Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Iraq War

  • Stop Calling the Iraq War a Mistake

    Dennis Kucinich - Frank Kelly LectureAs Iraq descends into chaos again, more than a decade after “Mission Accomplished,” media commentators and politicians have mostly agreed upon calling the war a “mistake.” But the “mistake” rhetoric is the language of denial, not contrition: it minimizes the Iraq War’s disastrous consequences, removes blame, and deprives Americans of any chance to learn from our generation’s foreign policy disaster. The Iraq War was not a “mistake” — it resulted from calculated deception. The painful, unvarnished fact is that we were lied to. Now is the time to have the willingness to say that.

    In fact, the truth about Iraq was widely available, but it was ignored. There were no WMD. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The war wasn’t about liberating the Iraqi people. I said this in Congress in 2002. Millions of people who marched in America in protest of the war knew the truth, but were maligned by members of both parties for opposing the president in a time of war — and even leveled with the spurious charge of “not supporting the troops.”

    I’ve written and spoken widely about this topic, so today I offer two ways we can begin to address our role:

    1) President Obama must tell us the truth about Iraq and the false scenario that caused us to go to war.

    When Obama took office in 2008, he announced that his administration would not investigate or prosecute the architects of the Iraq War. Essentially, he suspended public debate about the war. That may have felt good in the short term for those who wanted to move on, but when you’re talking about a war initiated through lies, bygones can’t be bygones.

    The unwillingness to confront the truth about the Iraq War has induced a form of amnesia which is hazardous to our nation’s health. Willful forgetting doesn’t heal, it opens the door to more lying. As today’s debate ensues about new potential military “solutions” to stem violence in Iraq, let’s remember how and why we intervened in Iraq in 2003.

    2) Journalists and media commentators should stop giving inordinate air and print time to people who were either utterly wrong in their support of the war or willful in their calculations to make war.

    By and large, our Fourth Estate accepted uncritically the imperative for war described by top administration officials and congressional leaders. The media fanned the flames of war by not giving adequate coverage to the arguments against military intervention.

    President Obama didn’t start the Iraq War, but he has the opportunity now to tell the truth. That we were wrong to go in. That the cause of war was unjust. That more problems were created by military intervention than solved. That the present violence and chaos in Iraq derives from the decision which took America to war in 2003. More than a decade later, it should not take courage to point out the Iraq war was based on lies.

  • Accountability for the War In Iraq

    David KriegerThe current level of violence in Iraq has a single root: the destabilizing act in 2003 of illegally invading and then occupying Iraq ordered by the George W. Bush administration, with their arrogant claims that US troops would be greeted as liberators. Rather than liberating Iraq, however, our country lost yet another war there, one which left thousands of American soldiers dead, tens of thousands wounded and still more traumatized. We also destabilized the region; slaughtered and displaced Iraqis; left Iraq in a mess; created the conditions for a civil war there; strengthened Iran; created many new advocates of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations; and demonstrated disdain for international law.

    The Bush administration led and lied the US into an aggressive war, the kind of war held to be a crime against peace at Nuremberg.  The lying was despicable, an impeachable offense, but it is too late for the impeachment of a president and vice-president who are now out of office.  The initiation of an aggressive war was an act, however, for which there should always be accountability, as there was at Nuremberg.  This, of course, would require having the courage and principle as a country to create policies to hold our own leaders to the same standards that we held those leaders whom we defeated in combat.

    The failure of militarism to accomplish any reasonable end, compounded by the terrible and predictable loss of life, is a strong argument for pursuing peace by peaceful means. The most important question confronting the US as a society is: have we learned any valuable lessons or gained any wisdom from our defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan? Those wars demonstrate conclusively that as a country we learned all the wrong lessons (worse than nothing) from the grotesque war in Vietnam.

    Shall we send US forces back into Iraq because the intensity of the war there is increasing?  That is what those who lied us into the war in the first place would have us do.  Shall we follow their advice on the deployment of US military might yet again?  It is indisputable that the US has caused and set in motion terrible violence in Iraq.  But our military forces cannot reverse the harm we have already done and would likely only make matters worse.

    History tells us that the use of US force throughout the world since World War II has always made matters worse for the innocent civilians caught in the conflict.  There is no reason to believe that this time would be any different.  Should our political leaders fail to learn from our recent history, however, and choose to reengage with a military intervention, we can be sure that not only will there be terrible collateral damage, harming the innocent, but that our own soldiers will pay a heavy price and the problems with our Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals will be greatly exacerbated.

     

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).  His recent book, Summer Grasses, is an anthology of war poetry.

  • The Iraq War: Ten Years, Five Poems of Remembrance

    David KriegerIt has been ten years since the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq spearheaded by the George W. Bush administration.  It is an occasion for remembrance, reflection and deep regret.  It was a war built on lies that harmed everything it touched.  Most of all, it has harmed the children of Iraq and their families, and it continues to harm them even though the United States and its allies have officially left Iraq.

    The war has also done deep and possibly irreparable damage to the credibility and decency of the United States, the country that led in choosing war over peace.  It is an ongoing disgrace to America that we do not hold those who initiated aggressive warfare to account for their individual crimes, as the Allies did at Nuremberg following World War II.  Short of public international criminal trials, the best we can do now is commit ourselves to never again allowing an aggressive war to be committed in our names, build a world at peace, and be a force for peace in our personal and communal lives.

