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September 1, 2010
The United States has announced that it is ending combat operations in Iraq. Obama is delivering on a campaign promise to wind down America's involvement in Iraq. That war was based on lies about the threat from weapons of mass destruction. The result was rendition, arbitrary detention and torture and catastrophe in Iraq.
So what was achieved by the neo-con invasion of Iraq that has cost the US around $700 billion or more, and resulted in the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, 2 million internally displaced Iraqis, more than 4,500 coalition deaths, a dysfunctional Iraqi government, few basic services such as electricity and water, and bombed out urban centres?
Juan Cole says:
How many Iraqis were killed in all this violence is controversial. It should be remembered that hundreds of thousands also died because of dirty water and lack of medical care, since many physicians and nurses fled the constant clashes. Surely the total death toll attributable to the US invasion and occupation, and the Iraqi reaction to them, is in the hundreds of thousands. Millions have been wounded. Some 4 million Iraqis were displaced, some 2.7 million of them inside the country, and most remain homeless. Iraq is a country of widows and orphans, of the unemployed and the displaced.
Iraq is not stable or democratic and its survival as a united and functioning state is now in question with the total US military withdrawal from the country by the end of 2011.
What was the purpose of the war when Iraq did not pose security threat to the US to justify an Anglo-American invasion that flattened the country and dismantled its entire political order?
In the New York Times the former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz says the US should stay in Iraq just like it did in Korea to ensure that Iraq us a stable country. Who is going to be contained by a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq? Containing a nuclear Iran?
The threat to regional security has more to do with the prospect of the prospect of a nuclearized Iran and the possibility of Israel endeavouring to stop Iran before it goes nuclear by a strike designed to cripple the Iranian nuclear program. This would involve bombing the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program.
Update
Obama professes to believe that he can “turn the page” on history. In the shadow of two towers, the United States declared a new kind of global war, a war that it has been fighting for nine years with little end in sight. The pages of American history indicate that war is now the American way. Whilst Obama tries to extricate the US from the war in Iraq the guns blazing in a war in Afghanistan. Presumably “combat operations” in Iraq become “stability operations” in an enduring war in which the main danger to the US is “terrorism.”
There is no talk in Washington of closing the hundreds and hundreds of bases, large and small, that the US garrisons around the world? No one is saying that the US should dismantle its empire and came home. There is no debate about what would happen to the US if it were no longer the "sole superpower" or the world's self-appointed policeman. These are the kind of questions being asked by Chalmers Johnson in his Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope (American Empire Project)
America's official "century" of being top dog (1945-2045? ) is coming to an end. Whether the US dismantles its empire or not, China will become the world's next superpower.
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Barton Gellman, a staff writer for the Washington Post, writing soon after the 1991 conflict, observed that: “Some targets, especially later in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself.” Gellman quoted Colonel John A Warden, deputy director of Air Force strategy, doctrine and plans: “One purpose of destroying Iraq’s electrical grid was that you have imposed a long-term problem on the leadership that it has to deal with sometime.” Gellman added: “It gives us long-term leverage.”
Former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, Denis Halliday, who resigned from the position in disgust in 1998, contends that epidemics of cholera, dysentery and hepatitis that have plagued Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War were the direct result of the US deliberately targeting Iraq’s infrastructure. He cites a recently released declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency document from the start of the conflict, pointing out Iraq’s vulnerable water situation. The document predicted that the shortage of pure drinking water resulting from the bombing of infrastructure could “lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease”.
“I think there’s no doubt whatsoever that the Americans had worked out the vulnerability of Iraq in terms of clean fresh water,” Halliday said. “So they set about destroying electrical power capacity, which is essential, of course, for the treatment and distribution of water.”
Halliday estimated that by 1999 the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and UN sanctions had directly caused the deaths of 600,000 children and 500,000 adults through malnutrition and disease....
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The welfare and safety of the Iraqi people was NEVER the primary motivation!