A Hard Truth

So today was the day the last American soldier from the last combat brigade left Iraq as promised by Barack Obama. On August 2, the president had reiterated this promise at the Disabled Veterans of America’s convention in Atlanta. His speech on this occasion included a rather odd sentence: “The hard truth is we have not seen the end of American sacrifice in Iraq.”

The notion of sacrifice necessarily implies high moral qualities, such as generosity, noble-mindedness, significant altruistic tendencies — all qualities which, it goes without saying, and even better with saying, the American Army cannot in any way claim for themselves.

To talk about an American sacrifice in Iraq is pure demagogy, for the war that wrecked the country was not prompted by a desire to help the Iraqi people, as the individuals responsible for this disaster unsuccessfully tried to have us believe, but by a calculation in which selfishness and greed played a major part in the decision-making process that led to the invasion of Iraq.

If he wanted to be honest and stick to reality, President Obama should have told the disabled veterans of America that the hard truth is that nobody has seen the end of the consequences of the mistakes made by both Bush administrations. The hard truth is that neither Clinton, who succeeded the first Bush, nor Obama, who succeeded the second, has called into question the disastrous choices of their predecessors. On the contrary, Clinton mercilessly implemented the sanctions imposed on Iraq by Bush senior in 1991, and Obama failed to express the slightest criticism on what is now known as the biggest fiasco of American foreign policy since the creation of the United States.

They are not sacrificing themselves for Iraq, even if they are keeping 50,000 soldiers there to “train” the Iraqi army and police. They are instead paying for the tragic mistakes made by father and son in the Bush family, whose pathological obsession with Iraq has turned out to be the misfortune of millions of Iraqis and thousands of American families. Undoubtedly, Saddam Hussein was far from being a saint. He made monumental mistakes, which the enemies of Iraq used as a pretext to bring the country several decades backward into the past. But monumental though those mistakes were, they did not in any way justify the destruction of a country and its infection with a virus, which proved to be nightmarishly virulent.

This virus is al-Qaida, whom the American intervention instilled in the heart of Iraq and whose hordes of kamikazes have been targeting Iraqi civilians and their social and political institutions rather than the American occupation forces.

The American intervention in Iraq has had terrifying consequences for the Iraqi population. The capacity of destruction of the army sent by Bush was just as incredible as its incapacity to construct. It destroyed, in the blink of an eye, all the political, administrative and legal institutions of Iraq, but it never managed in over seven years of occupation to construct the slightest credible institution capable of correctly fulfilling its duties to the Iraqi people. As a result, the Iraqi people find themselves today in an economic, social and political situation much, much worse than that of the days of the Ba’ath. Let us illustrate this with just one example: In the time of Saddam, Baghdadis had electricity practically all the time, whereas today they have electricity for no longer than 6 hours per day.

But more serious than the destruction of infrastructures or institutions is the infection of Iraq by the al-Qaida virus, an infection which has largely spilled over into many countries of the region. Jordan suffered a series of fatal attacks against its hotel industry on November 9, 2005; Lebanon endured three months of deadly violence initiated by the terrorist group Fatah al-Islam in the fall of 2007; and today Yemen faces a vast campaign of destabilization orchestrated by radical groups linked to al-Qaida. It is plain to see that the terrorist violence suffered by those three countries is directly linked to the American intervention in Iraq.

Having achieved neither strategic, political nor military success, Americans today are falling back on the “success” of the withdrawal from Iraq of half their troops. This withdrawal is admittedly not comparable to the American debacle in Vietnam in spring 1975, but neither can it be called a “success.” Because for a withdrawal to be called a success, the soldiers should leave with their heads held high. However, in this particular case, the 50,000 soldiers leaving Iraq have few reasons to be proud of their mission. You cannot be proud or talk of “success” when you have taken part in a disgraceful mission that can be summed up in three words: intervention, destruction, abandonment.