    The five poems that follow were written over an eight-year period, nearly the length of the nine-year war.  The first poem, “The Children of Iraq Have Names,” was written in the lead-up to the war and was read at many hopeful peace marches in late 2002 and early 2003, when many people throughout the world took to the streets seeking to prevent the war from occurring.  The second poem, “Worse Than the War,” was written in June 2004, a little over a year into the war.  In it, I give my thoughts on what could be worse than the war.

    The third poem, “To an Iraqi Child,” was written nearly a year later, in April 2005.  It is about a 12-year-old boy, Ali Ismail Abbas, who lost his mother, father, brother and 11 other relatives when a US missile struck his home.  The boy lost both of his arms in the attack. He had wanted to be a doctor.

    The fourth poem, “Greeting Bush in Baghdad,” was written in December 2008, near the end of the war and is based upon an incident that occurred when George W. Bush visited Iraq and spoke to the press there.  The fifth and final poem, “Zaid’s Misfortune,” was written in July 2010, and is a poem about another Iraqi child.

    The children of Iraq paid the price for a war that should not have happened.  So did the people of Iraq.  So did the young Americans that the government sent to fight and die there.  So did those Americans who fought in Iraq and came home injured and traumatized.  So did America itself and its allies pay the price of military failure, the loss of credibility and the trillions of dollars wasted on the war.  So did we all pay the price of being implicated in an unnecessary and immeasurably futile war.  When will we ever learn?

     

     

    The Children of Iraq Have Names

    The children of Iraq have names.
    They are not the nameless ones.

    The children of Iraq have faces.
    They are not the faceless ones.

    The children of Iraq do not wear Saddam’s face.
    They each have their own face.

    The children of Iraq have names.
    They are not all called Saddam Hussein.

    The children of Iraq have hearts.
    They are not the heartless ones.

    The children of Iraq have dreams.
    They are not the dreamless ones.

    The children of Iraq have hearts that pound.
    They are not meant to be statistics of war.

    The children of Iraq have smiles.
    They are not the sullen ones.

    The children of Iraq have twinkling eyes.
    They are quick and lively with their laughter.

    The children of Iraq have hopes.
    They are not the hopeless ones.

    The children of Iraq have fears.
    They are not the fearless ones.

    The children of Iraq have names.
    Their names are not collateral damage.

    What do you call the children of Iraq?
    Call them Omar, Mohamed, Fahad.

    Call them Marwa and Tiba.
    Call them by their names.

     

     

    Worse Than the War

    Worse than the war, the endless, senseless war,
    Worse than the lies leading to the war,

    Worse than the countless deaths and injuries,
    Worse than hiding the coffins and not attending funerals,

    Worse than the flouting of international law,
    Worse than the torture at Abu Ghraib prison,

    Worse than the corruption of young soldiers,
    Worse than undermining our collective sense of decency,

    Worse than the arrogance, smugness and swagger,
    Worse than our loss of credibility in the world,
    Worse than the loss of our liberties,

    Worse than learning nothing from the past,
    Worse than destroying the future,
    Worse than the incredible stupidity of it all,

    Worse than all of these,
    As if they were not enough for one war or country or lifetime,
    Is the silence, the resounding silence of good Americans.

     

     

    To an Iraqi Child

    for Ali Ismail Abbas

    So you wanted to be a doctor?

    It was not likely that your dreams
    would have come true anyway.

    We didn’t intend for our bombs to find you.

    They are smart bombs, but they didn’t know
    that you wanted to be a doctor.

    They didn’t know anything about you
    and they know nothing of love.

    They cannot be trusted with dreams.

    They only know how to find their targets
    and explode in fulfillment.

    They are gray metal casings with violent hearts,
    doing only what they were created to do.

    It isn’t their fault that they found you.

    Perhaps you were not meant to be a doctor.

     

     

    Greeting Bush in Baghdad

    “This is a farewell kiss, you dog.”
    — Muntader al-Zaidi

    You are a guest in my country, unwanted
    surely, but still a guest.

    You stand before us waiting for praise,
    but how can we praise you?

    You come after your planes have rained
    death on our cities.

    Your soldiers broke down our doors,
    humiliated our men, disgraced our women.

    We are not a frontier town and you are not
    our marshal.

    You are a torturer.  We know you force water
    down the throats of our prisoners.

    We have seen the pictures of our naked prisoners
    threatened by your snarling dogs.

    You are a maker of widows and orphans,
    a most unwelcome guest.

    I have only this for you, my left shoe that I hurl
    at your lost and smirking face,

    and my right shoe that I throw at your face
    of no remorse.

     

    Zaid’s Misfortune

    Zaid had the misfortune
    of being born in Iraq, a country
    rich with oil.

    Iraq had the misfortune
    of being invaded by a country
    greedy for oil.

    The country greedy for oil
    had the misfortune of being led
    by a man too eager for war.

    Zaid’s misfortune multiplied
    when his parents were shot down
    in front of their medical clinic.

    Being eleven and haunted
    by the deaths of one’s parents
    is a great misfortune.

    In Zaid’s misfortune
    a distant silence engulfs
    the sounds of war.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Iraq 10 Years Later: What Lessons Have Been Learned?

    This article was originally published by the Ventura County Star.

    This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War. As the longest and most costly war in U.S. history, the true costs in dollars, lives, environmental contamination and opportunity costs may never be fully appreciated.

    This “preventive war” waged on our behalf has forever tainted the world view and standing of the U.S. Perhaps the most significant outcome of the war is the identification and clarification, a “how to” of what doesn’t work in resolving international conflict. Namely war itself.

