Monday, April 13, 2009

The Loser

By Restless [Orginally on goofyblog 5.15.07]

Patrick Cockburn, author of The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, has written an analysis about the damage the Iraq war has done to America as a superpower. In his 5-page post on AlterNet, he makes it concretely clear what a monumental mistake it has been.

Moreover, even though U.S. covert policy is to stay in Iraq forever (gigantic embassy and military bases belie any statements to the contrary), the people of the Middle East just won’t allow that to happen. They win, we lose.

The war in Iraq that started in 2003 has now lasted longer than the First World War. Militarily, the conflicts could not be more different. The scale of the fighting in Iraq is far below anything seen in , but the political significance of the Iraq war has been enormous. America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.

At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.

The U.S. occupation has destabilized Iraq and the Middle East. Stability will not return until the occupation has ended. The Iraqi government, penned into the Green Zone, has become tainted in the eyes of Iraqis by reliance on a foreign power. Even when it tries to be independent, it seldom escapes the culture of dependency in which its members live. Much of what has gone wrong has more to do with the U.S. than Iraq. The weaknesses of its government and army have been exposed. Iraq has joined the list of small wars — as France found in Algeria in the 1950s and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s — that inflict extraordinary damage on their occupiers.

Link

What have I done to deserve such a fate
I realize I have left it too late
And so it’s true, pride comes before a fall
I’m telling you so that you won’t lose all

I’m a loser
And I’m not what I appear to be

- The Beatles

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