Iraq – US imperialism bloodied and humiliated
With the invasion of Iraq on 19 March 2003, the US-led predatory war against Iraq commenced under the code name
‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. Eight years, eight months and twenty five days
later, on 15 December 2011, the Stars and Stripes were lowered in Baghdad to mark the ‘end’ of the war. Leon Panetta, US Defence Secretary, flew in to
witness the flag-lowering ceremony a day after President Barack Obama had
officially declared the withdrawal of the remaining 4,000 US troops – down from a peak of 170,000 in 2007 – from Iraq.
Leaving “with heads
held high”!
Mr Panetta insisted that the war, despite the high
levels of sacrifice and cost, had been worth it.
“After a lot of blood spilt by Iraqis and
Americans, the mission of an Iraq that could govern and secure itself has
become real”, said Mr Panetta lying through his teeth. “To be sure”,
he said, “the cost was high – in blood and treasure for the United States, and for the Iraqi people. Those lives were not lost in vain.”
Held under tight security at Baghdad’s
international airport, the date and timing of the ceremony had been kept secret
so as to prevent the Iraqi resistance from rudely interrupting it with armed
attacks.
Along with Mr Panetta, General Martin Dempsey, the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Lloyd Austin, the Chief US
Commander in Iraq, watched as the flag of the US Forces in Iraq was folded and put away, before its return to the US.
“You will leave with great pride – lasting pride
… secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to cast
tyranny aside and to offer hope for prosperity and peace to the country’s
future generations” said Mr Panetta without even a hint of a sense of guilt
or shame. He added that although the war had been a “source of great
controversy”, the US forces had helped to build “a sovereign, stable and
self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its
people”.
A day earlier (14 December), President Obama
declared the end of the war in Iraq with a speech in which he paid a tribute to
the American armed forces as well as accepted some of the alleged aims of a war
he was opposed to at one time. Addressing the soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he said that it was “harder to end a war than to begin one”,
adding that they were leaving Iraq with their “heads held high”. Iraq, he said, “is not a perfect place”, and the decision to wage the war had been
controversial, with “patriots on both sides of the debate”. However,
continued the president, who during his campaign for the presidency had
characterised the conflict in Iraq as a “dumb war”, “… we are
leaving behind a sovereign stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative
government that was elected by its people”, under the shadow of the guns of
the imperialist occupation forces, he ‘forgot’ to mention.
Yes indeed! So stable and self-reliant, that the
flag-lowering ceremony had to be kept a dead secret, while Mr Panetta had to
fly in and out of Baghdad airport like a thief. So stable and self-reliant
that in November 2011 alone, 200 people were killed and more than 560 injured,
while in early December there was an attack inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified
Green Zone on the eve of a visit by US vice-president Joe Biden. Even the US
State Department has been obliged to admit that there is still more daily
violence in Iraq than in Afghanistan – that is saying something. The
flag-lowering ceremony, held behind blast walls and security checkpoints that
are dotted around Baghdad airport, speaks eloquently and gives the lie to the
assertions of Messrs Obama and Panetta.
Within 24 hours of the ‘end’ of the Iraq war, the
Iraqi capital experience a suicide bombing, a bomb under a car and an
assassination, while the northern town of Tal Afar witnessed two car bombs,
with more shootings and bombings reported in Kirkuk, Mosul and the north of
Basra.
Within a week of the so-called end of the war, on
22 December, Baghdad was the scene of a series of bomb blasts, which left at
least 63 dead and more than 190 wounded. At the same time the bitter
infighting within the camp of puppets, and disintegration of the dispensation
put in place by the US occupation regime, accelerated as Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, called for the arrest of Tariq al-Hashimi, the Iraqi vice-president,
on charges of organising bombings and assassinations. Mr Hashimi, a senior
Sunni, has fled to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, is refusing to surrender, and has in turn charged al-Maliki with an attempt to
monopolise all power. Maliki has also asked parliament to sack Saleh
al-Mutlaq, his Sunni deputy, after the latter likened the prime minister to (no
joke) Saddam Hussein, the late president of Iraq – murdered by the US on 30 December 2006. It is clear that the attempt at reconciliation between the various stooge
factions through a power-sharing government is practically over. All the signs
are that the Maliki government would fall soon, making room for genuine Iraqi
patriots and upholders of Iraqi sovereignty and national interests to come to
the fore. Such patriotic elements are bound to include, though not exclusively
confined to, Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, which has been vehemently
opposed to any continued US presence in Iraq and which stepped up armed attacks
this year. Attacks by other sections of the resistance, mainly led by
Ba’athists, have also been stepped up. It is these two sections which have
forced the US army of occupation out of Iraq with a bloody nose; it is they who
have prevented the Maliki government from accepting the continued presence of
14,000 to 18,000 American troops (as lobbied by General Lloyd Austin) in Iraq
after the ‘end’ of the war under a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA); it is they
who hold the future of a democratic, stable and sovereign Iraq in their hands.