    Dollar estimates of the combined war costs range from $1.4 trillion to $4 trillion spent and obligated or a bill of between $4,500 and $12,742 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

    The human costs and death toll are immense. It is estimated that between 225,000 to more than 1 million have been killed when taking into account all the lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    To this tragedy are added the tens of thousands injured. Significant brain and spinal injuries to coalition forces approach 20 percent and PTSD 30 percent. The costs of treating these problems will continue for decades to come.

    The respected international mediator John Paul Lederach suggests that going to war to defeat terrorism is like hitting a mature dandelion with a golf club — it only creates another generation of terrorists.

    That graphic image is very telling in a part of the world where the mean age ranges from 17.9 in Afghanistan to 21.1 in Iraq. How will these future generations who lack the meeting of basic human needs respond to our war?

    We have fallen victim to the idea that the “ends justify the means” when in reality the means are the ends in the making.

    In his book Dying to Win, Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago examines the phenomenon of suicide bombing. His research reveals that despite religious conviction or revenge, the vast majority (95 percent) of suicide bombings always include the primary motivation of trying to push out foreign occupiers.

    In a way to somehow sanitize or numb ourselves to the horrific effects of this war we have seen an entirely new lexicon added to our language. From drones to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) to TBI (traumatic brain injury) to collateral damage to enhanced interrogation (torture) to rendition (torturing prisoners in outsourced countries) to suicide bombers.

    We have written legal treatises to soothe and justify our use of terrorism and assassination of even our own citizens. In the use of these methods, machines and practices, have we not become the embodiment of “the enemy”? What happens when the entire world has the same capabilities and beliefs? These are some of the realities after 10 years of war.

    We have fallen into financial disarray at home, with a significant contribution from these wars. The robbing of our own social fabric to cover these costs will play out for years to come. Yet, there are those who would continue to dismantle our social infrastructure to continue this war effort and that of future wars at any cost. How we address the facts at hand will determine our future and that of the world.

    Indeed conflict is inevitable. War is optional. We have the necessary means to address conflict without war. The means are the ends in the making.

    Robert Dodge is a family physician in Ventura, California, and is a member of the NAPF Board of Directors.

  • The Iraq War: 10 Years Later

    After a decade of combat, casualties, massive displacement, persisting violence, enhanced sectarian tension and violence between Shi’ias and Sunnis, periodic suicide bombings, and autocratic governance, a negative assessment of the Iraq War as a strategic move by the United States, United Kingdom, and a few of their secondary allies, including Japan, seems near universal. Not only the regionally destabilizing outcome, including the blowback effect of perversely adding weight to Iran’s overall diplomatic influence, but the reputational costs in the Middle East associated with an imprudent, destructive, and failed military intervention make the Iraq War the worst American foreign policy disaster since its defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s, and undertaken with an even less persuasive legal, moral, and political rationale.

    Most geopolitical accounting assessments do not bother to consider the damage to the United Nations and international law arising from an aggressive use of force in flagrant violation of the UN Charter, embarked upon in the face of a refusal by the Security Council to provide a legitimating authorization for the use of force despite great pressure mounted by the United States. The UN further harmed its own image when it failed to reinforce its refusal to grant authorization to the United States and its coalition, by offering some kind of support to Iraq as the target of this contemplated aggression. This failure was compounded by the post-attack role played by the UN in lending full support to the unlawful American-led occupation, including its state-building mission. In other words, not only was the Iraq War a disaster from the perspective of American and British foreign policy and the peace and stability of the Middle East region, but it was also a severe setback for the authority of international law, the independence of the UN, and the quality of world order.

    In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the United States was supposedly burdened by what policymakers derisively called ‘the Vietnam Syndrome.’ This was a Washington shorthand for the psychological inhibitions to engage in military interventions in the non-Western world due to the negative attitudes towards such imperial undertakings that were supposed to exist among the American public and in the government, especially among the military who were widely blamed for the Vietnam disaster. Many American militarists at the time complained that the Vietnam Syndrome was a combined result of an anti-war plot engineered by the liberal media and a response to an unpopular conscription or ‘draft’ that required many middle class Americans to fight in a distant war that lacked both popular support, a convincing strategic or legal rationale, and seemed to be on the wrong side of history, which as the French found out in their own Indochina War favored anti-colonial wars of liberation. The flag-draped coffins of dead young Americans were shown on TV, leading defense hawks to contend somewhat ridiculously that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms.’ The government made adjustments that took these rationalizations serious: the draft was abolished, and reliance  henceforth was placed on an all-volunteer professional military complemented by large-scale private security firms; also, intensified efforts were made to assure media support for subsequent military operations by ‘embedding’ journalists in combat units and more carefully monitoring news reporting.

    President, George H.W. Bush told the world in 1991 immediately after the Gulf War that had been successfully undertaken to reverse the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait that “we have finally kicked the Vietnam Syndrome.” In effect, the senior President Bush was saying to the grand strategists in the White House and Pentagon that the role of American military power was again available for use to do the work of empire around the world. What the Gulf War showed was that on a conventional battlefield, in this setting of a desert war, American military superiority would be decisive, could produce a quick victory with minimal costs in American lives, and bring about a surge of political popularity at home. This new militarist enthusiasm created the political base for recourse to the NATO War in 1999 to wrest Kosovo from Serb control. To ensure the avoidance of casualties, reliance was placed on air attacks conducted from high altitudes. The war took more time than expected, but was interpreted as validating the claim of war planners that the United States could now fight and win ‘zero casualty wars.’ There were no NATO combat deaths in the Kosovo War, and the war produced a ‘victory’ by ending Serbian control over Kosovo as well as demonstrating that NATO could still be used and useful even after the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet threat that had explained the formation of the alliance in the first place.

