TheMillerCircle.org

Last week, we heard the President of the United States announce the end of the war in Iraq, as he tried to mobilize the American spirit to coalesce around a sense of relief over a war that should never have been fought and should never have seriously been contemplated. Of course, he didn’t say those things. And, what he also didn’t tell us is that the way we are ending the war in Iraq will be identical to the way we have ended all wars, with the exception of Vietnam, beginning with how we ended  WW II–we will occupy the country with perhaps 50,000 troops and maybe as many or more civilians, some of whom are still trying to bring electricity in Baghdad up to the service levels that existed before we invaded the country. And he didn’t tell us about the no-bid contracts won by American companies like Haliburton and Blackwater that gouged $ billions out of our treasury. Nor did he comment on the missing $ 9 billion that was removed from the Fed in New York, never to be seen or heard of again. Vietnam, the one country we didn’t occupy, was left without rear guard troops because we were defeated in the field of battle. Yes, as much as the right wing wants to insist otherwise, the United States of America was defeated in the battlefield in Vietnam, retreated and abandoned its military mission in that country because of the overwhelming strength of the opposition and the final realization that we didn’t really have a dog in that fight. Obama might have also conveyed the fact that when Maliki’s government refused to sign Bush’s Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA; urged and insisted by Maqtada al-Sadr), which would have given the U.S. Military years of additional occupation status, we had no choice but to pick up sticks and leave. It was, in reality, the Iraqis who threw us out, rather than our own choice to leave, that made the difference. Given Obama’s right center political motif, if the Iraqis had signed the SOFA agreement, we would still be there fighting terrorists or protecting oil interests. Speaking of oil, Obama didn’t mention that China seems to be the main benefactor in competing for Iraq’s oil contracts and reserves, as well as their development of mining interests in the country. If Obama has asked not to view Iraq as a failure, he didn’t give us any reasons why we might consider our efforts by using any other scorecard. Thus, for example, the two countries that have gained the most from our invasion of Iraq are Iran and China and the losers are the United States and devastated Iraq.

But, here are a few additional things Obama didn’t tell us in his speech last week, when he announced that we were “leaving” the country. Obama didn’t tell us that before we invaded Iraq, there were no suicide bombers and no car bombs, women did not wear  burkas, but they did attend schools without being threatened or harassed and got an education; some even went to college. He did not mention that hundreds of thousands or more Iraqis were killed by our bombs, bullets and brutality and that the country is dangerously laden with unexploded cluster bombs that are left to kill and maim a generation of Iraqis, mostly children who venture into the countryside. He didn’t tell us that five million people  were forced to move into the countryside or into neighboring countries such as Jordan, where they cannot work and have spent whatever money they took with them. He did not explain that, included among those Iraqis who  left the country, are the doctors, merchants, civil servants, engineers and workers that form the essential core of a functional society.  These are the people that Iraq needs to rebuild itself, but the conditions in that country make it unlikely that this will happen, since the displaced Sunnis fear retribution from the newly empowered Shiites. I don’t think Obama mentioned that our invasion of Iraq made Iran into a much stronger player in the Middle East and that, as a direct result of our “success” in Iraq, we must now face a much stronger Iran, with few tools left for negotiation. Our invasion has made Israel feel more threatened by Iran than ever before. To deal with Iran now, we have been left to fabricate stories about nuclear arms buildup, for which there is no evidence. It shouldn’t really matter–it’s just one more lie on top of thousands of others that by now have us asking, are we really like Rome? Well, if you can tell me that we are not suffering from the excessive weight of our militarism, then I can tell you that we are not Rome. But can you say it and mean it? Can we invade and destroy a country and talk only about our own losses? It is sad that we lost several thousand soldiers, but this tragic loss of life is compounded by the fact that the war against Iraq will probably wind up costing us something like $ 3 trillion, according to analysis done by Nobel Prize winner (economics) Joseph Stiglitz. In addition, there are still parts of Iraq, like Mosul, where violence is a daily event and American troops patrol with shoot-to-kill authority. There are places in Iraq where intense fighting is not over. Overall, Iraq remains as a far less secure state for ordinary citizens than it was under Saddam Hussein. Apparently that doesn’t really matter. But, what does?

