The End of the “Dumb War”

Emad Risn, a Baghdad newspaper columnist, probably summarized better than anyone what the official end of the war meant to the Iraqis, a war begun nearly nine years ago by the U.S., with the pretext of eliminating the threat embodied by the dictator Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction that Washington certainly knew were fictitious. “The war only ended for the Americans,” wrote Risn. “Nobody knows if the war will also end for us.” The invasion of Iraq, in fact, did not even serve to mitigate the ancestral hostility between the principal ethnoreligious sects — the majority Shiites, the Sunnis who oppressed them under Saddam and the Kurdish separatists concentrated in the north of the country. Subject to savage reciprocal killings, Shiites and Sunnis converged only in the insurgency against the invaders to make their presence intolerable. By the end of the month, the remaining 4,000 American troops will have left.

The war which began with a lie ends with a half-truth. The lie: From the outset, George W. Bush used the outrage of September 11, 2001 to destroy Saddam — which the first Bush, George H. W., was advised against doing in the Gulf War of 1991 by Saudi Arabia, allied with the United States. It was this that the neoconservative theorists, encrusted on the decision-making centers of Washington, also wanted, with their fantasy of implanting pro-Western democracy in the heart of the Arab world. Worries about Israeli security, the American economic and geostrategic interests in Iraqi petroleum, the electoral calculations of the president and his hatred of Saddam, who threatened to kill his father, and there was the origin of the catastrophe inflicted on Iraq, under the pretense of its imaginary chemical and nuclear weapons. The abysmal ignorance of Bush did the rest. Until just before the invasion, he did not know of the antagonism between the Shiites and the Sunnis.

The half-truth: On ordering the complete withdrawal of troops, apart from a few hundred soldiers charged with guarding the fortress that houses American diplomats in Baghdad, Barack Obama is only being faithful to his campaign promise, which garnered him more than a few votes, to bring to a close once and for all what he called a “dumb war” (and came to call a “war of choice,” to differentiate it from the “war of necessity” in Afghanistan).

In reality, what gave him the definitive push to the exit was the refusal by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to ensure immunity for the remaining troops for crimes of any kind. The country will not forget the atrocities of American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. No Iraqi authority, by the way, attended the 45-minute ceremony soberly conducted by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in the Baghdad airport to formalize the end of the war.

The statistics are devastating. The American fatality level was on the order of 5,000, without counting those of their British, Australian and other allies. About 110,000 Iraqi civilians perished, and 1.5 million fled to neighboring countries. The financial cost of its unpardonable adventure is not known for certain by the United States. The official cost is $800 billion, but independent estimates go as high as $3 trillion. Whatever the true number, it is impossible to dissociate this from the critical state of the American economy — not to mention the massive jackpots that were diverted by companies Washington contracted to perform services in Iraq. Iraqi corruption is not lacking. The country is fractured in more than one sense. Since the invasion on March 17, 2003, the population of Baghdad hasn’t known what it is to have a whole day with electricity. It is feared that the security forces trained and financed by the United States are loyal more to their religious sects than to the current government. The power vacuum is palpable.

And the Iranian ayatollahs are watching everything, gloating. In their proud blindness, the Americans have given them what they couldn’t manage since the Islamic Revolution of 1979: A powerful influence in Iraqi policy.