Most American troops have left Iraq, but there's no end in sight to the horrors caused by the war -- horrors that Chris Floyd does a typically fine job of describing.
In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attacked it and posed no threat to it. This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.
This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly. Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.
Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children -- the infants, the toddlers, the schoolkids -- whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.
The current political crisis and violence are direct results of the 2003 invasion, which George Bush carried out and many Democrats supported. Barack Obama was not among them, and his opposition to that war remains one of the greatest items on his resume. I hope that he grows less reticent about saying, I was right about Iraq (and that his defense secretary stops saying the war was "worth it") because neocons are blaming the President for the mess there.
What is happening in Iraq is sickening, in part because the gains came at such a high cost and in part because what is happening there was so avoidable. Obama was handed a war that was largely won. What America had given to Iraq is what the Arab scholar Fouad Ajami called “the foreigner’s gift.” But Iraq being Iraq, maintaining an American troop presence there, separate from engaging in combat operations, was necessary if Iraq was ever to become whole again. President Obama has undone much of what had been achieved there, almost in the blink of an eye. And when the history of his administration is written, it increasingly looks as if he will be fairly judged to have been the man who lost Iraq.
In an administration full of failures, this one may well rank among the highest. The human cost to Iraq and the strategic damage to America may be unimaginable. And so unnecessary.
Despite their remarkable record of being wrong, necons continue to hold sway in the Republican Party, Ron Paul notwithstanding. Believe it: the GOP nominee will attempt to make Iraq a campaign issue. I don't think the criticism will hurt the President's candidacy -- a huge majority of Americans support the withdrawal, and economic issues will dominate the race -- but it's important not to let neocons further rewrite recent history. How the war is perceived in the future may well determine whether the United States launches another similar invasion-occupation.
Thanks largely to war opponents' failure to claim ideological victory, neocons have managed to sell the notion that the war has been something less (or more) than a disaster. Here's the lie we'll be hearing over the next year: the surge turned things around in Iraq and the United States was this close to victory when President Obama decided to precipitously pull troops out.
The 3-part truth is that:
Staying would have only prolonged the inevitable. What we're witnessing now is simply the underlying bloody reality that Bush-Cheney inflicted on Iraq, and it would've become (more) manifest whenever U.S. troops left. It's happening not because Americans left too soon but because they left. The idea that the U.S. occupation would have eventually cultivated a stable democracy is just neocon absurdness.
George Bush negotiated this withdrawal date. By bringing troops home, President Obama is following the terms negotiated by George Bush in the 2006 SOFA.
The Obama administration pushed to stay longer. Mitt Romney and other Republicans are arguing that he should've negotiated a longer stay for American troops. The truth -- which President Obama isn't eager to advertise for obvious reasons -- is that the United States pushed to have U.S. troops stay past the end of the year but Iraq refused to agree to the American demand that they be exempt from Iraqi law.
There's no use hoping that Dems will articulate the larger truth, which is that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime for which Bush and Cheney should spend the rest of their lives in prison. But it'd be nice if they found it in themselves at least to make the case in no uncertain terms that the cause of Iraq's misery is the war -- not withdrawal.