Mr. Obama, you are allowing the right wing to take credit for “stabilizing” Iraq through the “surge” of General Petraeus, without emphasizing that when Petraeus took command in 2007, the Iraq war was already imploding because the civil war was largely won by the Shiites, who then controlled 3/4 of Baghdad; at the same time, al-Qaeda had overplayed its hand, such that the two most effective means of reducing violence in Iraq were i) the co-opting of Sunni insurgents and arming them to fight against al-Qaeda and ii) as arranged by Iran, getting Muqtada al-Sadr to contract his operations and remove his Mahdi army off the streets. The troop surge came after that and largely served as witness to progress. The claim that the “surge” worked is simply a political strategy by the right-wing desperadoes of the country to take the bitter sting out of a completely bungled war effort.

By leaving Iraq, if that is what you want to call it, we are leaving behind a failed state that we created by our greed for oil and our complete indifference to the sovereignty of another nation. Legal experts have already judged that what we did by invading Iraq was illegal and against treaties we have signed and promoted. We had hoped to further establish American hegemony over the Middle East, but what happened instead was the destruction of a secular state: we helped to shore up Saddam Hussein as an enemy of Iran and supported him through his devastating war with that country, but we could have more readily helped transform Iraq into a viable, secular democracy. Exercising the war option by inducing Iraq to engage against Iran was a costly error of judgment, one that led to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, permission for which was granted by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

Mr Obama, as you have “ended the war in Iraq,” you have converted the war in Afghanistan over to the Obama label, in much the same way Nixon converted Johnson’s Vietnam war into that of his own. And, like Vietnam, we are fighting an indigenous people who feel the country belongs to them. The objectives for the war in Afghanistan are so murky that no one in your administration can identify what a victory will look like, or the conditions that will exist when we can call an end to that war, just as you called an end to the Iraq war, but left 50,000 troops to engage in military activity if required, with the possibility of being sucked back into a civil war if the level of violence becomes excessive. And, violence remains high in Iraq.

Mr. President, you have an attractive alternative to the war in Afghanistan that many people have told you about: reduce 9/11 to a criminal act, as we were not attacked by a nation, but by a group of terrorists and through that declaration,  leave it to the international investigative forces to bring the perpetrators to trial and justice. Invading sovereign states on trumped up charges (Iraq) or without strong commitments for limited actions (Afghanistan) leads us into wars of perpetuity, the new kind of war to which America is slowly and pathologically acquiring a state of acclimation. Tragically, we are learning to breathe at this new altitude.

Your war in Afghanistan runs the risk of destroying your Presidency, just as Johnson’s Vietnam war did to him. It is hard to see what’s been gained in Afghanistan, with drones creating new enemies and our failures to help the people of Pakistan address their most recent episode of massive flooding, starvation and displacement. We give $ 150 million a month to the Pakistan army, but promised a total of $ 150 million for aid relief for flood victims in Pakistan.

Afghanistan has no oil, but may get a natural gas pipeline to transfer natural gas from the Caspian Sea into India. Are we there for a pipeline? If so, this is another one of those hidden motives that are plainly evident to some, but too risky to reveal to the nation as a whole, just as it was too risky to reveal that the invasion of Iraq was all about oil. The war in Afghanistan is far more murky. It is a war that cannot be won, in the sense that we are fighting an insurgent that lives there and draws through a large population base. Like Bush before him, Obama faces a war that he cannot win and one which has no clear objective. He must live with the foolish numbness of his decision to lose a protracted war in a twisted way that he hopes the public will accept. In Afghanistan, we are faced with a war without an end, without any conceivable victory and one can only wonder if Obama, with the disadvantage of already twisted logic, can find a way to declare victory in Afghanistan, just as he did for Iraq. If so, Afghanistan better hope we don’t declare victory, because we appear to do so when the country is decimated into a state of cultural oblivion.

Oh, there is one other thing Obama forgot to tell us about Iraq. Iraq, the seat of civilization once had rich archeological sites and fabulous museums, where their own history was slowly being dug out and put on glorious display. Our invasionary force black topped over many of those sites, as we allowed whole-sale looting of the digs and museums. Our only interest was in surrounding and protecting the oil ministry, where we learned about recent soundings for oil in the unexplored regions of the country. Last week Obama stated that we “defeated a regime that had terrorized its people.” What words should we use to describe a regime that attacked a country, destroyed its social fabric, and did so against a sovereign state that had done nothing against us, except to suffer the fate that they had oil underneath their land. After all this, you might find one of William Blum’s recent postings relevant for the subject.

RFM