The war on Iraq has been a spectacular failure: in a stampede of dishonesty and duplicity led by neoconservative ideologues, thousands of lives have been trampled on and snuffed out.
Non-existent weapons of mass destruction and discredited links between Saddam and September 11, played up incessantly by administration officials and the corporate media early on, have been proven utterly false.
Hans Blix said, “I’m certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed almost all of what they had in the summer of 1991.”
Even American-assigned weapons hunter David Kay was forced to admit he has found no weapons whatsoever. President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld also recently admitted Saddam Hussein played no role in September 11. It is a dark and ominous sign, then, that almost 70 percent of Americans believed Hussein was behind September 11: a mix of societal racism and media sensationalism, perhaps?
Additionally, a recent Pentagon study has revealed that the rosy “intelligence” information fed to them by Pentagon favorite (and indicted bank embezzler) Ahmed Chalabi was useless. This Pentagon puppet, once appointed to run post-war Iraq, is totally out of the picture.
Business opportunities for reconstruction have been doled out to cronies of the Bush administration, including Bechtel and Brown ‘ Root. Power across the country is intermittent and unreliable, with Iraqi technicians cut out of the loop by American-hired firms, and the entire country’s non-oil assets have been put up for sale via privatization with no democratic process.
In “free” Iraq, the hand-picked Iraqi governing council has suspended two prominent Arab news stations and barricaded itself behind a 20-foot wall. One of its members was recently shot dead. Security inside Baghdad, not to speak of major oil and transportation lines, is unreliable to non-existent. Meanwhile the U.S. civilian overseer of occupation, Paul Bremer, remains Alice in Wonderland, swaggering about in his boots, ensconced in one of Hussein’s former palaces, equipped with the only cell phone access permitted in the entire country — courtesy of MCI.
Outrageous incidents occur daily, including the following, reported by the Toronto Sun, Sept. 28: “A little Iraqi girl … squatted beside the road with tears of humiliation streaming down her cheeks. Six meters away, three American soldiers had their rifles aimed at her as she was forced to relieve herself in full view of a long line of parked cars.”
The Bush administration continues its mindless crusade, raising all kinds of desperate rhetoric to avoid concrete reality. The Iraqis did not welcome invasion as “liberation” and armed resistance is extensive, popular and increasingly more bold and organized. Even General Ricardo Sanchez conceded to the New York Times Oct. 2, “The enemy has evolved, a little bit more lethal, a little more complex, a little more sophisticated.”
As American schools, health care, and jobs crumble, another $87 billion (twice the Homeland Security budget) will be thrown into the Iraqi cesspool – including $9 million for ZIP codes and $19 million for wireless internet. Such misplaced priorities reflect the overall madness of our expensive colonial adventure in the Middle East. For our sake, we should get out now.
-M. Junaid Alam is a middler political science major.