A Predatory War
The US-led war against Iraq had absolutely nothing
to do with the ‘reasons’ proffered by the Bush administration and its chief
accomplice, Tony Blair’s Labour Government in Britain, for the waging of it.
These were mere pretexts for waging a predatory imperialist war against Iraq for the sole purpose of overthrowing a legitimate government, which had incurred the wrath of
imperialism by pursuing economic and foreign policy goals not to the liking of
imperialism – a war for domination of Iraq and grabbing its vast mineral
resources.
For public consumption, however, Anglo-American
imperialism’s rationale for the war continued shifting as each pretext in turn
was demonstrably shown to be a lie. To begin with, it was the alleged
possession by Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which, it was claimed,
presented a danger to the security, not only of the Middle East, but also of
the US and Britain. In parallel, it was also asserted by the US and British governments that the Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein was somehow
connected with al-Qaeda, whom the US blamed for the 9/11 events in New York and Washington. The weapons inspectors – before and after the invasion of Iraq – found no evidence of their existence, not that their presence would have justified war
against Iraq. Likewise, the claim concerning the link between the Iraqi
government and al-Qaeda proved to be groundless – in fact a deliberate fabrication
put out by the White House and Whitehall, to frighten their populations into
acquiescing with this criminal war.
Finally, with no other excuse left, the Bush and
Blair administrations retreated to their last scoundrelly refuge, namely,
ridding the Iraqi people of the allegedly tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein
and bringing in the blessings of democracy, human rights, rule of law and
suchlike guff, to them at gun point.
‘Achievements’ of this
war
Let us cast a brief glance at the ‘achievements’ of
this ‘humanitarian’ war for ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights’. Here
briefly are they:
● 2.35 million Iraqis were killed up to March
2009 as a result of the imperialist occupation of Iraq; since 19 March 2003, Iraq has been the most dangerous country in the world;
● There are 36 prisons in Iraq, other than
Abu Ghraib prison which was, despite its scandalous treatment of detainees,
with torture, sexual humiliation and summary executions practised routinely,
relatively humane as compared with the others; these prisons housed at any
time 400,000 detainees, with the period of detention varying from 3 months to 4
years, with a hundred per cent incidence of torture in all of them;
● In addition to the publicly known prisons,
there are 420 secret centres of detention, notorious for their abuse of human
rights;
● 2,770,000 Iraqis have been internally
displaced consequent upon the occupation, while another 3,000,000 Iraqis have
fled the country – mostly to Syria and Jordan;
● With 3 million widows and 5 million orphans
(of whom 500,000 are homeless), Iraq has been transformed into a country of
widows and orphans;
● Whereas before the war, Iraq had the best
health system in the Middle East, now 90 per cent of its 180 hospitals suffer
from a critical shortage of doctors, equipment and medicines; Iraq needs
100,000 doctors of all specialities, but it has presently only 20,000, leaving
a shortage of 80,000; there are presently 67,000 Aids cases – a disease which
was practically unknown in pre-occupation Iraq; 140,000 Iraqis suffer from
cancer consequent upon exposure to depleted uranium used by the imperialist
armies and burning of chemicals during wholesale bombardment;
● Whereas before the occupation, Iraq’s
education system was the pride of the Middle East, today it is in shambles;
there are presently 5 million illiterate Iraqis in a country that had
eradicated illiteracy by 1980. In an effort to destroy the flower of Iraqi
science and higher education, more than 5,500 academics, scientists,
philosophers, atomic scientists, chemists and physicians, were kidnapped and
detained and many murdered by the occupation regime; a fifth of the academics
killed through targeted assassinations were holders of doctorates;
● Iraq has achieved the dubious reputation of
being the foremost country in killing of journalists, of whom 247 have been
killed and 64 kidnapped during the past 9 years;
●70 per cent of Iraqis have no access to
potable water;
●42 per cent of the demand for electricity
remains unmet, as compared with 15 per cent before the occupation;
● The youth unemployment rate stands at 30
per cent – double the overall national rate;
● 43 per cent of Iraqis live on less than $1
per day;