    More sophisticated American war planners understood that not all challenges to United States interests around the world could be met with air power in the absence of ground combat. Increasingly, political violence involving geopolitical priorities took the form of transnational violence (as in the 9/11 attacks) or was situated within the boundaries of territorial states, and involved Western military intervention designed to crush societal forces of national resistance. The Bush presidency badly confused its new self-assurance about the conduct of battlefield international warfare where military superiority dictates the political outcome and its old nemesis from Vietnam War days of counter-insurgency warfare, also known as low-intensity or asymmetric warfare, where military superiority controls the battlefield but not the endgame of conflict which depends on winning the allegiance of the territorial population.

    David Petraeus rose through the ranks of the American military by repackaging counterinsurgency warfare in a post-Vietnam format relying upon an approach developed by noted guerrilla war expert David Galula, who contended that in the Vietnam War the fatal mistake was made of supposing that such a war would be determined 80% by combat battles in the jungles and paddy fields with the remaining 20% devoted to the capture of the ‘hearts and minds’ of the indigenous population. Galula argued that counterinsurgency wars could only be won if this formula was inverted.  This meant that 80% of future U.S. military interventions should be devoted to non-military aspects of societal wellbeing: restoring electricity, providing police protection for normal activity, building and staffing schools, improving sanitation and garbage removal, and providing health car and jobs.

    Afghanistan, and then Iraq, became the testing grounds for applying these nation-building lessons of Vietnam, only to reveal in the course of their lengthy, destructive and expensive failures that the wrong lessons had been learned by the militarists and their civilian counterparts. These conflicts were wars of national resistance, a continuation of the anti-colonial struggles against West-centric  domination, and regardless of whether the killing was complemented by sophisticated social and economic programs, it still involved a pronounced and deadly challenge by foreign interests to the national independence and rights of self-determination that entailed killing Iraqi women and children, and violating their most basic rights through the unavoidably harsh mechanics of foreign occupation. It also proved impossible to disentangle the planned 80% from the 20% as the hostility of the Iraqi people to their supposed American liberators demonstrated over and over again, especially as many Iraqis on the side of the occupiers proved to be corrupt and brutal, sparking popular suspicion and intensifying internal polarization. The truly ‘fatal mistake’ made by Petraeus, Galula, and all the counterinsurgency advocates that have followed this path, is the failure to recognize that when the American military and its allies attack and occupy a non-Western country, especially in the Islamic world, when they start dividing, killing and policing its inhabitants, popular resistance will be mobilized and hatred toward the foreign ‘liberators’ will spread. This is precisely what happened in Iraq, and the suicide bombings to this day suggest that the ugly patterns of violence have not stopped even with the ending of America’s direct combat role.

    The United States was guilty of a fundamental misunderstanding of the Iraq War displayed to the world when George W. Bush theatrically declared on May 1, 2003 a wildly premature victory from the deck of an American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with the notorious banner proclaiming ‘mission accomplished’ plainly visible behind the podium as the sun sank over the Pacific Ocean. Bush reveled in this misunderstanding by assuming that the attack phase of the war was the whole war, forgetting about the more difficult and protracted occupation phase. The real Iraq War, rather than ending, was about to begin, that is, the violent internal struggle for the political future of the country, one made more difficult and protracted by the military presence of the US and its allies. This counterinsurgency sequel to occupation would not be decided on the kind of battlefield where arrayed military capabilities confront one another, but rather through a war of attrition waged by hit and run domestic Iraqi forces, abetted by foreign volunteers, opposed to the tactics of Washington and to the overall aura of illegitimacy attached to American military operations in a Third World setting. Such a war has a shadowy beginning and a still uncertain ending, and is often, as in Iraq, as it proved to be earlier in Vietnam and Afghanistan, a quagmire for intervening powers. There are increasing reasons to believe that the current Iraqi leader, Nouri al-Maliki, resembles the authoritarian style of Saddam Hussein more than the supposed constitutional liberal regime that the United States pretends to leave behind, and that the country is headed for continuing struggle, possibly even a disastrous civil war fought along sectarian line. In many respects, including the deepening of the Sunni/Shi’a divide the country and its people are worse off that before the Iraq War without in any way questioning allegations about the cruelty and criminality of the regime headed by Saddam Hussein.

    The Iraq War was a war of aggression from its inception, being an unprovoked use of armed force against a sovereign state in a situation other than self-defense. The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals convened after World War II had declared such aggressive warfare to be a ‘crime against peace’ and prosecuted and punished surviving political and military leaders of Germany and Japan as war criminals. We can ask why have George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been investigated, indicted, and prosecuted for their roles in planning and prosecuting the Iraq War. As folk singer Bob Dylan instructed us long ago, the answer is ‘blowin’ in the wind,’ or in more straightforward language, the reasons for such impunity conferred upon the American and British leaders is one more crude display of geopolitics—their countries were not defeated and occupied, their governments never surrendered and discredited, and such strategic failures (or successes) are exempted from legal scrutiny. These are the double standards that make international criminal justice a reflection of power politics more than of evenhanded global justice.

    There is also the question of complicity of countries that supported the war with troop deployments, such as Japan, which dispatched 1000 members of its self-defense units to Iraq in July 2003 to help with non-combat dimensions of the occupation. Such a role is a clear breach of international law and morality. It is also inconsistent with Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. It was coupled with Tokyo’s diplomatic support for the U.S./UK-led Iraq War from start to finish. Should such a record of involvement have any adverse consequences? It would seem that Japan might at least review the appropriateness of its complicit participation in a war of aggression, and how that diminishes the credibility of any Japanese claim to uphold the responsibilities of membership in the United Nations. At least, it provides the people of Japan with a moment for national soul-searching to think about what kind of world order will in the future best achieve peace, stability, and human dignity.

