of diplomacy.  It has left us an outlaw state intent
on creating more outlaw states.  It has empowered Iran, as well as
Russia and China, which sit on the sidelines gleefully watching our
self-immolation.  This is what George W. Bush and all those “reluctant
hawks” who supported him have bequeathed us. 

What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists
of the Iraq war have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be
finished.

END NOTES

[1]http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/baghdad-green-zone.htm

[2]http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0860176.html

[3]http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/thomasfriedman.htm

[4]http://www.mideastweb.org/iraq.htm

[5]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/not_in_website/syndication/monitoring/media_reports/2291649.stm

[6]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/daily/feb99/kurdprofile.htm


[Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York
Times, spent seven years in the Middle East.  He was part of the
paper’s team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage
of global terrorism.  He is the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning.” His latest book is “American Fascists: The Christian Right
and the War on America.” ]