● Iraq is presently the third most corrupt
country in the world;
● Since the occupation, the position of
minorities has become intolerable, with 1969 Christians, 504 Mendaien and 500
Yazidis murdered and several thousands forced to flee abroad in a systematic
campaign of terror directed against them;
● The smashing of the Iraqi state by
‘humanitarian’ imperialist predators, the wholesale destruction of Iraq’s
institutions, has created a vacuum which has been filled by 550 political
parties and other entities, 11,400 NGOs, 126 security companies, in addition to
the 43 militias attached to political and religious parties, 220 newspapers
financed by foreign powers, as well as 67 radio stations, the majority of which
are financed by the secret services of various foreign countries;
●Whereas before this war, Iraq was a proudly
secular state, in which religious affiliation hardly played any part, where
Shias, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds and Arabs all lived together in harmony, since
the overthrow of president Saddam Hussein’s regime the whole country has been
turned, thanks to the deliberately divisive divide and rule policy of the
occupation regime, into a sectarian hell hole, where different religious
factions, each one with its own militia, engage in endless turf wars for
political power and material gain;
● Whereas before the invasion and occupation,
Iraqi women enjoyed an honourable and relatively equal status with men, since
then they have been subjected to violence, rape, prostitution and increasingly
to obscurantist oppression by the religious establishment.
(Almost all the above bullet points are based on
information in the excellent pamphlet ‘Iraq after seven years of occupation –
facts and figures, issued by the Ikram Centre for Human Rights. Every piece of
information in it relies on impeccable sources. The Centre can be contacted
at Ikraam2006@yahoo.com)
Vile Defence
In view of the forgoing frightening summary of the
cruelty, barbarism and genocide practised by the imperialist occupation regime
over a period of nearly nine years, one can gauge the moral depravity and
degeneration of those who attempt to defend imperialism’s predatory war against
the people of Iraq in the name of some abstract democratic principle completely
divorced from reality. On such degenerate and revoltingly devilish character
in a human frame is a certain Nigel Biggar, Regius professor of moral and
pastoral theology – no less – at the University of Oxford. Writing in the Financial
Times of 11 March 2010, this weighty authority on moral and pastoral
theology says: “The decisive issue in evaluating the Iraq invasion is not whether it was morally flawed or disproportionate or illegal, but
whether it was really necessary to prevent a sufficiently great evil”. He
goes on to say that “Saddam Hussein’s regime was grossly atrocious. In 1988
it used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians [which] amounted to
genocide; and from 1988 to 2003 it murdered at least 400,000 of its own people.
“Critics of the invasion would presumably not
tolerate such a regime in their own backyard, and an effective international
policing authority would have changed it. Is the coalition to be condemned for
filling the vacuum?” (‘Do not be so sure invading Iraq was immoral’)
Even if everyone of the professor’s accusations
against Saddam Hussein’s government was to be founded in fact, which they are
not, it will still not constitute justification – moral or legal – for the
predatory imperialist war which has totally destroyed a wonderful country,
displaced a quarter of its population, killed well over 2 million people, and
plunged the remaining population into a state of utter destitution and misery.
But our professor of moral theology is so lacking in any sense of morality that
he sticks firmly to the mantra, learned by him by rote from his imperialist
masters: Saddam Hussein was an evil man, who had to be removed at any cost. Fiat
justitia, et pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even though the whole
world may perish). Such is the staggering accumulation of corruption and filth
at our most prestigious universities that professorships on moral philosophy
are held by such morally degraded and repulsive creatures as Mr Biggar.
After this sage has spoken thus, can one complain
about the members of the mercenary journalist fraternity, who argue, like ‘our’
professor, along the following lines: “The moral arguments are more finely
balanced than the anti-war movement ever acknowledged. Iraq paid a terrible price for the conflict but it was freed from a vicious regime that was up to
its elbows in blood” (‘Farewell to a dumb war in Iraq’, Gideon Rachman, Financial
Times, 20 December 2011).