    Are there lessons to be drawn from the Iraq War? I believe there are. The overwhelming lesson is that in this historical period interventions by the West in the non-West, especially when not authorized by the UN Security Council, can rarely succeed in attaining their stated goals. More broadly, counterinsurgency warfare involving a core encounter between Western invading and occupying forces and a national resistance movement will not be decided on the basis of hard power military superiority, but rather by the dynamics of self-determination associated with the party that has the more credible nationalist credentials, which include the will to persist in the struggle for as long as it takes, and the capacity to capture the high moral ground in the ongoing legitimacy struggle for domestic and international public support. It is only when we witness the dismantling of many of America’s 700+ acknowledged foreign military bases spread around the world, and see the end of repeated US military intervention globally, that we can have some hope that the correct lessons of the Iraq War are finally being learned. Until then there will be further attempts by the U.S. Government to correct the tactical mistakes that it claims caused past failures in Iraq (and Afghanistan), and new interventions will undoubtedly be proposed in coming years, most probably leading to costly new failures, and further controversies as to ‘why?’ we fought and why we lost. American leaders will remain unlikely to acknowledge that the most basic mistake is itself militarism and the accompanying arrogance of occupation, at least until this establishment consensus is challenged by a robust anti-militarist grassroots political movement not currently visible.

    Richard Falk is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and NAPF Senior Vice President.

  • The Eighth Anniversary of the Iraq War

    David KriegerOn this eighth anniversary of the Iraq War, I feel a deep sense of sadness mixed with anger, along with regret for what might have been.  We’ve had eight years of futile war in Iraq and nearly ten years of the same in Afghanistan.


    Following September 11, 2001, the world stood with the US.  We had a choice then: to respond legally, morally and with wisdom; or, like a helpless giant, to flail out with our vast arsenal of weapons.  To our shame, our leaders, then and now, have taken the latter course. 


    Before this war began, many of us marched for peace.  People all over the world marched for peace, but peace was not to be.


    Dick Cheney said, “We will be greeted as liberators.”


    Donald Rumsfeld said, in effect, that the war would pay for itself: “The bulk of the funds for Iraq’s reconstruction will come from Iraqis – from oil revenues, recovered assets, international trade, direct foreign investment….”


    George W. Bush said, we will attack “at a time of our choosing.”  He dismissed the United Nations, saying “The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities.  So we will rise to ours.”  He chose to attack Iraq on the evening of March 19, 2003, and he did so with shock and awe, but without legality under international law. 


    Less than two months later, Bush dressed up in a flight suit, landed on the aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, stood under a sign that said “Mission Accomplished,” and boasted with his usual shortsightedness, “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”  The people of the world will have prevailed when Mr. Bush is on trial at the International Criminal Court.
     
    The result of our Global War on Terror is that we have spent more than $780 billion on the Iraq War and more than $387 billion on the Afghanistan War, a total of over $1.167 trillion.  These wars have cost California $147 billion, and have cost our 23rd Congressional District $2.6 billion.  These numbers grow by the day.  Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, has predicted that the total cost of the war in Iraq to the Federal government and to society will conservatively exceed $3 trillion.


    It is long past time to end this drain of our resources, which might have gone instead of war and massacre to support the poorest among us, to schools, to health care, and to improve our infrastructure. 


    The Global War on Terror, along with other excesses of capitalism, including massive fraud, has resulted in some 400 families in the US having assets exceeding those of the poorest 50 percent of Americans, some 155 million people.  Four hundred families versus half our population.  And many of our political representatives have fought for tax breaks for the very rich, while seeking to end the collective bargaining rights of the unions for public employees – teachers, nurses, firefighters and policemen.  This is just plain wrong.  But it is what we have become as a nation.


    Across this nation, people still haven’t connected the dots to understand the toll war takes on our society.


    Of course, the money wasted is only a part of the outrage that has weakened our country.  More importantly, some 4,500 American soldiers have died in Iraq. Of these, 4,300 Americans died since George Bush dressed up in his flight suit and gave his victory speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln.  But the death toll of Americans is dwarfed by that of Iraqis.  By some estimates, more than a million and a half Iraqis have died in the Iraq War.  Four million have been displaced from their homes.


    In Afghanistan, 1,498 American soldiers have died and 2,361 total coalition forces have died.  In 2010 alone, 2,777 civilians died in Afghanistan.  Of these, 1,175 were children and 555 were women.


    It is tempting to say that they all died because George Bush lied.  But George Bush’s lies were only one factor.  They also died because so many good Americans were silent in the face of these wars.  They also died because, in the case of Afghanistan, Barack Obama escalated the war and made it his own.


    Let me conclude with a poem I wrote about the war, titled “Worse than the War.”



    WORSE THAN THE WAR


    Worse than the war, the endless, senseless war,
    Worse than the lies leading to the war,


    Worse than the countless deaths and injuries,
    Worse than hiding the coffins and not attending funerals,


    Worse than the flouting of international law,
    Worse than the torture at Abu Ghraib prison,


    Worse than the corruption of young soldiers,
    Worse than undermining our collective sense of decency,


    Worse than the arrogance, smugness and swagger,
    Worse than our loss of credibility in the world,
    Worse than the loss of our liberties,


    Worse than learning nothing from the past,
    Worse than destroying the future,
    Worse than the incredible stupidity of it all,


    Worse than all of these,
    As if they were not enough for one war or country or lifetime,
    Is the silence, the resounding silence of good Americans.


