George Bush doesn’t learn. It was five years ago this week that the US-led invasion of Iraq began. An equally significant anniversary will fall on May 1. It was then that the US president landed by helicopter on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and strode up to the microphones to announce to the world that the hostilities in Iraq were at an end. Rarely has anyone been proved more clueless.
Now he is at it again, declaring that the US troop surge has brought about a “major strategic victory in the broader war on terror”. The truth is that Bush’s greatest enemy in his global campaign against Al-Qaeda and its satraps has been his own woefully bad judgment. The president built America and much more importantly the Iraqi people a new mountain to climb when, in the first flush of victory, the US occupation administration immediately disbanded the Iraqi Army and police force. In what was arguably the dumbest move by an unusually dumb administration, this at a stroke threw tens of thousands of angry Iraqis, often well-trained soldiers and paramilitaries, who plundered police and military arsenals as they left onto the streets where they were readymade recruits for the subsequent insurrection.
Behind the insurgent screen of these abandoned men, Al-Qaeda flowed into an Iraq from which Saddam’s security forces had excluded them and set about the real business of terror. It is only now, five years on when Sunni leaders have recognized that Bin Laden’s people are deranged bigots who care nothing for Iraq, that this substantial resource of men and material which the Bush administration so wantonly discarded has swung behind the Maliki government, for all its bickering and feebleness. Meanwhile, the radical militias also called a cease-fire.
The victory, if victory there be, belongs to the Iraqi people. For George W. Bush it is confirmation of the defeat of all the addled and inadequate thinking and deliberate falsehoods that caused him to embark upon the toppling of Saddam.
A much more realistic assessment of the challenges that Iraq still faces has come from the country’s President Jalal Talabani. Having emphasized in his own speech commemorating five years since the invasion began, that no further progress could be made without reconciliation, Talabani went on to warn that violence and corruption constituted a “disease” that endangered the future of Iraq. Like so many Iraqis, even among the once-favored Sunnis, Talabani continues to applaud the overthrow of Saddam’s ruthless and brutal regime but he warns of grave dangers ahead. In truth, though the violence has declined in recent months, it is only relative to the almost constant carnage that had gone before. Bombings and murders remain an everyday occurrence.
Had Bush invaded with the backing of the UN and international support, along with a properly thought-out plan to rapidly restore the peace, stability and basic services, it might really have been a victory.
