The 5th Anniversary Of The Iraq Invasion Blogswarm
Via RickB we have the March 19 Iraq War Blogswarm:
This blogswarm will promote blog postings opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a full withdrawal of foreign occupying forces in Iraq. Five years of an illegal and catastrophic war is five years too many. On the March 19 anniversary of the conquest of Iraq by the Bush Administration, there needs to be a loud volume of voices countering the pro-war propaganda from far too many politicians and corporate media outlets.
I urge you to sign up and take part.
I plan to participate with one major proviso: I can’t swear with hand on heart that I’d like to see the occupation’s troops out of Iraq. I was against the war but I’m for the occupation, at least in an abstract sense. I think I’m off the ‘you broke it you bought it’ school.
I wonder about and fear what will happen if and when the troops leave. Who will fill the void that’s left? Daniel Davies says of ‘liberating’ Afghanistan, ‘if something can’t be done, then it can’t be done, no matter how bad the consequences of not doing it’. It has a certain appealing logic when also applied to whether to stay in or quit Iraq, but I can’t shake the feeling of: Is this it? Is this what it comes down to?
We’re going to leave Iraq to the theocrats and the bombers and the monsters? All those lives, all that money, all those hopes, for this? Isn’t there something else we can do? I told you it was abstract.
Knowing that those of us who marched against the war got it right at every point should be no comfort at all - I won’t be gloating on March 19. I wish we’d been very, very wrong at every stage. I wish we had been greeted as liberators with flowers.
I could live with the sneers and I-told-you-sos of the pro-war crowd, the Cohens, the Aaronovitchs, the Harry’s Places, the Kamms, Gerases and attendant cheerleaders, if those million Iraqis were still alive today. This isn’t a rhetorical parlour game for me, as it seems to be for some if not most of them. I’d have been more graceful in defeat than they would have been in victory. Sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say ‘you were right’.
But I will say this: Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein. There were other options than killing so many and then giving the country, inch by inch, to murderers and fundamentalists. If you disagree, then I only have one thing to say to you: I don’t believe you.
Posted on February 13th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
| See also • Twitter daily digest for 2008-03-18 • It’s Iraq Week, look busy • A polite reminder |
Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe By Email • Print This Post • • • |
|
Filed under Activism, Iraq |
I think there’s this: that if it were a liberation, people would know what it was. There wouldn’t be any debate about it. We know what real liberations look like, we’ve seen photos and footage. We also know that they’re followed by mass support for the liberators, not mass resentment and opposition to them.
If it had been a liberation, what subsequently happened could not have happened.
I’m against the Occupation. I don’t see where it can go even if it were well-motivated, which it is not. I think it’s indicative - to put it extraordinarly mildly - that when the Brits left Basra, only 2% of the locals wished we’d stayed.
I don’t think there’s any useful option but to hop it. You can only occupy other people’s countries for a short time without them resenting it and even then, only if you don’t give them reasons to hate you. But it’s been five years and those five years have involved torture to a grotesque degree, regular shootings of civilians, bombings of civilian areas, destruction of towns, corruption on a vast scale, the appropriation of Iraqi resources by the occupiers, the arming of sectarian militias. This is not the basis on which a country can be rescued.
If I were an Iraqi, I wouldn’t want the occupiers to stay. Come to that, though, I don’t know I’d want them to go. Come to that, I don’t think I’d know whether to stay or go myself. What I’d most likely be doing myself is heading for the exit with as much as I could carry with me, cursing pretty much everybody as I went, but the British and Americans loudest of all.
Only the Iraqis can save Iraq now.
My deep suspicion (and it is one shared by many Arab commentators) is that the intention of those who were the driving force behind the invasion from the very start was to break Iraq and to keep it broken for as long as possible and everything the US is doing at the present time is contributing to that result.
This was never a case of a ‘liberation’ gone wrong. The country has been brutally and sadistically raped, it really is as simple as that and I don’t think it’s appropriate to ask the rapist to stick around for a while to help ‘fix’ things.
And yes, you are right about Saddam Hussein. I’m sick of hearing the pro-war lot saying “well, at least we got rid of a brutal dictator, that was worthwhile, you have to agree”. NO! NO! NO! The world would be a better and safer place today if Saddam were still alive and it had been Bush and Blair who had been hanged.
