Between Bush and Obama

Much in the same way that American President Bush announced, from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, victory and the end of military operations in Iraq in May 2003, so President Barack Obama announced a few days ago the beginning of the end of the war in Afghanistan, pledging to continue the American mission.

Nearly a decade has passed between these two pronouncements. While the faces, strategies and alliances have changed, these self-evident variables show that the Iraq war was lost, and that the U.S. operated outside of legitimate international contexts, in opposition to the will of the Iraqis. This cost the Bush administration its reputation and the veracity of its claims to invade Iraq; the announcement of victory in Iraq was a lie. The day after the start of the American occupation of Iraq, the Iraqi resistance began, and the first U.S. soldier was killed on April 10, 2003 — a sign of the Iraqis’ immediate rejection of the occupation and the grounds for the occupation over the years that followed, until the Americans were forced to withdraw, humiliated and defeated, as their leader declared victory in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

Despite the difference in the presidents’ perspectives and justifications for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, their goals converged in terms of appetite for increased control, military intervention and unimaginably risky ventures. This has cost the U.S. and the Iraqi and Afghan people a great deal and introduced a cycle of violence and retaliation to the world, and in the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, in addition to wasting resources.

The Afghanistan war, the mission which Obama promised to his people to complete, is lost and is now a quagmire for the Americans. After more than a decade, the American administration is now forced to dialogue with the Taliban. The American administration took a heavy blow in 2001 and had to review its plans to provide concessions to various parties wanting to escape Afghanistan, the excessive casualties its forces suffered and the failure of those currently in power in Afghanistan to meet the security needs of their own people and stop the cycle of serial violence.

All the talk about victory in the Iraq war and the completion of the mission in Afghanistan reflects the American dilemma in dealing with the fallout of these wars, both in motives and results.

The Bush administration’s own staff exposed the motives and justifications, which they had touted, for invading Iraq and thus transformed a victory — in Bush’s eyes — into a defeat for the American venture in Iraq. The justifications for the Afghanistan war were supposedly in support of the Afghan people, and to rid the country of its backward regime, but the war instead transformed the country into a terrorist hotbed. The rules of the game in this country changed quickly after the current U.S. administration was forced to dispose of Bush’s legacy in order to open the dialogue with the former regime leaders, deposed in 2001.

After more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the world is no safer, as Bush’s administration had argued it would be in their grounds for war. Meanwhile, these two countries continue moving forward in uncertainty, and the American occupier has provided neither the Afghan nor the Iraqi people with the desired security and stability.

Exporting the American model of democracy, freedom and human rights advocacy abroad through the spears of occupation turned these ideals into mere slogans, which only confirm the failure of America’s projects and its defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.