The Greatest Crime of the Iraq War
It is one thing to have gangsters come to your neighborhood, plunder your goods, wreck your home, threaten you, kill your family and intimidate you into compliance. But it is quite another thing when they don’t leave, take up residence, and start to draw flies. Flies of the most abhorrent kind.
The biggest crime of the Iraq war is that it is not an “Iraq” war. The key to this understanding lies in the war on terror catch phrase popularized by George W. Bush and his followers: “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”
It is well established that, as reprehensible as Saddam Hussein was, he had no substantial connection with al qaeda. By invading Iraq, the US took the fight with al qaeda to a theatre of war that is not the United States. On the face of it, a good plan. But there’s a problem.
The problem with taking the war with al qaeda to another theatre of war is that the chosen theatre, Iraq, is full of people with lives, loved ones, property and aspirations. Or, it was. There are now substantially fewer people in Iraq. There is markedly less property. Families have been shattered and decimated at levels we may not know for years to come. Civilian casualties are not currently calculable, but good estimates put them in the tens of thousands, perhaps more than a hundred thousand.
Iraq was a country in the hands of a dictator. Its modern, oil-financed infrastructure had deteriorated somewhat due to the costs of Iraq-Iran war, the first Gulf War, as well as neglect stemming from UN sanctions and the resultant choices by Saddam on how to deploy scarce resources.
But the outcomes of this current conflict have left Iraq a broken country, its infrastructure razed, its history plundered, its legacy spent and its spirit hostage to terror that streams in from outside and bubbles up on the inside, born from the pain and frustration of gross injustice.
This is the greatest crime of the Iraq War. When you put aside all the phony, jingoistic reasons for going to Iraq you are left with a few that stand scrutiny. There is the realpolitic reason of regional hegemony, which includes the goal of bases with striking proximity to Iran, Syria, et al. Relatedly there is the global economic reason of access to and control of Iraq’s oil. And there is the diversionary reason of creating a theatre of war that will draw jihadists and others to Iraq instead of allowing them to concentrate on other projects, namely attacks on US soil.
Pardon me. Oh, excuse us. We’ll be using your country for our war from here on in. Sorry about that. Try to stay indoors. In the basement. Behind a bomb shelter door. You might be ok.
Not only did the US attack and largely destroy a country with no connection to its current War on Terror (a great crime in itself), but now they remain, which is an even greater crime. The greatest crime of the entire scenario.
America, get out of Iraq. You are drawing flies of the most abhorrent kind. You are bad neighbors. You are not wanted. Your goals for Iraq are not the goals of Iraq.
Get out.