So, there you are. Saddam Hussein’s regime was
vicious and immersed in blood, but those who ‘freed’ the Iraqi people (2.35
million of them ‘freed’ from life itself), the imperialist bandits, are squeaky
clean. While pretending to be a dispassionate and disinterested observer of
the horrendous war in Iraq, striking a pose and going through the motions of
balancing the arguments for and against the war in Iraq, Mr Rachman, without
any hesitation and twinge of conscience, firmly comes down in favour of the
‘dumb war’ against the people of Iraq. Obviously without imperialist
brigandage and loot there will be no fat salaries for its ink slingers.
Having referred to the nauseating arguments of the
Biggars and Rachmans of this world, it is truly refreshing to recall the
following words, full of moral indignation at the devastation of Baghdad by
Anglo-American imperialism, written on 22 March 2003 by Brian Reade: “Closer
to home, you wondered how every member of the Labour Cabinet, and every
careerist Labour MP which backed this unethical bombardment, was feeling.
“Hopefully, as the mushroom plumes rose over Baghdad, they saw their life as socialists flash before them. A life lost forever. And I
hope the realisation that they had authorised this outrage made them feel as
repulsed with themselves as most of the rest of us do”
With such passion, candour and courage did Mr Reade
report from Baghdad for the Daily Mirror of 22 March 2003.
Cost to US imperialism
While unleashing death, destruction and devastation
of Nazi proportions on the Iraqi people, US imperialism has emerged from this
war badly mauled and much weakened. Here briefly are the losses of US imperialism:
● 4,500 US soldiers lost their lives in this
war, while another 100,000 were injured (Britain lost 172 soldiers, while
several thousand suffered injuries);
● At its height the war was costing the US treasury $12 billion a month. In their book entitled The Three Trillion Dollar War,
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning economist, and Linda Bilmes, a senior
official during Bill Clinton’s presidency, estimated that the Iraq war, the
most expensive in US history, with the exception of the Second World War, cost
the American taxpayer close to 3 trillion dollars, taking into account the
disability compensation and benefits paid to soldiers airlifted home after
being injured or falling seriously ill; the extra costs to the defence budget;
loss of productive capacity of those killed or wounded; and higher costs
deriving from higher oil prices. Even according to the Joint Economic
Committee of the Congress, in the first five years (up to 19 March 2008) the Iraq war cost $16,900 to an average American family of four – much more by December 2011.
In comparison the British taxpayer spent £6.6 billion in the Iraq war;
● As a result partly at least of this war,
the US trade, fiscal and foreign debt have risen inexorably. Already, writing
in the Financial Times of 18 August 2004, Martin Wolf felt compelled to
write: “Let us be blunt about it. America is now on the comfortable path to
ruin”. America’s economic position has since then become far more
precarious; the near meltdown of the imperialist financial system undermined
the belief in the free market as well as the ability of the governments to
control the destructive powers unleashed by the deepest ever crisis of
overproduction faced by capitalism. It knocked the stuffing out of the Chicago consensus. No longer could imperialist governments and their financial
institutions lecture to the rest of the world about the best way to run their
economies;
● Consequent upon this war, US standing in
the world has plummeted; everywhere – from Europe to the Middle East, Asia and
Latin America – there is a surge of anti-American sentiment; George W Bush had
made the launch of the Iraq war as a supreme test of American military and
political strength, but the actual course of this war has shown the US to be a
colossus with feet of clay;
● While the American prestige and power, in
the Middle East especially, has emerged much reduced, that of Iran has come out
much stronger; by invading Iraq, and overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime, the
US willy-nilly empowered Iran by removing from the scene Iran’s most formidable
rival in the region; Iran maintains very close relations with the Iraqi
government as well as with Moqtada al-Sadr. On Sunday, 2 March 2008,
Ahmadi-Nejad, the Iranian president, became the first head of state to visit Iraq since the 2003 US invasion – almost in a symbolic show of defiance. While there, Ahmadi-Nejad
blamed the fragile security on the “occupation forces” seeking
justification for a long-term presence in Iraq. What is more, his visit was
open and announced in advance, as opposed to the clandestine visits of the
spokesmen of Anglo-American imperialism. Serious observers of the Middle East
