Daily Times

There is rarely a day when Iraq is free of brutal violence. Much of the time it is sectarian in nature between the Sunnis and Shias but others too are not spared, like the country’s fast depleting Christian minority. It gets even more complicated with al Qaeda-inspired/affiliated groups committed towards creating an Islamic haven of sorts, to include neighbouring countries and, if possible, the entire Muslim world.

Iraq’s tragedy, though, began when the then US president, George Bush, and his coterie decided to club Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with Afghanistan, as the centre of global terrorism. To make Iraq look even more sinister, a case was made that it had weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, etc), which posed a threat to the region as these weapons could be passed on to the terrorists to cause mayhem. In other words, terrorism and Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (that were never found) became enmeshed into one huge ‘imminent’ threat requiring urgent action. Its urgency was thought self-evident with a dangerous tyrant like Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq. It was considered best to deal with it as part of the ‘global war on terror’, starting with the invasion of Afghanistan where the al Qaeda leadership, responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, was sheltering. In any case, it was necessary to make an example of another regional country, and who could be a better candidate than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Bush had said he had tried to kill his father after the first Gulf War under Bush senior. Besides, as Rumsfeld reportedly said, the US military would soon run out of targets within Afghanistan.

However, still a case needed to be made about Saddam’s terrorism connection and Bush wanted it done immediately after the September 11 attacks in the US. As Richard Clarke, Bush’s counterterrorism adviser, reportedly recalled, the president got hold of a few of us, and said, “…I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.” Clarke said that when we told the president that it was al Qaeda’s doing and “…we have looked several times…and not found any real linkages to Iraq,” Bush said testily, “Look into Iraq, Saddam [linkage].” What this says is that Bush’s mind appeared to have been already made up, with advice from his close coterie, to use the September 11 events to nail down Saddam and get rid of him. In the process, it was to restore and re-establish US supremacy in the region and, indeed, to reorder the Middle East’s geopolitical map.

This was supposed to bring about democracy in Iraq on the back of US tanks rolling through the country. At the same time, this was not supposed to cost the US much because Iraq would be re-built with its oil wealth, with contracts awarded to American companies. Indeed, if anything, the US might come out a winner, both politically and economically. Besides, such a display of “shock and awe” would be a salutary lesson to other countries in the Middle East to do as they are told. And this would further secure Israel.

Even though the September 11 tragedy shook the US psychologically, being the first attack of its kind on US soil, the proponents of realpolitik, like Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, (and then prime minister Tony Blair in the UK) seemed to see in it an opportunity to not only reset US (western) dominance in the Middle East but to develop a new theory and practice of ‘benevolent imperialism’ to restore order anywhere in the world where it was deemed to be broken. The US conservatives around Bush believed that in realpolitik terms, the US had wasted its status as the world’s only superpower for nearly a decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld, with Cheney as US vice-president virtually behaving like the president, were set to overhaul the US military doctrine by enshrining the principle of ‘pre-emptive strike’, thus enabling them to militarily intervene anywhere and everywhere they considered fit. Iraq, apart from Afghanistan where the case for military invasion was thought self-evident, was the testing ground for the new US doctrine.

As we know, things did not work out as they were meant to, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the latter, the mechanics of a small residual US military presence has still not been worked out for after the scheduled US withdrawal from Afghanistan by end 2014. In Iraq, things are getting worse by the day and there is no knowing if and when this Pandora’s box, so rudely opened by the US with its military invasion of Iraq, will be closed again. Mark Danner, while reviewing some books, including Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, in the New York Review of Books, makes a stinging critique of the Iraq invasion. He writes, “Under Saddam, Iraq had been devoid of Islamic jihadists; it took the US occupation to make of Iraq a breeding ground for jihadists and a laboratory for developing and honing their techniques of asymmetric warfare: the car bombs, kidnappings, improvised explosive devices and other ruthless tactics in a cheap and effective ‘toolbox’ that has been employed with considerable success from Afghanistan to Yemen to Mali.” Now, we see this in Syria with the al Qaeda-inspired Islamic state of Iraq and Syria operating there as probably the biggest insurgent group in that country, as well as in Iraq with violence rocking Anbar province.

What a terrible indictment of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 with its ramifications being felt not only in Iraq, with more than 8,000 people dead in 2013 alone, but in an arch of al Qaeda-inspired insurgency from North Africa to much of the Middle East!

Barack Obama, Bush’s successor, was supposed to be different. He did withdraw US troops from Iraq by end 2011 but the mess created by the US military invasion has created its own momentum of continuing and aggravated violence with people being blown up here and there. Though Obama toned down Bush’s rhetoric of the “global war on terror”, replacing it with the new term “overseas contingency operation” after coming to power in 2009, this does not reflect any substantive change with the exception of the increasing use of drones to hunt down terrorists and civilians alike.

Besides, as Mark Danner quotes Rumsfeld’s remarks to Errol Morris, director of the film The Unknown Known, “Barack Obama opposed most of the structures that President George W Bush put in place: Guantanamo Bay, the concept of indefinite detention, the Patriot Act, military commissions.” He adds cryptically, “Here we are, years later, and they are still here.” In other words, the mess continues and the Iraqi people — and people elsewhere in the region — caught in its dragnet, are paying the price.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at sushilpseth@yahoo.co.au