The invasion of Iraq turned Iraq into a failed state. Overthrowing a dictator and creating a failed state is nothing to cheer about. Cheering about the overthrow of Saddam also conveniently avoids the fact that the West did nothing about Iraq when Saddam was at his most brutal (except encourage arms’ dealers to set up shop in Baghdad). There is something distasteful about the way in which the pro-war brigade in 2002 and 2003 foamed at the mouth about genocide without saying that these events happened more than 15 years previously.
Like Mike, I have difficulty in seeing this as a liberation gone wrong. The “mistakes” weren’t really mistakes, they were errors that were deeply-embedded in the way in which the USA (and the UK) looked at Iraq. State institutions were allowed to collapse becasue the free-market world view of the invaders doesn’t recognise the importance of state institutions. Iraqis were viewed as people who happened to be living on top of some giantic oil fields and who ought to be integrated into world markets. Iraqis were not viewed as a people with a history and with their own customs and institutions.
If the point of the surge was to buy time and create a window of opportunity to fix things, we ought to be seeing a flurry of activity to fix things right now (before that window inevitably closes). But we’re not seeing that. That’s either because the Americans don’t intend to fix things or don’t know how to. In either case we’re being a bit naive if, five years after the invasion, we still want the Americans to stay in Iraq to fix things.
Jonathan Steele give an interesting talk at Chatham House in late January. The paper is on the Chatham House website. His main point is that the first step in fixing Iraq is for the Americans to show clearly that they’re going to leave.
America could have saved and rebuilt Iraq if that had been the overriding intention. It’s America for fuck’s sake.
Just look at the history of the US in Iraq. The courting of Saddam, the April Glaspie meetings prior to the invasion of Kuwait. The oil money and the rebuilding contracts for Bechtel and Halliburton. If the US got anything right, it was pushing through legislation in the piss-pot Iraq parliament to liberalise the countries oil.
For the war in Iraq - see the Opium Wars. It’s about addressing America’s oil addiction, yet it has little to do with supply, and everything to do with addressing the balance of payments and diverting profits to US engineering behemoths.
The so called pro-war liberals have been sold hook, line, and sinker. They’ve bought in to the propaganda and the bullshit. And yet, I still have time for Justin’s pottery barn rule (but again, who’ll be doing the rebuilding… rock and hard place).
…to liberalise the *country’s* oil.
I’d like to second the points made by the commenters above - from the point of view of oil companies, weapons manufacturers, and Dick Cheney, surely the ‘occupation’ has been a wonderful success? ‘Creative destruction’ is how Rumsfeld referred to it I believe.
To take your ‘he who broke it fixes it’ argument - if somebody came into your house to remove vermin, and smashed up your living room in the process of removing said pest, and five years later had not only failed to fix the damage in the living room but had also smashed up the rest of your house, would you still be expecting him to stick around and clear up his mess? Or would you want him to get the fuck out of your house immediately?
What if you then found out that the original pest had actually been bred and nurtured by the Rentokil company?
I think the foreign occupation of Iraq is making things worse, not fixing things. Withdrawal from Iraq won’t solve all the country’s problems, but it is an essential step to making those solutions possible.
I’d tend to agree with that assessment, libhomo. Unfortunately I also think that a withdrawal would be followed by an extended period of even greater blood-letting which will make it appear like a disastrous decision. But the presence of the invading army can only delay this, and draw out the misery for the Iraqi people.
Ultimately, I disagree with Justin’s suggestion that we should view this from a ‘you broke it, you bought it’ perspective. That’s like expecting the proverbial bull in the China shop to sit down with a tube of superglue and do a decent restoration job on all that crockery. I mean, the damn thing doesn’t even have opposible thumbs!
Nor opposable ones, neither.
You have inspired me to become part of this. I thank you.
As for Iraq’s future in the absence of an occupation, Johann Hari proposed a joint peacekeeping force drawn from willing Muslim Nations and financed entirely by the US and UK. I’m not so sure about making it exclusively Muslim but I think its the best bet.