IRAQ WAR ENTERS ITS FIFTH YEAR

As the Iraq war goes into fifth year, those pundits who believed on March 20, 2003 that a new dawn had begun for Iraq should now admit they were living in cloud cuckoo land.
No one should be more willing to do that than President Bush who strode onto the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 dressed as a combat pilot, convinced victory was in his grasp. With a banner behind him announcing “Mission Accomplished,” he declared that after only five weeks of occupation major combat operations in Iraq were over. How naïve that must now seem to him when, after four years of fighting, the lives of American service personnel and innocent civilians are still being lost and the Iraqi death toll is being counted in the hundreds of thousands.
For the US military things have only got worse and a new troop surge promotes an ever revolving service door for enlisted personnel shuttling between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers of American wounded are now in the tens of thousands with many scarred forever, and too many doomed to hospital treatment for life for the loss of a limb, head trauma or psychiatric illness. And the cost in dollars mounts every day, climbing into hundreds of billions and making a mockery of the 2003 White House promise that Iraqi oil would pay for the Occupation. There has been so much wasted spending of US taxpayer dollars that billions are untraceable and may have been appropriated by crooked Iraqi politicians, insurgents and greedy corporations. The war has also created the largest ever number of “mercenaries,” possibly 100,000, hired by the Pentagon to inflate the ranks of US personnel on the battlefield. Many of those hired guns are being paid inflated salaries and there has been no oversight of their activities. Worse still, they are not bound by US military law or by the laws of Iraq because they are considered part of the occupying force.
If all that is not a terrible indictment of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, consider also the critical misjudgments of the Bush Administration that included the bogus case it made for going to war in the first place. Who can forget General Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN and the world of what he claimed were mobile biological weapons labs. They turned out to be agricultural trailers. And why did Powell tell the world they were something else? Well, the German government had an Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball” who claimed he had seen those same trailers outfitted as weapons labs. The CIA never interviewed “Curveball” but just handed his information to Colin Powell to present to the world. It turns out “Curveball” was a fake. He just wanted a better life in the West and was happy to tell American intelligence what it wanted to hear. Believe it or not, it was not until the war was in full swing that the CIA went to Germany to speak to “Curveball.” It was only then he admitted he had conned them. And who can forget the warnings by Condoleezza Rice of the danger of a mushroom cloud over an American city. She probably got that nonsense from another “Curveball.” It seems there were plenty of Iraqis willing to lie, knowing their lies were just what some people in Washington wanted to hear.
Let us also not forget that the Iraq invasion has unleashed a bloody civil war and encouraged Iraq’s Shiites to move closer to Iran. It has left America’s standing in the world at an all time low. The US has lost so much of its moral authority that anti–Americanism has taken hold among our allies in Europe. A recent survey showed that anti-US feeling was now as high in Britain as it had been traditionally in France. Rarely has an American president drawn so much vitriol from so many across the globe and all because of Iraq and events like the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and belligerent White House rhetoric. Even leading British judges who generally remain silent on political issues have condemned the Bush administration for its tactics, especially in its treatment of detainees at Guantanamo.
The war in Iraq has changed many of the diplomatic dynamics of the international scene with American influence weakened by growing hostility towards it. In Britain, America’s closest ally, there is a growing consensus that with the departure this year of Tony Blair as Prime Minister, Britain’s relationship with the US will change and the British will never again give unquestioning support to Washington’s foreign policy. Tony Blair has been weakened by his support for the war and the general belief is he lied to the British public about the case for war.
Recently, Hans Blix, the former UN chief weapons inspector said Tony Blair and George Bush lost the confidence of their own electorates because the Iraq war was illegal. He didn’t go so far as to say they lied. Instead he used more diplomatic language.
“They put exclamation marks where there should have been question marks,” he told a reporter, adding that the Bush administration was full of “witch hunters” in the run up to the war. In his view “they were prepared to see anything as evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction when it was clear he had none.”
One of the startling effects of the Iraq war is that the American public has slowly turned against it, realizing it was launched on the basis of bogus evidence and that it has left the US military at the mercy of two sides in a bitter civil war. Part of the growing disillusionment with the war can also be attributed to the fact there has been no exit plan and the White House has constantly sugar coated a terrible reality by refusing to admit that things have been steadily getting worse.
Now the war is about to enter its fifth year, it is worth looking back at what was being said this time last year when the war was entering its fourth year. President Bush was telling us that there would be only victory and no compromise. Donald Rumsfeld was warning those who said we should pull out of Iraq that it would be tantamount to handing post war Germany back to the Nazis. No one quite knew what he meant other than the fact that there appeared to be no one but the US military capable of running Iraq. Dick Cheney was busy denying there was a civil war and was continuing to hint at victory. In contrast, former Iraqi Prime Minister, Allawi viewed things differently. He said: “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”
Sen. Chuck Hagel, Rep., Nebraska, was blunt in his assessment of the realities. He believed the American people were beyond believing in Bush administration public relations offensives. For him it was about “cold hard realities and the facts on the ground.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Adviser under President Carter was one of the few public speakers who appeared to have his finger on the pulse. He clearly sensed a changing mood in the American heartland and across the nation and made his feelings known in an NPR interview on March 20, 2006:
“We have destroyed our credibility. No one believes anything the president says anymore. We have tarnished our morality with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. These are phenomenal costs. And there’s of course blood and money and tens of thousands of Iraqi dead. So, in my view the time has come to face all of this and to realize that staying for a prolonged period of time until some ephemeral victory is not the solution. It is time to leave.”

One wonders what will be said this time next year as the Iraq war enters its sixth year. Will people still be talking about a pull out or about a new Vietnam, or will the war have widened to include Shiites and Sunnis in neighboring countries? One thing is for sure. President Bush will not be standing in front of a banner with “Mission Accomplished” emblazoned on it. Even if the violence subsidies, the words of Colin Powell will still ring true. Before the war, he reminded President Bush of the pottery barn rule. “When you break it you own it,” he warned the president. How long he US will “own” the problem that is Iraq is the question that really troubles most Americans.