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March 20 is the third anniversary of
the Bush regime's invasion of Iraq. US military casualties to
date are approximately 20,000 killed, wounded, maimed, and disabled.
Iraqi civilian casualties number in the tens of thousands. Iraq's
infrastructure is in ruins. Tens of thousands of homes have been
destroyed. Fallujah, a city of 300,000 people had 36,000 of
its 50,000 homes destroyed by the US military.
Half of the city's former population are displaced persons living
in tents.
Thousands of Iraqis have been
detained in prisons and hundreds have been brutally tortured.
America's reputation in the Muslim world is ruined.
The Bush regime expected a
short "cakewalk" war to be followed by the imposition
of a puppet government and permanent US military bases.
Instead, US military forces are confronted with an insurgency
that has denied control over Iraq to the US military. Chaos
rules, and civil war may be coming on top of the insurgency.
On March 9, US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, the man who has been totally wrong about Iraq,
told Congress that if the unprecedented violence in Iraq breaks
out in civil war, the US will rely primarily on Iraq's security
forces to put down civil war.
What Iraqi security forces?
Iraq does not have a security force.
The Shia have a security force. The Sunnis have a security force,
and the Kurds have a security force. The sectarian militias
control the streets, towns and cities. If civil war breaks out,
the "Iraqi security force" will dissolve into the sectarian
militias, leaving the US military in the middle of the melee.
Is this what "support
the troops" means?
President Bush's determination
to remain in Iraq despite the obvious failure of the attempted
occupation puts Bush at odds with the American public and with
our troops. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe
that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and that our troops should
be withdrawn. An even larger majority of the troops themselves
believe they should be withdrawn.
Yet Bush, who is incapable
of admitting a mistake, persists in a strategic blunder that
is turning into catastrophe.
Bush's support has fallen to
34 percent.
The war's out of pocket cost
to date is approximately $300 billion--every dollar borrowed
from foreigners. Economic and budgetary experts have calculated
that the ultimate cost of Bush's Iraq war in terms of long-term
care for veterans, interest on borrowed money, and resources
diverted from productive uses will be between $1 trillion and
$2 trillion.
What is being achieved for
this enormous sacrifice?
No one knows.
Every reason we have been given
for the Iraqi invasion has proved to be false. Saddam Hussein
had no weapons of mass destruction.
Reports from UN weapons inspectors, top level US intelligence
officials, Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, and leaked
top secret documents from the British Cabinet all make it unequivocally
clear that the Bush regime first decided to invade Iraq and then
looked around for a reason.
Saddam Hussein had no terrorist
connection to Osama bin Laden and no role in the 9/11 attack.
Hussein was a secular ruler totally at odds with bin Laden's
Islamist aims. Every informed person in the world knew this.
When the original justifications
for the US invasion collapsed, Bush said that the reason for
the invasion was to rid Iraq of a dictator and to put a democracy
in its place. Despite all the hoopla about democracy and elections,
no Iraqi government has been able to form, and the country is
on the brink of civil war. Some Middle East experts believe
that violence will spread throughout the region.
The brutal truth is that America's
responsibility is extreme. We have destroyed a country and created
political chaos for no reason whatsoever.
Seldom in history has a government
miscalculated as badly as Bush has in Iraq. More disturbingly,
Bush shows no ability to recover from his mistake. All we get
from our leader is pig-headed promises of victory that none of
our military commanders believe.
Our entire government is lost
in confusion. One day Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld tell us that we are having great success in training
an Iraqi military and will be able to begin withdrawing our troops
in a year. The next day they tell us that we will be fighting
the war for decades.
Bush's invasion of Iraq was
a mistake. Bush's attempt to cover up his mistake with patriotism
will ultimately discredit patriotism.
America has to be big enough
to admit a mistake and to bring it to an end.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the
Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is coauthor of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
Finally
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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