    When will we say that we’ve had enough?  When will America try to regain its conscience, its soul, its decency and its honor?  When will we become a force for peace in the world?  The answer is: It’s up to us!  It’s up to us to take back our country and put it on the path to peace.

  • “Rapid Withdrawal is the Only Solution”

    Testimony of William E. Odom, LT General, USA, Ret., before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

    April 2, 2008

    Good morning Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is an honor to appear before you again. The last occasion was in January 2007, when the topic was the troop surge. Today you are asking if it has worked. Last year I rejected the claim that it was a new strategy. Rather, I said, it is a new tactic used to achieve the same old strategic aim, political stability. And I foresaw no serious prospects for success.

    I see no reason to change my judgment now. The surge is prolonging instability, not creating the conditions for unity as the president claims.

    Last year, General Petraeus wisely declined to promise a military solution to this political problem, saying that he could lower the level of violence, allowing a limited time for the Iraqi leaders to strike a political deal. Violence has been temporarily reduced but today there is credible evidence that the political situation is far more fragmented. And currently we see violence surge in Baghdad and Basra. In fact, it has also remained sporadic and significant inseveral other parts of Iraq over the past year, notwithstanding the notable drop in Baghdad and Anbar Province.

    More disturbing, Prime Minister Maliki has initiated military action and then dragged in US forces to help his own troops destroy his Shiite competitors. This is a political setback, not a political solution. Such is the result of the surge tactic.

    No less disturbing has been the steady violence in the Mosul area, and the tensions in Kirkuk between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen. A showdown over control of the oil fields there surely awaits us. And the idea that some kind of a federal solution can cut this Gordian knot strikes me as a wild fantasy, wholly out of touch with Kurdish realities.

    Also disturbing is Turkey’s military incursion to destroy Kurdish PKK groups in the border region. That confronted the US government with a choice: either to support its NATO ally, or to make good on its commitment to Kurdish leaders to insure their security. It chose the former, and that makes it clear to the Kurds that the United States will sacrifice their security to its larger interests in Turkey.

    Turning to the apparent success in Anbar province and a few other Sunni areas, this is not the positive situation it is purported to be. Certainly violence has declined as local Sunni shieks have begun to cooperate with US forces. But the surge tactic cannot be given full credit. The decline started earlier on Sunni initiative. What are their motives? First, anger at al Qaeda operatives and second, their financial plight.

    Their break with al Qaeda should give us little comfort. The Sunnis welcomed anyone who would help them kill Americans, including al Qaeda. The concern we hear the president and his aides express about a residual base left for al Qaeda if we withdraw is utter nonsense. The Sunnis will soon destroy al Qaeda if we leave Iraq. The Kurds do not allow them in their region, and the Shiites, like the Iranians, detest al Qaeda. To understand why, one need only take note of the al Qaeda public diplomacy campaign over the past year or so on internet blogs. They implore the United States to bomb and invade Iran and destroy this apostate Shiite regime. As an aside, it gives me pause to learn that our vice president and some members of the Senate are aligned with al Qaeda on spreading the war to Iran.

    Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased. You might want to find out the total costs for these deals forecasted for the next several years, because they are not small and they do not promise to end. Remember, we do not own these people. We merely rent them. And they can break the lease at any moment. At the same time, this deal protects them to some degree from the government’s troops and police, hardly a sign of political reconciliation.

    Now let us consider the implications of the proliferating deals with the Sunni strongmen. They are far from unified among themselves. Some remain with al Qaeda. Many who break and join our forces are beholden to no one. Thus the decline in violence reflects a dispersion of power to dozens of local strong men who distrust the government and occasionally fight among themselves. Thus the basic military situation is far worse because of the proliferation of armed groups under local military chiefs who follow a proliferating number of political bosses.

    This can hardly be called greater military stability, much less progress toward political consolidation, and to call it fragility that needs more time to become success is to ignore its implications. At the same time, Prime Minister Maliki’s military actions in Basra and Baghdad, indicate even wider political and military fragmentation. We are witnessing is more accurately described as the road to the Balkanization of Iraq, that is, political fragmentation. We are being asked by the president to believe that this shift of so much power and finance to so many local chieftains is the road to political centralization. He describes the process as building the state from the bottom up.

    I challenge you to press the administration’s witnesses this week to explain this absurdity. Ask them to name a single historical case where power has been aggregated successfully from local strong men to a central government except through bloody violence leading to a single winner, most often a dictator. That is the history of feudal Europe’s transformation to the age of absolute monarchy. It is the story of the American colonization of the west and our Civil War. It took England 800 years to subdue clan rule on what is now the English-Scottish border. And it is the source of violence in Bosnia and Kosovo.

    How can our leaders celebrate this diffusion of power as effective state building? More accurately described, it has placed the United States astride several civil wars. And it allows all sides to consolidate, rearm, and refill their financial coffers at the US expense.

    To sum up, we face a deteriorating political situation with an over extended army. When the administration’s witnesses appear before you, you should make them clarify how long the army and marines can sustain this band-aid strategy.

    The only sensible strategy is to withdraw rapidly but in good order. Only that step can break the paralysis now gripping US strategy in the region. The next step is to choose a new aim, regional stability, not a meaningless victory in Iraq. And progress toward that goal requires revising our policy toward Iran. If the president merely renounced his threat of regime change by force, that could prompt Iran to lessen its support to Taliban groups in Afghanistan. Iran detests the Taliban and supports them only because they will kill more Americans in Afghanistan as retaliation in event of a US attack on Iran. Iran’s policy toward Iraq would also have to change radically as we withdraw. It cannot want instability there. Iraqi Shiites are Arabs, and they know that Persians look down on them. Cooperation between them has its limits.

