Iraq and Ruin

The mess in Iraq just keeps getting messier. And it doesn’t seem to matter how many speeches the various politicians in Washington give out in support of what it is we are supposed to be doing there. Car bombings, assassinations, and clashes with insurgents  keep occurring at their leisurely and deadly  pace quite independently of U.S. political rhetoric.   

While we are probably not getting the complete picture of what’s happening in Iraq, here are five concrete examples of Iraqi messiness that are the direct result of Mr Bush’s exercise in military adventurism.

1. Former U. S. hand-picked puppet Ahmad Chalabi found himself at the receiving end of a raid by U. S. forces and Iraqi police the other day. Apparently Mr Chalabi has done something wrong. What it is, isn’t quite clear. But it’s bad news for the administration; Chalabi was Washington’s hand-picked man sent out to lead Iraq in the post-Saddam era. But it’s good news for Chalabi who wants to distance himself from the U. S. Mr Chalabi put on a show for the cameras telling everyone how outraged he was. He then launched into a diatribe against the U.S. This is a pretty good tactic by Mr Chalabi. This way he isn’t as apt to get himself machine-gunned or car-bombed as was the fate of a couple of his colleagues. Getting too close to Americans is a good way for an Iraqi to wind up dead. Of course, the very idea of trying to handpick an Iraqi leader unknown to most Iraqis was foolishness supreme. But this is just another example of the blindness and ignorance of the neocons in the Bush administration. If they knew any history, they’d have realized that this same sort of thing was tried by the British when they controlled Iraq in the 1920s. But being neocons, they believed their own propaganda as well as their own infallibility and decided to use an Iraqi exile as an American puppet to run a post-Saddam Iraq. Bad choice, but at least Mr Chalabi won’t receiving any more of that monthly subsidy of $400,000 a month we were paying just to be our man in Iraq.

2. The U.S. attack the other day on a wedding party at Qa'im, a remote area, on the Iraqi side of the Syrian border, along the Euphrates River. It’s estimated that 40 people were killed. It’s possible that the revelers were also operating some kind of terrorist arms depot, but that fact (if true) sure won’t do much get Iraqi support for the American occupation. Hearts and minds in the Islamic world will not be moved by such exercises of American military might;--excepting, of course, the terrorists, who will be moved in the direction of trying to kill as many Americans as possible. Those AP photos showing graves being dug at the site of the attack won’t help the U.S. much either.

3. The endless casualty reports. Casualties are to be expected in war, but it is not generally expected that casualties will still be occurring after the country you have made war against is now completely occupied. It has been about a year now, since Mr Bush declared victory in Iraq, yet deadly fighting as well as car-bombings and assassinations continue. The Iraqis, quite reasonably, are not happy with foreign occupation and those most unhappy about it are willing to engage in guerrilla war for as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq. American soldiers are being killed at the rate of several a day. The number of those wounded so far is about 20,000. And no one can say if there is any light at the end of the tunnel and if there is, when will the U. S. reach it.

4. The Abu Ghraib prison abuse story. The horrific pictures just keep coming. The pictures are like the casualties; there doesn’t seem to be any end to them. And each new photo is worse than the previous one. In fact, they are so horrific that it is difficult to look at them. They depict torture, pure and simple. They do not depict mere prisoner “abuse” as sometimes occurs in any kind of prison environment. At Abu Ghraib prisoners are being actively tortured, and not only that, it looks like the torturers are enjoying what they are doing. There doesn’t appear to have been much military discipline in the prison in any event. Investigations are ongoing, but they are doing little to counteract the damage the U.S. is suffering in the Islamic world.

5. The sense of panic in the Bush administration. Public support for the war (you can’t really call it an occupation), continues to decline. Mr Bush’s poll numbers are down. Even Republicans are having second thoughts about the wisdom of invading Iraq. The original reasons for going into Iraq seem less and less valid with every passing day. Saddam is in U.S. custody, yet no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Despite the daily combat, the assassinations and the car-bombings, the die-hard neocons are holding on to their pipe-dream of remaking Iraq into some kind of Jeffersonian democracy. Mr Bush bought into that dream some time ago and now has to take the consequences of that action. The neocons simply cannot accept the possibility that they could be wrong in any profound sense. So the war goes right along with no end in sight.
 

Mr Bush’s speech last night showed that he is as clueless now about Iraq, as he and his neocon advisors have been all along.

It simply never occurs to anyone them  that the Iraqis might not want democracy as we in the West understand it. It simply never occurs to them that the Iraqis will probably resist any sort of government or governmental system imposed on them by an occupying power.

Punditwalla--