Iraq war: Victims and villains
Most wars have heroes, victims and villains. Not the Iraq War. It has no heroes, only victims and villains. The war's fifth anniversary on 19 March 2008 is a good time to examine who these are. VICTIMS
They are numerous and of all shades. The foremost are Iraqis. Estimates of Iraqi dead vary from 89,000 (Iraq Body Count), to 151,000 by Iraq's health ministry/WHO (from March 2003 to June 2006) and to 654,000 by UK medical journal Lancet. About 4.5 million are displaced from their homes including 2 million refugees outside Iraq mainly in Jordan and Syria. About the terrible intangible costs, Baghdad University Professor Nabil Younis writes the war destroyed Iraq's "…valuable military and economic asset, institutions and traditional, social and spiritual heritage." (The Times, 18 March). Iraqi society and state was demolished to satisfy US lust for hegemonism. A poor bargain for getting rid of tyrant Saddam! About 4,000 GIs, or 163 Iraqi dead for each American killed (using Lancet figure), died for this dubious achievement. Add to that 60,000 wounded, and many American families had their lives uprooted. US casualties are directly traceable to the Bushies' failure in conceptualizing, planning and executing this illegal conflict. Iraq has strained the US military. It has a lot to be ashamed about (Abu Ghraib; Guantanamo; Bagram). This exercise in cruelty is not new for the Pentagon. Look at the Vietnam War (three million Vietnamese dead); defoliation of forests (Agent Orange) and prolonged secret B52 bombing of Cambodia. By these standards, US brutality in Iraq is mild! Nonetheless, anti-Americanism has exploded worldwide especially amongst Muslims. The US taxpayer is another victim. Against Rumsfeld's estimate of the war's total cost at $50-60 billion, the current monthly cost is $12 billion or $5,000 per second. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the war cost $431 billion as of last September. But Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in his book The Three Trillion Dollar War estimates that the true costincluding disability compensation and benefits-- of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan to be $3 trillion (1000 billion=1 trillion)! Borrowing financed the war. "This is the first major war in American history where all the additional cost was paid for by borrowing," notes Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman Bob Hormats. The budget surplus Bush inherited in 2000 is in deficit, with 40% of the increased debt held by PRC and other foreigners. PRC's current US dollar holdings exceed a trillion! No wonder Bush's circumspect on what's happening in Tibet and elsewhere in PRC. A debtor, even with nuclear missiles, has limited leverage against his biggest creditor. Opinion differs on the war's impact on US economy. Stiglitz considers the current US economic mess "…very much related to the Iraq war." War spending didn't stimulate the domestic economy much, prompting the Fed to loosen liquidity that led to the housing and consumption boom and subsequent bubble. Hormats doesn't consider the war to be a "…significant cause of the present downturn" but concedes the opportunity costto strengthen the US economy-- to be great. The war battered international law. Writing in The Guardian, former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix slammed it as "a tragedy for Iraq, for the US, for the UN, for truth and human dignity" and a "setback in the world's efforts to develop legal restraints on the use of armed force between states." An unintended victim was ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, described by fellow Jamaican Calypso King Harry Belafonte as the Bush house boy. His UN speech of 6 February 2003 was a pack of lies that ruined his gilt-edged reputation. He spends his time with tinkering with Volvos, his hobby, rather than making big bucks on the talk circuit! VILLAINS
It's not rocket science to figure out the two biggest villains. Blix provides a clue. Iraq in 2003 "was not a real or imminent threat to anybody," he wrote and that responsibility for the war "must lie with those who ignored the facts five years ago." This can only refer to the dynamic duo of Bush and Blair who fabricated facts and knowingly exaggerated Saddam's menace. Blair like Saddam has gone, leaving office in disgrace. He's turned his talents to addressing the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Good luck to him. Some colleagues survived the shipwreck. Jack Straw and Geoffrey Hoon, Blair's Foreign and Defence Secretaries, are Gordon Brown's Lord Chancellor and Chief Whip, respectively. Politicians are great at comebacks. We Bangladeshis are finding this out! Bush's legacy is in ashes because of poor performance: spectacularly unsuccessful (Iraq), insipid (Katrina), lackluster (seniors' health-care) and stillborn (social security reform). A fiscal conservative, he drove the US treasury into massive deficit with tax cuts and war financing. He sanctioned torture, upheld renditions, curtailed civil rights (Patriot Act), authorized illegal wiretapping and undermined America's moral and material standing domestically and internationally. There's lively debate amongst US historians whether or not Bush is the worst of all US presidents, eclipsing Grant, Harding, Hoover, Nixon et al. There's no such uncertainty in the rest of the world. It thinks Bush stinks. Bush destroyed US's good image. The ideological villain behind Bush's strident unilateralism is neoconservatism, as embodied in the American Enterprise Institute's Project for a New America Century (PNAC). This was a blueprint for US world domination based on unbridled free market capitalism backed by the unchallenged primacy of US arms after USSR's collapse in 1991. The failure of Washington's Iraq adventure has discredited this ideology and the neocons' are reduced to whimpering. But US hubris resides in Bush's Machiavellian hawk VP Dick Cheney. He's doing his best to foment a war with Iran. While neoconservatism may be down, it's not out. Republican presidential nominee John McCain may be an able devotee, with his talk of a 100 years US presence in Iraq and his public jingle of Bomb Iran Bomb. We'll know in November 2008 if the US public has learned its lesson from Iraq by the President it elects.
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