The American Occupation and the Delusion of the Lost Opportunity in Iraq

There is no graver issue than when a society’s elite falls into delusions and then gives the phantoms of those delusions free reign, allowing them to lead the society and shape its consciousness. If we review our history over the last five decades, we see that the movement of our society and its political powers has been governed by wishes and dreams. Days gone by have proved the fragility of those dreams’ foundation and wishes, as well as the improbability of their realization. In contrast to this excessive utopianism, the reality has often been shockingly violent. Iraqi society has only been disappointed in the things that it has adopted and the things imposed upon it by its political elites and their intellectual subordinates — none of which have come from the community’s free, informed choice, but have instead been excreted by a cruel authority that, save for the relatively tiny differences between one ruler and another and between one era and another, has never really fluctuated in its despotism. Society hasn’t only been disappointed by the waste of opportunities and resources, but, much more importantly, by the loss of precious blood that continues to drain out of Iraq to this very day.

When the American occupation of Iraq first began, it seemed as if the first stage of a new era had also begun, with concepts that Iraq had not known for a very long time — concepts like democracy, human rights, elections, civil society and other similarly new terms. Although these terms found in the new political discourse were important in the lives of the people, our political elites, along with the intellectual elites that live off what the political elites feed them, dealt with the issue through dreams and wild fantasies. They imagined that the ballot box would be like Moses’s magic staff (peace be upon him) and that is how they portrayed it to the people. While this dream world was out of touch with domestic reality — i.e. it was a superficial understanding of the complexities and huge problems in Iraq — it was even more ignorant of the intentions, goals and background of the newcomer to Iraq, a country weighed down by tragedies and disasters caused by a long history of despotism. At the end of that history, a cruel, black imprint of this kind of devastating authoritarianism remains.

The most widely proliferated delusion was that Iraq would, in the hands of the American occupation, be a new Japan or Germany for the 21st century. This kind of rosy dream was circulated before and after the occupation began, through both written articles and word of mouth. When it wasn’t realized, those fingers and mouths that had spread it turned around, accusing the Iraqis of letting an opportunity escape them. Furthermore, many of them began claiming that the Iraqis are “the people of lost opportunities,” the previous one having been British colonialism. They claimed that Iraqis wasted that opportunity too, even though historical evidence proves that every time the British entered a country, they preserved its dominant traditions, consolidated its backwardness as much as they could and obstructed its progress. This was quite unlike the French, who carried the concepts and values of the French revolution. There are many examples of Britain’s colonial conduct, but perhaps the most prominent is India, the country whose wealth Britain lived off for two centuries. India was exposed to the biggest plundering operation in history. Thus, history confirms that no opportunity was lost with the end of Britain’s occupation of Iraq and the effects that followed because Britain never gave Iraq the opportunity in the first place. But was a different opportunity lost in America’s occupation of Iraq, in which Britain participated as a partner?

In any case, in order to dissipate the delusion that Iraq could have been like Japan and Germany, it should be noted that those were not backwards countries living off oil revenue. Rather, they were developed capitalist countries. Japan’s industrial awakening, like that of Germany, preceded America’s by more than a century and a half. Likewise, Japan, a small country, was occupying many countries in East Asia between itself and China before the Second World War. It entered the war as an equal to great rising powers like the United States. This means that it had sufficient capabilities and power to occupy its place as a global superpower. When the Americans occupied Japan after its defeat in the Second World War, they turned to schemes engineered to humiliate the country. They went to the extent of banning the Japanese language and attempting to replace it with English, banning the country’s flag and the praising of its glories, and other degrading measures that would have continued to distort Japan’s character if an unexpected event hadn’t flipped America’s plans upside down. That event was the victory of the communist revolution in China and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. It made America turn to restoring Japan’s power and economic role, at the very least, so that the country didn’t fall, due to the circumstances of the occupation, into the clutches of communism — the most dangerous enemy at the time for the United States and, behind it, the Western world. The necessary ingredients for Japan to reclaim its economic might were readily available. Japan didn’t change from a backwards or poor country to a rich and developed country because of America’s occupation or assistance. Rather, it did so due to the virtue of its past—a past Japan was able to continue from after many of the restrictions that were limiting its movement and preventing it from officially acquiring freedom from the occupation were eased. The occupation turned into a friendly presence that Japan needed in order to protect itself, but that protection would occur on its own sovereign terms, not those of the occupation. The relationship turned into a relationship of equals that returned Japan to its former role and place despite the restrictions that limited Japan’s military development, which complied with a domestic Japanese trend as much as they did with tangible international needs.

In turn, the development seen in Germany — a country that needs no introduction — was also not a result of the American occupation there. Rather, the country was one of the pillars of the global capitalist system in the Western world. When it entered the Second World War, its goal was to adjust international balances and defend its economic interests. It was a rising capitalist country that strived to acquire an ample share of the international market. When the Second World War ended in Germany’s destruction, the goal of the Marshall Plan — investments made by the United States and the Western world — was to rehabilitate a capitalist country the development of which was in the interests of the global capitalist system. The fact that Germany belonged to the Christian West was an additional reason for the rehabilitation operation. On this basis, resurrecting Germany was a profitable move for the West to make, with returns on various different levels. But there is another important factor underpinning the massive undertaking that, over the course of a decade, brought a devastated Germany back to the position it had occupied in its previous era — that of a great economic power whose influence was subsequently strengthened by its unity. That factor is that America, when it took leadership of the West in the provision of aid to Germany, had a large degree of wealth. The war had not drained America like it had drained the other Western allies. Similarly, the adoption of its national currency as a monetary means of international exchange, thanks to the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, gave America the advantage of begin able to swap its paper money, which had become a global currency, for various resources, commodities and services from different countries around the world. In other words, it could get them for free, if we deduct the cost of producing the paper, or in exchange for a mounting debt of which there was no sign or possibility that it would ever repay.

