[THS] !! Simon Jenkins: A trillion-dollar catastrophe

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/31/trillion-dollar-catastrophe-iraq-war


A trillion-dollar catastrophe. Yes, Iraq was a headline war

Mission accomplished? The Iraq war did more than anything to alienate the Atlantic
powers from the rest of the world

          o Simon Jenkins
          o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 August 2010 20.00 BST

Today the Iraq war was declared over by Barack Obama. As his troops return home,
Iraqis are marginally freer than in 2003, and considerably less secure. Two million
remain abroad as refugees from seven years of anarchy, with another 2 million
internally displaced. Ironically, almost all Iraqi Christians have had to flee. Under
western rule, production of oil – Iraq's staple product – is still below its pre-invasion
level, and homes enjoy fewer hours of electricity. This is dreadful.

Some 100,000 civilians are estimated to have lost their lives from occupation-related
violence. The country has no stable government, minimal reconstruction, and daily
deaths and kidnappings. Endemic corruption is fuelled by unaudited aid. Increasing
Islamist rule leaves most women less, not more, liberated. All this is the result of a
mind-boggling $751bn of US expenditure, surely the worst value for money in the
history of modern diplomacy.

Most failed "liberal" interventions since the second world war at least started with
good intentions. Vietnam was to defend a non-communist nation against Chinese
expansionism. Lebanon was to protect a pluralist country from a grasping neighbour.
Somalia was to repair a failed state.

In Iraq the casus belli was a lie, perpetrated by George Bush and his meek
amanuensis, Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein was accused of association with 9/11, and
of plotting further attacks with long-range weapons of "mass destruction". Since this
was revealed as untrue, the fallback deployed by apologists for Bush and Blair is that
Saddam was a bad man and so toppling him was good.

The proper way to assess any war is not some crude "before and after" statistic, but
to conjecture the consequence of it not taking place. Anti-Iraq hysteria began in 1998
with Bill Clinton's Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing of Iraq's military and
civilian infrastructure, to punish Saddam for inhibiting UN weapons inspectors. To
most of the world, it was to deflect attention from Clinton's Lewinsky affair.

Most independent analysis believed that Iraq had ceased any serious nuclear
ambitions at the end of the first Iraq war in 1991, a view confirmed by investigators
since 2003. Even so, Desert Fox was claimed to have "successfully degraded Iraq's
ability to manufacture and use weapons of mass destruction". Whether or not this
was true, there was no evidence that such an ability had recovered by 2003. Among
other things, the Iraq affair was an intelligence debacle.

Meanwhile, the west's sanctions made Iraq a siege economy, eradicating its middle
class and elevating Saddam to sixth richest ruler in the world, though he faced
regular plots against his person. Western hostility may have shored him up, but
opposition would have eventually delivered a coup, from the army or Shia militants
backed by Iran.

Even had that not happened soon, Iraq was a nasty but stable secular state that no
longer posed a serious threat even to its neighbours. It was contained by a no-fly
zone that had rendered the oppressed Kurds de facto autonomy. It was not
appreciably worse than Assad's Ba'athist Syria, and its oil production and energy
supplies were improving, not deteriorating as now.

The Chilcot inquiry has been swamped with stories of the American-British occupation
on a par with William the Conqueror's "harrying of the north". That any 21st-century
bureaucracy could behave with such cruel and bloodthirsty incompetence beggars
belief. The truth is it was blinded by a conviction in its neo-imperial omnipotence.
However much we delude ourselves, the west is still run by leaders, especially
generals, drenched in the glory of past triumphs: leaders who refuse to believe that
other nations have a right to order their own affairs. The awfulness of Iraq in 2003
was not so grotesque as to be our business – even had we been able to build the
pro-western, pro-Israeli, secular, capitalist utopia of neocon fantasy.

Germany, France, Russia and Japan did not go near this war. They did not believe
the lies about Saddam's armoury and did not see any duty to liberate the Iraqi
people from oppression. In his other-worldly performance before Chilcot, Blair offered
only a glazed belief that he was revelling as a latter-day Richard the Lionheart.

All wars wander from their plan, since all armies are good at landings but bad at
breakouts, and dreadful at occupations – known to every military manual long before
Iraq. The truth is that this was always to be a headline war, fuelled by a desire to see
what Bush celebrated as "mission accomplished" just when a nervous Pentagon was
murmuring: "We don't do nation-building." It was a political invasion, not to win a
battle or occupy territory but to score a point against Islamist militancy. That it meant
toppling one of Asia's few secular regimes was another of its hypocrisies.

The overriding lesson of Iraq comes from that dejected goddess, humility. The
dropping of thousands of bombs, the loss of 4,000 western troops and the spending
of almost a trillion dollars still cannot overcome the AK-47, the roadside explosive
device, the suicide bomber, and an aversion to occupation. Nations with different
cultures cannot be ruled by seven years of soldiering. Bush and Blair thought
otherwise.

The Iraq war will be seen by history as a catastrophe that did more than anything
else to alienate Atlantic powers from the rest of the world and disqualify them as
global policemen. It was a wild overreaction by a paranoid, overmilitarised American
state to a single spectacular, but inconsequential, act of terrorism on 9/11. As such it
illustrated how little international relations have advanced since the shooting of
Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Its exponents are still blinded by incident.

All the UN's pomp cannot stop such incidents running amok. The UN is powerless in
the face of glory-seeking statesmen, goaded by military-industrial interests of
unprecedented potency. We might think that after history's mightiest lesson book –
the 20th century – the west would be proof against repeating such idiocy. Yet when
challenged to show prudence and maturity in response to terror, it plays the
terrorist's game. It exploits the politics of fear.

The west is leaving Iraq in a pool of blood, dust and dollars. It remains wedded to
Iraq's twin sister in folly, Afghanistan.