Filmed in Iraq (the cradle of civilization) 2 weeks before “Shock and Awe”:
…today, the introduction of “democracy” to Iraq is considered an American gift so precious that it somehow makes up for anything that’s happened in the last seven years. This is why, for instance, in a piece about the recent Iraqi elections headlined “It’s Up to Iraqis Now. Good Luck!” pundit Tom Friedman could write this sentence about the “U.S. project in Iraq”: “Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right.”
This is why, in honor of those same Iraqi elections, Newsweek could feature a “Victory at Last” cover showing George W. Bush striding from the scene on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln where he gave his infamous “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” speech under a White-House-produced banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” And then, under the eerie headline, “Rebirth of a Nation,” with its American movie resonances, that magazine’s correspondents could write: “And yet it has to be said and it should be understood — now, almost seven hellish years later — that something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East.”
Like Afghanistan before it, Iraq is now largely the “forgotten” war, and if this is “victory,” then here’s a little of what’s been forgotten in the process, of what Friedman suggests he’d prefer to leave future historians to sort out: that the American invasion led to possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths; that literally millions of Iraqis had to flee into exile abroad and millions more were turned into internal refugees in their own country; that the national capital, Baghdad, was significantly ethnically cleansed in a brutal Shiite-Sunni civil conflict; that the country was littered with new “killing fields”; that a devastating insurgency roiled the land and still brings enough death and terror to Baghdad to make it one of the more dangerous places on the planet; that a soaring unemployment rate and the lack of delivery of the most basic services, including reliable electricity and potable water, created nightmarish conditions for a vast class of impoverished Iraqis; that the U.S., for all its nation-building boasts, proved remarkably incapable of “reconstructing” the country or its oil industry, even though American private contractors profited enormously from work on both; that a full-scale foreign military occupation left Americans on almost 300 bases nationwide and in the largest embassy on the planet; that American advisors remain attached to, and deeply embedded in, an Iraqi military that still lacks a credible air force and is unlikely to be able to operate and resupply itself on its own for years to come.
The Pride of Us
In other words, as bad as Saddam Hussein was (and he was a megalomanic monster), what followed him was a staggering catastrophe for Iraq, even if Americans no longer care to give it much thought.
Given the nature of American democracy today — the first billion-dollar presidential election, the staggering levels of lobbying and influence peddling that go with it, the stunning barrages of bizarre advertising, the difficulty of displacing incumbents in Congress, the increasingly corporate-owned and financed campaigns, a half-broken Congressional system, a national security state with unparalleled powers and money, and so on — why all the effort to take it to Iraq? Why measure Iraqis against it and find them lacking? After all, in 2000, our presidential election went to the non-majoritarian candidate, thanks to decisions made by Supreme Court justices appointed by his father. If this had happened in Nigeria, Afghanistan, or perhaps Iraq, we would know just what we were dealing with.
The fact is we have no word adequate to describe what, at the national level, we still persist in calling “democracy,” what we regularly ask others to admire to the skies or bow down before. The other day, at TPM Café, Todd Gitlin termed our system a “semi-democracy.” That, at least, represents an honest start.
In imperial China, when a new dynasty arrived on the scene, the emperor performed a ritual called the “rectification of names” in the belief that the previous dynasty had fallen in part because reality and the names for it had ceased to correspond. We in the United States undoubtedly now need such a ceremony. We certainly need a new term for our own “democracy” before we’re so quick to hold it up as the paragon for others to match.
Read it all here: When Was the Last Time You Visited Iraq?, by Tom Engelhardt
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Where’s Iraq?
who called the megalomaniac Saddam Hussein an ally before Bush and the self-same Donald Rumsfeld called him a madman who had to be eliminated.
And all in the name of waging war against Iran. Lest we let that slip down the memory hole, too, the U.S. enabled Saddam Hussein in the name of fighting Iran.
At some point in that mess, the U.S. decided those nasty Marxist Sandanistas had to go, so in a moment of monumental stupidity and hubris, Reagan and “Patriot” Ollie North sold arms to the Iranians, the very people the U.S. empowered Saddam Hussein against because they feared them so much.
Of course, the U.S. also decided that it wanted to play Proxy War, so it armed the mujahadeen, whose atavistic stepchildren led to the tiny pinprick of blood we call 9/11, which led directly to the ocean of mangled limbs, bombed out cities and angry people who hate America we have now.
The neoimperialists scoff at others. How naive you must be, they chant, when you think you can just leave others alone. The world is too complicated for your foolish non-action.
But when you look at the actions of the neoimperialists, it’s one long chain of empowering madman, waging war against people who could be our friends, then making war against the very madmen we empowered.
Mad dog Saddam indeed. But who is responsible for him?
And the neoimperialists still want to start a war against Iran. When will they ever learn? Foolish, foolish people, who dare to say other people are “naive”.