    No quick reconciliation between the US and Iran is likely, but US steps to make Iran feel more secure make it far more conceivable than a policy calculated to increase its insecurity. The president’s policy has reinforced Iran’s determination to acquire nuclear weapons, the very thing he purports to be trying to prevent.

    Withdrawal from Iraq does not mean withdrawal from the region. It must include a realignment and reassertion of US forces and diplomacy that give us a better chance to achieve our aim.

    A number of reasons are given for not withdrawing soon and completely. I have refuted them repeatedly before but they have more lives than a cat. Let try again me explain why they don’t make sense.

    First, it is insisted that we must leave behind military training element with no combat forces to secure them. This makes no sense at all. The idea that US military trainers left alone in Iraq can be safe and effective is flatly rejected by several NCOs and junior officers I have heard describe their personal experiences. Moreover, training foreign forces before they have a consolidated political authority to command their loyalty is a windmill tilt. Finally, Iraq is not short on military skills.

    Second, it is insisted that chaos will follow our withdrawal. We heard that argument as the “domino theory” in Vietnam. Even so, the path to political stability will be bloody regardless of whether we withdraw or not. The idea that the United States has a moral responsibility to prevent this ignores that reality. We are certainly to blame for it, but we do not have the physical means to prevent it. American leaders who insist that it is in our power to do so are misleading both the public and themselves if they believe it. The real moral question is whether to risk the lives of more Americans. Unlike preventing chaos, we have the physical means to stop sending more troops where many will be killed or wounded. That is the moral responsibility to our country which no American leaders seems willing to assume.

    Third, nay sayers insist that our withdrawal will create regional instability. This confuses cause with effect. Our forces in Iraq and our threat to change Iran’s regime are making the region unstable. Those who link instability with a US withdrawal have it exactly backwards. Our ostrich strategy of keeping our heads buried in the sands of Iraq has done nothing but advance our enemies’ interest.

    I implore you to reject these fallacious excuses for prolonging the commitment of US forces to war in Iraq.

    Thanks for this opportunity to testify today.

    William E. Odom is a retired US Army 3-star general, and former Director of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan.

  • Five Years of Failure

    Article originally published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site

    If George Bush and Tony Blair had presided as CEOs over deceptive and fraudulent practices in the City comparable to those they are guilty of with regard to Iraq, they would have been immediately and unceremoniously sacked.

    Five years on, the legacy of the Iraq war is now clear. Let us look at the balance sheet.

    Based on an extrapolation from the figures of the Lancet study, more than 1 million Iraqi civilians have died – a figure that might even eclipse the genocide in Rwanda.

    In terms of casualties, 3979 US soldiers have died to date, and almost 30,000 have been seriously wounded.

    Four million refugees have been created. Two million of these have fled the country altogether; 2 million have been internally displaced.

    According to Joseph Stiglitz, the combined cost to the UK for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan comes to some £10bn, over £3bn of that having been spent in the last year alone. Based on estimates from the congressional budget office, the cost of the war to the US is in the trillions.

    Massive human rights abuses have been permitted and even perpetrated by the occupying nations. These include the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the Haditha killings of 24 civilians, the use of white phosphorous, the gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl and the murder of her family in Mahmoudiya, and the bombing and shooting of civilians in Mukaradeeb.

    Finally, the price of oil has quadrupled since 2002. Today it is almost $110 a barrel.

    What is so astonishing about these stories and statistics is that the politicians responsible for them have not been held accountable, despite the fact that between 65% and 70% of the population in this country opposed the war, and despite the fact that the war has been an unqualified disaster.

    We have entered a dangerous period in world politics, one in which our politicians are not being held accountable for their mistakes or for their lies.

    Tony Blair’s casual attitude to the rule of international law was demonstrated again this week when the foreign secretary, David Miliband, admitted to parliament that Britain assisted in the extraordinary rendition of US detainees to face uncertain treatment by foreign interrogators in foreign jails in 2002.

    We have become complicit in a series of secret, underhand “dirty tactics” in America’s so-called war on terror. This must stop now.

    Iraq was from the outset an immoral, illegal and unwinnable war. We did not provide enough troops or equipment, and we did not provide sufficient resources to back the civilians on the ground.

    We have failed to provide security. We have failed to provide good governance. We have failed in our efforts at reconstruction.

    Iraq today is less secure and less stable than it was under Saddam Hussein, a brutal dictator. Even under him, Iraq did not have 2 million people flee the country and 2 million people internally displaced.

    The failure is such that, according to an Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies poll in December 2006, 90% of Iraqis preferred Iraq under Saddam.

    What are our forces actually doing in southern Iraq? They have not been able to prevent the slaughter of the Iraqi people. The only reason, I would suggest, that Prime Minister Brown remains in Iraq is to provide camouflage for the American presence.

    So we must withdraw, and redeploy our forces somewhere in the world where we are able to do good. Continuing this war will further destabilise this region.

    In January 2006, General Sir Michael Rose called for Tony Blair’s impeachment over Iraq. I would make a different, more modest claim on Blair’s successor: Prime Minister Brown, I urge you and the British government to announce the date of our withdrawal from Iraq, and to do so today.

    I agree wholeheartedly with the statement by Amnesty International this week that on top of a much-needed independent enquiry, the government should unambiguously condemn all “renditions”, secret transfers and the programme of “ghost detentions”.

