As US Vice President Dick Cheney landed secretly in Baghdad yesterday at the start of a ten-day trip to the region, which will include a visit to the Kingdom, three international reports were published ahead of the fifth anniversary of the disastrous US-led invasion. The International Red Cross reports that 40 percent of Iraqis are living on less than a dollar a day, the UN measure of extreme poverty. It also says that most of the population is deprived of clean water, proper sanitation and reliable power. It further notes with deep concern that the educational system has collapsed and that the health service is in an even worst state. There are insufficient qualified medical personnel, equipment and drugs which are needed to treat the injured who are taken daily to hospitals as a result of terror attacks.
Amnesty International in its report concludes that while security may have improved in recent months, human rights abuses are almost as bad as under Saddam's regime. Police and security officials have been reliably implicated in widespread torture and murder but, says Amnesty, no one has been brought to trial and worse, the American occupation forces seem content with this situation. The one high-profile prosecution of a senior Health Ministry official collapsed last month for lack of evidence - though it is widely assumed that key prosecution witnesses were intimidated into withdrawing their testimony.
The third report, based on a poll of 2,000 Iraqis commissioned by four international media organizations, including ABC and the BBC, concludes that Iraqis do feel that the security situation is improving and as a result are becoming more optimistic. In one way this last poll has some validity, since it is the latest in a series conducted since the US-led invasion. Yet the findings are hardly surprising. Though the terror continues, its scope has abated. Al-Qaeda, while far from beaten, is somewhat in the shadows and thanks to Iran's intervention, most of the radical Shiite militias have ceased their nightly butchery of Sunnis, which provoked reprisals which were no less bloody. It is thus hardly surprising that Iraqis, with their fund of resilience, are feeling more positive about their future.
If Cheney and his chief seek to claim any credit for this improvement, thanks to the much-touted surge, they should also admit that it was their crass lack of post-invasion planning that pushed and kicked an advanced and stable country back into the Dark Ages. The big US contractors who dreamed of multibillion-dollar contracts to rebuild the shattered Iraqi infrastructure that US arms destroyed have long since quit. Thus the work of restoring regular power and clean water merely creeps on. And the national unity government led by Nuri Al-Maliki continues to struggle to find any unity, let alone do much governing. The real improvements have nearly all been achieved by ordinary Iraqis, despite their fumbling government. If these people can prevail, even in the chaos Bush and Cheney brought them, how much better will they do when peace finally returns?
