Bush Wants No Less than Victory, But Over Whom?

It isn’t clear which army President George W. Bush wants to defeat in Iraq. Does America really face an army in Iraq? Does America really know who it is fighting?

We live in Iraq and Bush and his administration are thousands of miles away. To any sane person, we would be better placed to interpret conditions on the ground in our own country than U.S. leaders.

All around us we see nothing but chaos. The government and the state are fragile and lack the basic tools of governance.

All around us are murderous militias wreaking havoc. Conditions are getting worse and worse every passing day and we, the ordinary people, have lost hope and have nowhere to hide or escape to.

Is President Bush aware that these militias and their leaders arrived in Iraq under the protection of his invading troops? Is President Bush aware that once they landed, they were given the reins of power under the so-called democratic elections his troops and administrators organized? These murderous militias belong to the very Iraqi leaders who came to power through the U.S.-sponsored, financed and backed elections. They came to Iraq on the back of U.S. tanks and armored vehicles.

The members of the government which came into being as a result of the kind of democracy the U.S. has imposed on us are the very ones directing the armed gangs to kill, kidnap and murder innocent Iraqis under the direct oversight of U.S. troops.

These gangs who operate officially in Iraq and are part of the ugly sectarian pyramid of power that the U.S. has established, are behind the scores of unidentified corpses that city workers collect from the streets Baghdad every day.

The carnage they inflict is of a scale the world has rarely seen. They are killing people based on their identity cards; they are liquidating former soldiers and military officers; they are murdering doctors, intellectuals, university professors and journalists; and they are ruining what little remains of the country’s infrastructure.

The atrocities taking place are beyond description. Women, children and the elderly are now the most vulnerable.

Most of Iraq’s population is on the move and have nowhere to settle. Unemployment is rampant and children, orphans and young girls are doing things contrary to our society’s traditions and values.

Bush’s dream of turning Iraq into an oasis of democracy has turned into a quagmire of sectarian violence. His claims of achieving victory are empty.

The U.S. has no friends left in Iraq. Today, everyone in Iraq laughs at U.S. claims of democracy, human rights and freedom.

In Iraq, the U.S. has no specific enemy to fight. Iraqis are fighting one another. Iraqis are fighting the U.S. and the U.S. is fighting everyone else.

The one thing Bush doesn’t want to face is that almost everyone in Iraq hates American now. The leaders Bush installed and the militias they control hold the U.S. in great contempt, even if ostensibly they say they want U.S. troops to stay.

The honorable anti-U.S. resistance, whose ranks are growing thanks to American stupidity and arrogance, will settle on nothing but victory over the occupation.

Iraq is in crisis. So is the U.S.

American troops are on the brink of a crushing defeat because they have no enemy to fight and no friends left.