"US Leaves Iraq Weaker, Less Secure, More Unstable"

Lamentable legacy

But the Iraq [US] troops have left behind is far weaker, less secure, and infinitely far more unstable than when they invaded it. The war unleashed and empowered the forces of religious fundamentalism in Iraq. Washington is patting itself on its back for leaving behind a democratic Iraq. But whether Iraq today is any more democratic than under Saddam Hussein is questionable.

...The US-led invasion of Iraq was shrouded in lies. Leaders in the US and Britain claimed they had irrefutable evidence that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. This duplicity continued right through the occupation. And now at the war’s end, Washington claims the war is a success, resulting in ‘an extraordinary achievement’ that Americans can look on ‘with their heads held high’. Can the US look the Iraqi people in the eye while telling them what exactly it means by ‘success’? 

Has Washington forgotten that as early as 2005, a former head of the US National Security Agency had declared the invasion of Iraq as ‘the greatest strategic disaster in United States history’?

Many Americans and Britons will want to forget their ignoble adventure in Iraq. They must not. All wars are wrong but their war in Iraq was particularly so. The US and its allies invaded and occupied Iraq when it posed no threat to them or any other country. Forgetting the past, glossing over blunders and refusing to learn lessons will condemn the US to repeat its mistakes. 

That repetition appears to have been set in motion with American officials already issuing threats to Syria and Iran. Historians and spin masters will make every effort to twist facts and embellish the US’ Iraqi misadventure and to wipe clean its lamentable legacy in Iraq. They would do well to record the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as marking the starting point of the US’ decline as a superpower. 

Regime Change Hangover in Iraq

Huge numbers of Iraqis still adrift within the country

As many as 2 million Iraqis — about 6 percent of the country's estimated population of more than 31 million — are thought to have been forced from the cities and towns where they once lived and are housed in circumstances that feel temporary and makeshift.

Tough luck.

via eschaton. 

Spreading Democracy

Via Digby:

An Iraqi MP preferred to remain anonymous told the newspaper that highly confidential negotiations took place by representatives from American oil companies, offering $5 million to each MP who votes in favor of the Oil and Gas law.

The amount that could be paid to pass the votes do not exceed $150 million dollars in the case of $5 million to each MP, pointing out that the Oil law requires 138 votes to pass, which the Americans want to guarantee in many ways, including vote-buying, intimidation and threats!

War Crimes

What justifies this?

Few people know about the crimes committed during the two sieges of Fallujah — Operation Vigilant Resolve, launched on April 5, 2004, and Operation Phantom Fury, in the following November — as a result of which 200,000 people became refugees. There are no official figures for civilian deaths.

In the face of repeated independent verification, U.S. forces have now acknowledged the use of chemical weapons, and yet there remains no sustained international outcry and no official response (let alone condemnation) from any government or the United Nations. The United States has overthrown a regime while supposedly searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction, only to use such weapons on the newly "liberated" civilian population. The cold hypocrisy of such actions is outweighed only by its extravagant viciousness.

Seventy articles of the Geneva conventions were breached in the two separate months of siege warfare. Despite calls to abolish the conventions by senior politicians, they remain an essential bulwark against the bullying tactics of the powerful, and a poignant index of the increasing impunity of the neo-colonial project. Their ethos is that the innocent, the weak, the defeated and the injured be afforded all the protection possible in times of conflict. The ethos of the U.S. government is that the weak and innocent are a hindrance to the acquisition of power and, occasionally, an opportunity for the expansion of profit.

Corruption Here And There

Corruption, nepotism, incompetence. No not India. That's the US reconstructing Iraq:

Instead of hiring reconstruction experts from NGO's, they hired from the Heritage Foundation [a right wing think tank]'s reject list. People who were ideologically sound were hired over the competant and trained. People like Michael Ledeen [a leading regime-change exponent, who works for another right wing think tank]'s daughter, Simone, were given the task of rebuilding Iraq's economy. Imagine the reaction of highly educated, Harvard, Oxford and Sorbonne trained Iraqi economists, when they could get into the Green Zone, dealing with these idiot children. By sending the pure, loyal and untrained, they told the Iraqis they were not serious people. The neocons were allowed to turn Iraq into their playground, and test their wacky theories. Meanwhile Iraqi oil facilities have been attacked 54 times since the occupation started.

Rumors of overcharging and kickback litter the news on a near daily basis. Halliburton has been accused of running empty trailers to get paid from the US government. Even so, the lack of security which is endemic in Iraq makes reconstruction a nightmare.

From here. "Running empty trailers to get paid"? If you like that, then how about hiring a non-existent audit firm for $1.6 million dollars? Watch it. (That's the head of the CPA in the earlier days of occupation being questioned). Corruption is a world-wide phenomenon, tough it does seem not to exist at the lower levels in the US.

Update: And there is a more subtle kind of corruption too. For example, look at this report from The Hindu:

Washington: An ``alternative intelligence'' unit operating at the Pentagon in the run-up to the war on Iraq was dedicated to establishing a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, even though the CIA was unconvinced of such a connection, the U.S. Senate was told on Friday.

A report presented to the armed services committee by the Pentagon's Inspector General Thomas Gimble exposes the Bush administration to new charges of manipulating intelligence to make its case for going to war against Saddam nearly four years ago.

The kind of corruption which tries to hoodwink the engine of a democracy - its people. More on this [the intelligence manipulation] here.