Two central pillars supporting the case for war in Iraq long ago fell to pieces. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, not until we dropped our own terrifying array of depleted-uranium weaponry. There was no al-Qaeda movement there, not until we launched the war – thus “achieving bin Laden’s ends,” to borrow the words of former Marine Corps commandant Joseph Hoare.
But one pillar appears untouched: the case for “liberation.” It has been argued that we are fighting to liberate Iraqis. It has also been argued that warring in Iraq prevents terrorists from attacking us. There is a gaping contradiction in these arguments – after all, are we dying to make Iraqis safer, or are Iraqis dying to make us safer? But placing that aside, neither argument of “liberation” stands up to scrutiny even when viewed alone.
When examining whether America has liberated Iraq, it is prudent to consider that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been freed only from their limbs and lives. That is the figure determined by a thorough peer-reviewed study conducted by the British medical journal Lancet last December, indicating the number of innocent Iraqis killed as a result of the war.
One should also consider the fact that, as the UN discovered six months ago, malnutrition levels of children in Iraq are about twice as high as they were before the war – a time when things were already desperately miserable.
Moreover, outside of a tiny sliver of Baghdad, gangs, looters, rapists, mercenaries, and militias prowl the highways, the urban centers, and the hinterlands. Any semblance of real security in Iraq – which even Saddam provided – is nowhere in evidence. The Bush administration recently conceded that, after more than two years, only one – yes, one – battalion of 750 Iraqis is prepared to fight the insurgency. That number is down from an earlier claim of three.
Removing Saddam does not alone constitute liberation, for liberation does not mean removing a man’s headache by chopping off his head. Now that Iraq is on the cusp of civil war, it is possible that it will be “liberated” only from its national existence. And as retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom pointed out when recently advocating immediate American withdrawal, “we can’t prevent a civil war by staying,” since we caused civil war in the first place.
But doesn’t fighting terrorists in Iraq trap them and prevent them from attacking America? This argument makes the bizarre assumption that there exists a finite number of evildoers hiding in hell waiting to pounce. In reality, the war itself creates terrorists. As Lt. Col. Frederick Wellman said recently of insurgents, “When I kill one, I create three.” And, as former senior CIA analyst Michael Scheuer notes, Islamist terrorism “has nothing to do with who we are or what we believe, and everything to do with what we do in the Islamic world” – including illegally invading Muslim countries. Additionally, an April 2005 State Department report chronicled a “significant” rise in terrorist attacks from 2004 compared to 2003, up from 175 to 655.
If anything, the war has only trapped Americans: almost 2,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq while terrorists strike freely in Afghanistan, London, Bali, and Madrid. Clearly, occupying Iraq has not deterred any terrorism at all; it has only encouraged it.
Meanwhile, this war is hurting America on the home front. As the large British daily, The Independent (news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article316682.ece) recently learned, a confidential report commissioned by the Secretary of Defense reveals that the disastrous response to Katrina was directly related to troop shortages. The report’s author, Stephen Henthorne, former professor at the Army War College and deputy director in the Louisiana relief efforts, wrote bluntly in the report, “Failure to plan, and train properly has plagued US efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and now that failure has come home to roost in the United States.”
Thousands of lost American lives, many times that number of Iraqi lives, and billions of dollars later, how can anyone concerned with the fate and honor of the nation fail to demand immediate withdrawal from this senseless quagmire?
Mohammad Junaid Alam Senior 2006 Journalism Major
