In just over a year, the United States has squandered the good will and confidence that many moderates in the Middle East once bore toward it.
Whatever the high-level agenda for control and influence over Middle East oil, ordinary American GIs reckoned that they were coming to Iraq to do a good thing, to release a people from a ruthless tyrant and facilitate the creation of a society in which the views of all would be represented fairly and no one would be above the law.
Saddam Hussein was easily defeated. But it is patently clear that the Americans simply had no idea of the consequences of removing the heavy yoke of dictatorship from the Iraqi people. Because Washington could only think in its own terms and had a president with little knowledge and less understanding of the world beyond the frontiers of the US, they imagined that once freed, the Iraqis would stay together. Yet without Saddam, the different communities began to pull apart. The Americans quickly became embroiled in the highly effective guerrilla resistance for which Saddam had long planned but of which the CIA clearly had no inkling. The failure by the US to stem this violence, which fell as much upon ordinary Iraqis as it did upon themselves, coupled with their increasingly hard-line tactics quickly undermined Iraqi confidence in American liberation. It became occupation.
With ever-fewer friends and a rising body count, the US military has given up on hearts and minds. Ordinary GIs, frightened and mourning friends and colleagues, have become trigger-happy. The brutality at Abu Gharib prison, filmed by CBS TV cameras is symptomatic of the frustration felt by the military. Yet as a result of these pictures, a top US general and seven senior officers along with 17 soldiers, have been suspended and are under investigation. There is an argument that this demonstrates that even at the moment when the US faces its greatest military humiliation since Vietnam, the basic values on which the US itself is based, of law and decent behavior, are still in place. But the regional opinion of American fair-handedness is so low now that the general view will be that the military authorities are only investigating because of the TV pictures. People will easily believe that this sort of brutal mistreatment of prisoners or suspects is generally approved of and that unless he is caught on camera, a GI can get away with anything.
The greatest loss the Americans face is to their reputation, not simply in the Middle East but in the world at large. US military power will be seen for what it is, a behemoth with the response speed of a muscle-bound ox and the limited understanding of a mouse. This has all happened because Bush refused to listen to the many friendly warnings he was given.