These things put America in a different situation to that which it was experiencing when it occupied Iraq. This time, it was weighed down by successive financial crises, which it, along with its allies, was trying to overcome by eagerly looking for ways to continually plunder the world’s resources through varying means and methods under different pretexts and excuses. There is no doubt that what the Arab region is witnessing today traces back to this goal. In relation to the United States’ grand strategic goals in the region, the occupation of Iraq doesn’t deviate from the framework of the search for another opportunity to plunder the resources of the countries, especially those in the Arab region, that suffer from the problem of being vulnerable to the great powers.

At the forefront of the United States’ grand strategic goals is what Bernard Lewis, the theoretician of these transformations and a top expert in society, linguistics and politics, calls correcting the mistake that Britain made during the first quarter of the last century by creating states in the region for peoples who still lived in the nomadic stage and were therefore unable to rise to the task of building and developing a nation-state. The United States, its Western allies and “Israel” employ long-term policies to realize this goal. Accordingly, the region must be returned to its previous era, in which it consisted of sects and creeds, to drown once again in its sectarian wars. This is what America has come to strive for with its occupation of Iraq, an important, fundamental power in the geography of the region. Besides the systematic plundering of Iraq’s resources and the depletion of the country’s income through a process of circulating funds that all oil-producing countries—especially those orbiting the West—are witnessing, America has given itself three objectives. Those three objectives will subsequently act as a model for the rest of the Arab countries, whose implementation will flow gradually from state to state. They are to disassemble the state, fragment the community and destroy the army. In completing these tasks, it doesn’t matter if some of the current formal, insubstantial features of a state, such as its name, its borders or other signs of its presence, are temporarily preserved until the implementation of the plan in other areas helps to create the right environment for redrawing the geopolitical map of the region. On this basis, America didn’t come to Iraq to build and develop, but to devastate and destroy. The signs of this are very clear for anyone with a sharp eye who wants to follow, firstly, the developments that Iraq has witnessed from the beginning of the occupation to this day and, secondly, the relationship between the situation in Iraq and the circumstances of the region as a whole.

It was important that what remained of the production sectors be paralyzed and destroyed. They had already been weakened by the period of the impenetrable international blockade, the policies of militarizing the economic sectors and the wasting of Iraq’s resources on futile wars, luxury and extravagance, and impromptu policies. Anyone following the economic situation in Iraq can clearly see that no mentionable effort has been made to rehabilitate any single agricultural or industrial production facility. Rather, many of them have been dismantled and many more have been neglected. As such, Iraq’s capitalist assets have turned to junk and the agricultural sector has been afflicted by neglect and ruin. The market was flooded with various imported foreign commodities and products that thwarted the ability of Iraqi products to compete, causing them to face a cumulative decline that reached the point of submission. The infrastructure, which was suffering from chronic ruin, did not receive any share of effort in construction or development. Whatever infrastructure existed was subjected to more ruin and fatigue until Iraq actually became one of the most backwards countries.

Today, it is no secret that the Iraqi economy is based upon two tributaries. The first is revenue, which constitutes, more or less, the only means of sustaining life regardless of whether we are talking about the government, its institutions or the citizens. The second is bribery, the role of which extends into the homes of all different influential people in power, regardless of their rank, and the decisions and powers that are in their hands, including the commissions and the division of shares in the markets, the portals of smuggling and other details of the secret, underground economy.

The issue of electrical power and Iraq’s inability to achieve a positive step toward solving that continuous problem is the biggest indicator of the country’s special situation. Despite the passing of a decade, the government that succeeded the occupation, with all the resources it has wasted on this chronic problem, has not been able to make any progress in solving it — not even a little. Initially, the reason for this failure seemed related to corruption, technical aspects, or funding. While the first factor does play a role in obstructing progress in any field of the national economy, the latter two factors don’t constitute a serious obstruction to solving the problem. That is because the problem, at its core, is political, not technical or financial. The provision of electricity means that progress and development are occurring in various different areas, and that is prohibited in Iraq — at least until a future time in which the country has truthfully, not superficially, recovered its national will. That goal may, at its core, require great international, regional and domestic changes of which, unfortunately, there are no signs of occurring on the visible horizon.

America has not disappointed anyone who hoped that it would, through its invasion of Iraq, create one of the two dreams for rebuilding the country [sic]. It was not content with just destroying Iraq, either through the blockade that preceded the occupation or with the systematic ruin that came after. Rather, it forbade any possible action that would allow Iraq to recover its wellbeing. Realizing this clear fact allows us to truly diagnose the catastrophic situation that Iraq is living in. The country’s infrastructure is eroding; the pillars of its economy are turning to rubble; its resources are being wasted in corruption and continuous plundering; and its problems are being exacerbated by the presence of a political class which, lacking competence and integrity, doesn’t possess the ability or will to overcome the restrictions that America has placed on Iraq to prevent it from escaping its cumulative catastrophic situation.

Perhaps what attracts attention is the fact that although ten years have passed, during which an uncountable number of conferences for supporters have convened under various different names at the expense of the state, on no single occasion has a conference been held for specialists on Iraq’s political and economic situation — i.e. people who research the country’s problems and the means available for escaping the long tunnel in which the policies of despotism and the subsequent occupation placed it. If Iraq can do that, it could catch up with its peers, both in the region and around the world, and make up for the opportunities to achieve stability and develop that it has lost.

–By a writer and political activist