Politics: The Latest War Lies

[shannon_a]

When I got up this morning, kimberly_a told me that the "war was over", which is unfortunately a huge misrepresentation by the-powers-that-be-in-Washington who were starting to take a bit too much flak for their incompetent campaign.

As the Guardian reports, we've pushed over a couple of statues, and have a strong presence in Baghdad, but "sporadic but fierce fighting continued in parts of the city, with marines coming under heavy machine-gun fire only blocks away from the squares where crowds were gathering to celebrate the dictator's fall." And that's to say nothing of fortified towns like Tikrit where we haven't even started killing people yet. PM Blair in Britain is a bit more rational, calling it "premature" to declare victory.

Yeah, we're going to "win", and knock Hussein's government out of power. There was never any doubt in that. But statements of victory when there's still killing going on in Iraq are *so* self-serving.

In the parts of Iraq that are mostly free of Hussein's government, "looting" is epidemic, and British and American troops aren't doing anything about it, because they want to be viewed favorably by the population. Consider it a polaroid of the future. How long will it be before Iraq descends into the anarchy of local warlords, murder, and rape gangs, as Afghanistan has since our "liberation" of that country? Oh, we'll keep order in the areas with the oil wells, be sure of that, but our record in Afghanistan speaks poorly of what's going to happen to the average Iraqi.

And speaking of the average Iraqi, the latest body count says that somewhere around 1,000 innocent civilians have been killed directly by our forces. That's about a-third of the number of people killed in the WTC attacks, and disregards the huge number of people that'll die due to our destruction of Iraqi infrastructure, but, hey, they're not Americans, so it doesn't really matter, does it?

With the war in Iraq slowly winding down, we've begun to turn our eyes toward other rich Middle Eastern nations. It looks like we've settled on Syria as our next target, because we've begun issuing increasingly escalated threats to them over the last couple of days. Don't be surprised if our clean-up crew in Iraq keeps moving right across the border. (See this editorial in the Independent for British fears of the US war machine rolling onward.)

After all, it's still a year and a half before elections, so Bush needs another war or two to keep his polls high.

Comments

[seidl.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to ask about some of the comments in the above. I haven't been tracking the afgan issues in detail the last few eeks (bloody broken bones), but I do keep generally in touch with them, and Soraya keeps very in touch with them. While the country isn't in great shape, and is really hurting for all the foreign aid thats been promised, the general impression I've gotten is that things are better now than before.

The Taleban were really really evil people. I suspect my opinion is colored by the personal tales I've heard, but things seem to be generally improving where reconstruction funding is available. Sure, things aren't great, but the country has been at war for 25+ years. Its not going to recover overnight.

[shannon_a]

Soraya probably knows better than I, but my impression from the news I've read is:

• Much of the country is in ruins from the war.
  
• We've left the country in the hands of numerous regional warlords.
  
• The "leader" we set up only controls a small amount of land around his capital (Kabul?) and his main purpose was to rubber stamp a deal for an oil pipeline within a few days of his being raised up to power.
  
• Women still are required to wear the burqa(sp?).
  
• Women who go out alone have to seriously fear for their safety and life.
  
• The money to reconstruct Afghanistan got left out of our budgets here in the U.S.
  

And I completely agree that the Taliban were really, totally evil people. (Hussein was too.) I've just gotten the impression that we've largely left the country in the hands of other evil people, and while doing so we destroyed a lot of the country's infrastructure without offering any aid to fix it.

[seidl.livejournal.com]

I guess I see it as the current people are less evil, and with a chance at turning into something reasonable if they get the support they need to rebuild. I do think its almost criminal that the US hasn't held up its promises of support though. So I guess its accepting some evilness, if it could lead to a good eventually. I suspect the same is going to be true of Iraq. In the short term, things will be ugly. Lots of factional fighting. But with hope of a medium term improvement in conditions. Without intervention, I wouldn't have predicted improvement till much farther in the future.