Iraq After Three Years
This Sunday, it will be three years since the United States launched its unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq. The anniversary will be commemorated, as have been the last two, by worldwide protests. Of particular note are decentralized marches across the United States and protests in Iraq itself.
Anniversaries are always a good time to sum up.
The war was not initially justified as liberation or humanitarian intervention. Initially it was about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s supposed links with al-Qaeda. Of course, the claims about WMD were a pastiche of lies and distortions. Their best evidence for the connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda was obtained from an al-Qaeda member who was repeatedly tortured until he made up a link to placate his torturers. Even in the Middle Ages, confessions obtained by torture were not considered to be evidence.
Still, after those lies and excuses faded, the most persistent theme for three years now has been about the invasion of Iraq as liberation and the occupation of Iraq as an attempt to help the Iraqi people and build democracy.
Judged on those criteria, there is virtually nothing good to say about the whole enterprise. Before the invasion, Iraqis were suffering under the twin oppressions of Saddam’s despotic rule and a system of comprehensive international sanctions. Iraq had never been able to recover from the massive destruction of infrastructure deliberately carried out by the United States in the first Gulf War. Nothing should have been easier than improving the humanitarian situation; absent positive malevolence toward the people of Iraq, the least you would expect would be some improvement in conditions.
Instead, shockingly, even by the most basic index, gross mortality, Iraqis are actually worse off. Infant mortality has doubled, crime has skyrocketed, and of course Iraqis have been killed wholesale by American and Islamist extremist terrorism. A survey done by American researchers at Johns Hopkins and Columbia and Iraqi researchers at Mustansiriyyah estimated that, in the first 18 months, excess Iraqi mortality, compared with respect to conditions in 2002, amounted to 100,000 dead. Other studies since have tended to confirm that figure roughly; some suggest the number was higher. Since this survey was done before the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, before the spate of suicide bombing attacks last year that probably claimed 6000 lives, and before the explosion of violence by government-affiliated death squads, it is very reasonable now, 36 months into the conflict, to double that number.
This 200,000 comes upon the heels of the hecatombs of the 1990’s, that claimed over 1 million lives, with U.S. involvement.
Iraq is on the verge of open sectarian war. Although conflicts between Kurds and Arabs have been a major problem throughout Iraq’s history and although Sunni-Shi’a inequalities and tensions have also been significant (reaching their worst heights during the 1991 uprising), never has Iraq been in a situation where ordinary people are killing people simply because of their sectarian identity. Although there was mass violence along sectarian lines on a few occasions, it was always through the medium of the despotic state. This can be blamed, in roughly equal measure, on the United States and on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Salafi extremists.
Although the United States was forced, against its attempts to delay, to agree to a timetable for elections and although the elections, despite attempts by the United States to interfere and influence them, were reasonably fair, they have created a government that is almost entirely unresponsive to the people and has one of the worst human rights records in the world.
It would have been too much to expect the United States to bring decent politics to Iraq; after all, it would be nice to see decent politics in this country. But the least you might have expected is that this high-tech, economic superpower could have rebuilt Iraq’s infrastructure. Instead, the United States will be leaving Iraq with fewer hours of electricity per day than it had before the war; before the war, 30% of Iraqis had access to clean water, now it is 22. And things won’t get better, because the reconstruction money, so much of it spent on private mercenaries and corporate profits, has run out and the United States is abandoning near-completed projects and letting them rot.
The Iraqi people never asked to be “liberated.” Other people praying for an end to their despotic regimes must have added a new prayer in the last three years – “Please, God, let us not be liberated by the United States.”
Rahul Mahajan |