scene are of the view that the failure of the US administration to persuade
the Iraqi government to allow several thousand troops to stay in Iraq after the
‘end’ of the war is largely attributable to the pressure exercised against such
an outcome by Iran through the Iraqi government as well as Sadr;
● The predatory war in Iraq also gave a spur to quite a few countries to at least consider the question of developing their
own nuclear weapons, for they realised that Iraq would hardly have been
attacked had it possessed nuclear weapons. That is precisely what the DPRK has
done. If more countries follow that path, it deprives US imperialism of the power to intimidate them with the threat of use of nuclear weapons. It is
precisely the realisation of such a scenario that is causing the US to take such a hostile stance towards Iran, which has a nuclear programme of its own, albeit for
peaceful purposes;
● Last, but not least, while the US has been
busy waging wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya recently,
almost unnoticed as it were, China has been steaming ahead with its industrial
development, strengthening its economy and defence capability, and into the
bargain become the largest manufacturer in the world and America’s major
creditor. Belatedly realising the challenge that China’s rise poses to the
US’s global hegemony, for no other reason than that China exists as a powerful
country, US imperialists has been lately busy with its hostile attempts to
organise an anti-China coalition in the Asia Pacific region (see elsewhere in
this issue);
Conclusion
For all the horrors inflicted by imperialism on the
Iraqi people, it must be said in the latter’s honour that they gave a fitting
rebuff to arrogant predatory imperialist forces. Nothing epitomises the
indomitable courage, the self-sacrificing heroism and revolutionary
perseverance of the Iraqi people, more than the battle for the City of Fallujah in November/December 2004, a battle during which imperialist forces were
attempting to stuff democracy into the city by the simple medium of
obliterating it. For more than two months, the mightiest military machine in
the world was unable to overwhelm a small force of urban guerrilla fighters
armed with no more than RPGs, IEDs AK47s and a few shoulder-held missiles.
Instead of capturing the city, the Americans were confronted with an opposition
that broke the back of their assault. Instead of “breaking bone by bone”
and breaking the backbone of the resistance, it was the resistance that managed
to smash the assault.
The battle of Fallujah and the battles in the rest
of Iraq since April 2003 have proved to be a gigantic successful experiment in
asymmetrical warfare, truly a turning point in warfare as practised by the
Americans, that is, the application of overwhelming force to achieve victory.
What the Iraqi resistance lacked in equipment, it more than made up for through
ingenious intelligence, a burning hatred for the aggressors, an ardent
patriotism and a passionate belief in the justness of its cause. The war in
Iraq has given demonstrable proof that a mighty imperialist power is powerless
in the face of determined resistance by people waging a people’s war, that in
the final analysis it is people, and people alone, not weaponry, that determine
the outcome of the kind of war which has been taking place in Iraq since march
2003.
Despite, or perhaps because of, it vilest
interests, imperialism through its predatory war has aroused the people of
Iraq, and beyond, to rise up in defence of their sovereignty and fight for
their liberation; it has acted as the “unconscious tool of history” in
bringing about a revolutionary change in the consciousness of the people of
Iraq and the wider Middle East.
The Iraqi people have given the imperialist
predatory armies a bloody nose and forced them to withdraw almost all their
forces. Almost all, because the Americans are leaving by way of ‘embassy
staff’ 16,000 people, of whom 5,000 are security personnel, for their embassy
(the largest diplomatic mission anywhere built at a cost of $1 billion) and a
700,000 strong puppet army trained and equipped by them. Several thousand US soldiers have simply been transferred across the border to Kuwait ready to return to Iraq at a moment’s notice. If the 170,000 American army in Iraq could not overpower and
crush the Iraqi resistance, neither will the ‘embassy’ personnel nor the puppet
army be a match for the resistance.
The US is withdrawing almost all its forces from Iraq much humiliated and much weakened. This being the case, for all the suffering,
torture and misery inflicted on the Iraqi people, for all the death and
destruction rained upon them by the imperialist bandits, progressive humanity
has the right, “in point of history”, to be satisfied with the result
and exclaim with Goethe:
“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”
(cited in Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, 10 June 1853).