Intervention ends with scarcely a whimper
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - When the United States formally ended its eight-and-a-half year
military adventure in Iraq on Thursday with a flag-lowering ceremony presided
over by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta Baghdad, hardly anyone here seemed to
notice, let alone mark the occasion in a special manner.
Similarly, earlier this week, when US President Barack Obama hosted Iraqi Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki at the White House to discuss - apparently rather
inconclusively - the future strategic relationship between the two countries,
hardly anyone paid attention.
The surprising lack of interest could be explained by the distractions of the
holiday season, the Republican presidential
race or the health of the global and US economies.
It could also be due to the fact that people are all too aware that, even as
the last 4,000 US combat troops in Iraq head for home over the next week to 10
days, Washington still has more than 90,000 troops based in Afghanistan.
That situation, in the public mind, is not all that different than Iraq,
particularly because former president George W Bush depicted them both as part
of the "global war on terror", or, as some of his more extreme neo-conservative
cheerleaders described it in their typically apocalyptic hyperbole, "World War
IV".
Or perhaps people here would just as soon forget as a bad dream what the former
head of the National Security Agency, the late Lieutenant General William Odom,
called in 2005 - just two-and-a-half years after the US invasion - "the
greatest strategic disaster in United States history".
The reversal of public opinion
Within days of the March 20, 2003, launch of Washington's "shock and awe"
military campaign, some 70% of the public told pollsters they supported the war
and thought it was "the right thing to do" against about 25% who said the US
should have stayed out.
Eight-and-a-half years later, those numbers are virtually reversed: in a poll
conducted last month by CNN, 68% of respondents said they opposed the US war in
Iraq, while only 29% said they favored it.
In a CBS New poll also conducted last month, 67% of respondents assessed the
Iraq war as "not worth the loss of American lives and other costs" incurred.
Only 24%, including a plurality of Republicans, disagreed - eloquent testimony
indeed to the deep disillusionment most citizens feel about a war whose costs
its initiators utterly failed to anticipate, let alone prepare for.
On the US side of the ledger, the costs have been staggering: nearly 4,500
soldiers killed, with tens of thousands more wounded, in many ways including
severe brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorders that haunt and
disable their victims for the rest of their lives.
The war's official price tag of approximately one trillion dollars over the
eight years ignores the far greater indirect costs.
Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, has estimated total
costs of the Iraq war on the US economy, including the costs of health care for
veterans, at more than three trillion dollars, a significant amount given the
difficult economic straits in which this country finds itself.
In addition, the US suffered an immeasurable loss in international credibility.
The stated justifications for going to war - Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda,
weapons of mass destruction, a rapidly developing nuclear weapons program -
proved utterly unfounded, while the mightiest, highest-tech war machine in
history failed to suppress a variety of rag-tag insurgencies.
Greater losses for Iraqis
Material US losses pale when compared to those of the Iraqis - estimated at
well over 100,000 dead, and countless others, including hundreds of thousands
of children, injured or traumatized by their experiences.
Nor can the social costs also be ignored: the United Nations has estimated the
number of people who have fled their homes since the invasion at nearly five
million, roughly equally divided between internally displaced persons within
Iraq and refugees who have fled to neighboring countries, including much of
Iraq's previously thriving Christian community, or beyond.
Moreover, the still-smoldering embers of sectarian violence between the
Shi'ite-led government forces and militias and their Sunni rivals, as well as
unresolved tensions between the Kurdish population in the north and Arabs over
territorial claims in and around Kirkuk have not just reconfigured the
country's demography and politics. They also remain largely unresolved and
therefore potential sources of major future conflict, even civil war.
The "surge" of an additional 33,000 US troops into Iraq in 2007 and 2008 and
the adoption of a counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy helped pull the
Sunni-Shi'ite conflict back from the brink of all-out civil war.
But it also fell far short of its political goal of bringing about the
"national reconciliation" between all of the contending parties that the
surge's neo-conservative and COIN champions had defined as its strategic goal.
An uncertain future
What the remarkably few stories that have reviewed the situation in Iraq during
this farewell period appear to agree on is that sectarian tensions are once
again on the rise, especially in the wake of sweeping roundups of Sunni leaders
associated with the US-backed "awakening" movement that was so critical to the
surge's success.
The apparent fragility of the peace on both the Shi'ite-Sunni and Kurdish-Arab
fronts and the possibility of renewed civil war - or enhanced Iranian influence
- has been the focus of attack by critics of Obama's decision to withdraw all
US combat forces by the end of this month.
Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, as well as
neo-conservatives, notably Fred Kagan, and other hawks, such as former United
Nations ambassador John Bolton, have complained bitterly over the past week.
They say that Obama failed to follow his commanders' advice to exert strong
pressure on Maliki to agree to retain at least 14,000 US troops in Iraq to
continue acting as a buffer between Kurds and Arabs in the north, maintain
pressure on the government for "national reconciliation", curb Iranian
influence and ensure that threats from a possibly resurgent al-Qaeda in Iraq
would be dealt with swiftly.
That plan was rejected when the Iraqis refused to grant any remaining troops
legal immunity from Iraqi prosecution.
Skepticism about Iraq's future stability is remarkably high, according to a NBC
News/Wall Street Journal survey released this week. A majority of respondents
said they thought "all-out civil war" was either "very" (21%) or "somewhat
likely" (39%) in the wake of the US withdrawal. A similar majority rated the
chances of Iraq achieving a "stable democracy" as either "somewhat" (32%) or
"very unlikely" (28%).
Nonetheless, the same pollsters last month found that a whopping 71% of
respondents believed that Obama's decision to withdraw all combat troops now
was the right decision; only 24% disagreed.
It seems that the US public has had enough of the war in Iraq.
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