BOMBINGS killed six US Marines last Friday, edging American war deaths toward 2,000 and the wounded toward 15,000, while Iraqi civilian fatalities were put at just under 30,000.
In the southern city of Basra, British troops (junior partners in the Anglo-American coalition force) arrested an unspecified number of Iraqi police officers accused of planting roadside bombs that killed at least 14 Americans, Britons and others in recent months, arrests that clearly reflected growing tensions between local Shiite Iraqis and Western-led forces in the city.
Basra’s police have also been accused of “extra-judicial” (read, death squad) killings and torture of fellow Iraqis, mostly Sunnis.
In Baghdad, the families of 22 men — 21 Sunnis and one Shiite — mourned their death. They had been taken from their homes in August, tortured and killed by members of Iraq’s elite Interior Ministry commandos, who dumped their bodies last week in the street of a small town near the Iranian border, where they were discovered.
“Police commandos are increasingly being accused of kidnappings, killings and torture, targeting mostly Sunnis,” reported the Washington Post’s Ellen Knickmeyer from Baghdad. “In August, the bodies of 37 Sunni men taken in a police sweep of a Baghdad neighborhood were found in a dry bed near the Iranian border.”
On Wednesday last week, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt in a Shiite mosque in Hilla, killing 25 worshippers and injuring 87. The next day, at least 21 Iraqi civilians were killed, in two separate suicide bombings in Baghdad.
In the ongoing major offensive in western Iraq, the US military said at least 71 insurgents have been killed.
So does all that grab your attention? No? I didn’t think so. And I don’t blame you. Heck, just another week in Iraq, and you have long ceased to feel shock and disbelief at what has become of this sad, sad country.
The land war in Iraq began triumphantly, seemingly effortlessly, with a column of seventy-ton Abrams tanks and twenty-five ton Bradley fighting vehicles barreling up the highway leading to Baghdad, a moving line of metal looking like a convoy of armor-plated elephants.
But this was no Hannibal traversing the Iberian Peninsula on his way to conquer Rome. This was shock and awe. This was, we were told, a war of liberation, mounted to free Iraqis from the clutches of a tyrant; introduce their country (and through it the entire Middle East) to democracy; search for, find and destroy those dreadful weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had reportedly been stockpiling for years; and remove forever the third leg of a tripod that formed an axis of evil around the world.
The war was short in duration. It lasted exactly three weeks — rare for wars in military history — longer than the six days it took Israel to defeat the Arab armies in 1967 but a bit shorter than the six weeks it took the Prussians to score a victory over Austria in 1870.
Yes it was, as the fashionable term had it in April 2003, a cakewalk. But, as we now know, a cakewalk on a street that led nowhere.
In a major speech delivered last week at the Ronald Reagan Building and Trade Center in downtown Washington (where for the first time he branded the enemy “Islamic radicals”), President Bush scoffed at those critics of the war who have “argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals.”
There was never any debate about the repressive, even genocidal, nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the genuine relief that many Iraqis felt at seeing an end to the climate of pervasive fear that defined it, but there were no terrorists in Iraq before the US invasion. Now it is crawling with them.
We are still too close to the fact to say with certainty whether US intentions were sinister or benign. If sinister — and one wouldn’t put it past the gang of neocons who had planned and executed the war to have harbored such sentiments — then the US, by blundering into Iraq, was asking for it. If benign — to introduce Iraqis to democracy and liberate them from tyranny — then those who sent American boys to a distant land they knew little about would’ve done well to have heeded Niccolo Machiavelli’s warnings about such ventures.
Machiavelli knew his stuff.
“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle,” he wrote, “than to initiate a new order of things.”
There is, of course, no return to the status quo ante in Iraq, and a “new order of things” will emerge there: Alas, a civil war followed by the splintering of the country into three independent enclaves. For the American invasion, you see, has succeeded only in bringing to the surface the recrudescence of sectarian and ethnic impulses that had lain dormant all that time.
American goals in Iraq have now become both fuzzy and modest, a sobering reminder of the narrow parameters within which the US finds itself operating these days. As to what exactly these goals are, well, search me.
Those Iraqi patriots who had hoped that a new constitution would unite them, and that a democracy would arise in their country out of the ashes of dictatorship, are demoralized. Those of us who were anti-war from the outset, but who had to bite the bullet and go along with it because we considered Saddam a greater evil, are equally demoralized. And those in government who had rushed the US to war — while armed with an almost mystical conviction of moral license — are now wondering how the strongest power in history, mounting a military campaign against a puny opponent in a Third World country, at a time and place of its own choosing, could find itself humbled at the core, hemorrhaging blood and treasure, as it both confronts a violent insurgency and deals with local political leaders who are not only rough at the edges, but rough straight through.
Truly, a mistake of gargantuan proportions.
In the end, it will fall to us, privileged citizens of this great United States, in whose hands ultimately lies the definition of our moral agenda, to make sure that no more such wars will ever be launched again by our wretched leaders.
