Iraq Is About to Become a Lot Worse
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on August 7, 2007, Printed on August 7, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58944/
The war in Iraq is about to get worse — much worse. The Democrats’
decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash
their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger
forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security
of the Green Zone,
our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control
will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and
defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in
fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to
American interests.
Iraq no longer exists as a unified country.
The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and
antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire
by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I, belongs to the
history books. It will never come back. The Kurds have set up a de
facto state in the north, the Shiites control most of the south and the
center of the country is a battleground.
There are 2 million
Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced. Another
2 million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now
has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth.
An Oxfam report estimates that one in three Iraqis are in need of
emergency aid, but the chaos and violence is so widespread that
assistance is impossible. Iraq is in a state of anarchy. The American
occupation forces are one more source of terror tossed into the caldron
of suicide bombings, mercenary armies, militias, massive explosions,
ambushes, kidnappings and mass executions. But wait until we leave.
(…)
There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States — people
who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak
Arabic. At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more
than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea. And I include all
the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence
community. Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this
would not work. The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation. The war
was doomed, period. It never had a chance. And even a cursory knowledge
of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.
(…)
he occupation of Iraq, along with the Afghanistan occupation, has
only furthered the spread of failed states and increased
authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and anarchy. It has
swelled the ranks of our real enemies — the Islamic terrorists — and
opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate and plot against
us. It has scuttled the art of diplomacy. It has left us an outlaw
state intent on creating more outlaw states. It has empowered Iran, as
well as Russia and China, which sit on the sidelines gleefully watching
our self-immolation. This is what George W. Bush and all those
“reluctant hawks” who supported him have bequeathed us.
What is
terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists of the
Iraq war have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” His latest book is “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
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