    History should have taught us by now that we will not bring democracy at gunpoint.

    Surely it is time now to admit that the war was a disaster. I urge Brown to have the strength and the integrity to do the right thing, to admit the mistakes of his predecessor and to withdraw completely and immediately from Iraq.

    At a press conference held to promote the Stop the War Coalition’s fifth anniversary protest march in London tomorrow, I called on the public not to vote for any MP who refuses to give his support to a full parliamentary enquiry. Politicians must be held to account for this colossal failure.

    Bianca Jagger is Chair of the World Future Council.

  • Accountability for the Iraq War

    David KriegerWe have been engaged in an illegal war in Iraq for five years – and there is no accountability.

    It is beyond doubt that our leaders lied us into this war – and there is no accountability.

    More than four thousand American and coalition soldiers are dead – and there is no accountability.

    Tens of thousands of American and coalition soldiers are seriously wounded – and there is no accountability.

    Our surviving soldiers are coming home traumatized from the war without proper medical and psychiatric care – and there is no accountability.

    More than a million Iraqis, mostly civilians, have been killed in this war and countless others wounded – and there is no accountability.

    More than four million Iraqis are displaced as internal or external refugees of this war – and there is no accountability.

    By using so-called “depleted uranium” weapons, we are poisoning the earth, air and water of Iraq, causing serious health problems to Iraqis and coalition soldiers – and there is no accountability.

    America has become a nation that tortures – and there is no accountability.

    America has become a nation that spies on its citizens – and there is no accountability.

    America has become a nation that hides the body bags of its soldiers killed in action – and there is no accountability.

    We are spending $12 billion a month on this war – and there is no accountability.

    Reputable economists calculate that this war will cost American citizens more than $3 trillion – and there is no accountability.

    This war is burdening unborn generations of Americans and Iraqis – and there is no accountability.

    This war has brought respect for America to its lowest ebb throughout the world – and there is no accountability.

    The war in Iraq has stretched our military forces to the breaking point, making us far less able to cope with real threats to our security – and there is no accountability.

    The war in Iraq has been a training ground for terrorists, making us far less safe – and there is no accountability.

    Accountability means holding to account those who are responsible for a war that is illegal under international law – in this case, it means holding to account those who have been irresponsible and criminal in their behavior. It means holding to account George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and others. It means not just their disgrace, but trials to bring them to justice.

    This is not a partisan issue – it is an issue of responsibility and accountability and, at a deeper level, an issue of restoring our decency, our dignity and our democracy.

    Americans must hold those responsible for this war to account.

     

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • How the Iraq War’s $2 Trillion Cost to the US Could Have Been Spent

    In war, things are rarely what they seem.

    Back in 2003, in the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon adamantly insisted that the war would be a relatively cheap one. Roughly $50 billion is all it would take to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, it said.

    We now know this turned out to be the first of many miscalculations. Approaching its fifth year, the war in Iraq has cost American taxpayers nearly $500 billion, according to the non-partisan U.S.-based research group National Priorities Project. That number is growing every day.

    But it’s still not even close to the true cost of the war. As the invasion’s price tag balloons, economists and analysts are examining the entire financial burden of the Iraq campaign, including indirect expenses that Americans will be paying long after the troops come home. What they’ve come up with is staggering. Calculations by Harvard’s Linda Bilmes and Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remain most prominent. They determined that, once you factor in things like medical costs for injured troops, higher oil prices and replenishing the military, the war will cost America upwards of $2 trillion. That doesn’t include any of the costs incurred by Iraq, or America’s coalition partners.

    “Would the American people have had a different attitude toward going to war had they known the total cost?” Bilmes and Stiglitz ask in their report. “We might have conducted the war in a manner different from the way we did.”

    It’s hard to comprehend just how much money $2 trillion is. Even Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world, would marvel at this amount. But, once you begin to look at what that money could buy, the worldwide impact of fighting this largely unpopular war becomes clear.

    Consider that, according to sources like Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs, the Worldwatch Institute, and the United Nations, with that same money the world could:

    Eliminate extreme poverty around the world (cost $135 billion in the first year, rising to $195 billion by 2015.)

    Achieve universal literacy (cost $5 billion a year.)

    Immunize every child in the world against deadly diseases (cost $1.3 billion a year.)

    Ensure developing countries have enough money to fight the AIDS epidemic (cost $15 billion per year.)

    In other words, for a cost of $156.3 billion this year alone – less than a tenth of the total Iraq war budget – we could lift entire countries out of poverty, teach every person in the world to read and write, significantly reduce child mortality, while making huge leaps in the battle against AIDS, saving millions of lives.

    Then the remaining money could be put toward the $40 billion to $60 billion annually that the World Bank says is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, established by world leaders in 2000, to tackle everything from gender inequality to environmental sustainability.

    The implications of this cannot be underestimated. It means that a better and more just world is far from within reach, if we are willing to shift our priorities.

    If America and other nations were to spend as much on peace as they do on war, that would help root out the poverty, hopelessness and anti-Western sentiment that can fuel terrorism – exactly what the Iraq war was supposed to do.

    So as candidates spend much of this year vying to be the next U.S. president, what better way to repair its image abroad, tarnished by years of war, than by becoming a leader in global development? It may be too late to turn back the clock to the past and rethink going to war, but it’s not too late for the U.S. and other developed countries to invest in the future.

    Craig and Marc Kielburger are children’s rights activists and co-founded Free The Children, which is active in the developing world. Marc Kielburger is a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Board of Directors.