Iraq and persistence of US hegemony

Rob Urie
The most recent war on Iraq is widely considered to be George W Bush’s war but a majority of leading Democrats including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry voted to grant Mr Bush authority for the war. As its moral, military and geopolitical catastrophes have emerged, it is necessary to remember that a large majority of Americans also supported both Mr Bush and the war on Iraq when it was undertaken.

Left largely unsaid in discussion of the events currently unfolding, as the CIA has armed and “trained” Syrian “rebels”, is that according to UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) America’s war sent 1.2 million Iraqis fleeing to Syria to escape violence in Iraq.

And a total of four million Iraqis were displaced. The question of precisely how many Iraqis were killed from the US invasion and occupation ranges from the determined undercount of 191 000 on the low end to over one million on the high end.

The most plausible count placed the number of “excess” Iraqi deaths at 655 000 by 2006, five full years before US troops left the country.
With “official” America debating how to respond to what at present appears to be a Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Iraq the question both within and outside of the US is: why do America and the Americans have any say in the matter?

The last quarter century of US engagement in Iraq has been a series of military and geopolitical blunders with catastrophic consequences across the Middle East.

The answer of course, as it was with the mis-sold invasions of 1990 and 2003, is Operation Iraqi Liberation, oil. The dim hubris of Bush / Cheney/ Rumsfeld/ Rice that broke “Iraq” into Sunni and Shi’ite factions has been met by leading Democrats with claims that the war was “mismanaged” and that Iraq remains of some vaguely specified “vital interest”. The moral, ethical and societal sickness that has US President Obama now sending murder robots (drones) and additional troops to force the will of “official” Washington onto what remains of the national government of Iraq misses that it was this very same will that caused the social / political catastrophe now claimed to be in need of rectification.

The American farce now underway is to argue implausibly parsed party politics when the whole of US officialdom bears substantial responsibility for current circumstances in Iraq, to a large extent for the broader Middle East, and most certainly for what remains of America.

The illumination-lite question of when US history in Iraq began is being used to hide / ignore that this much is known: The CIA helped bring Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party to power in a CIA-orchestrated coup in the early 1960s.

After overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran in a CIA-MI5 orchestrated coup in 1953 the Reagan / (George H.W.) Bush administrations supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War in the early-mid 1980s.

That war resulted in substantial casualties and Reagan / Bush went so far as to supply Iraq with chemical and biological weapons to use against Iran. George H.W. Bush hired public relations firms to sell the first Gulf War in 1990-1991 as a war of liberation while giving wholly fictional accounts of the geopolitical interests at stake. The US propaganda effort for that war went so far as to have the Kuwaiti Ambassador’s daughter pose as a witness to Iraqi atrocities that did not, in fact, occur.

Estimates are of 60 000 – 200 000 Iraqi soldiers killed in the first Gulf War, mostly Iraqi conscripts buried by bulldozers in the desert sand.
Political economy in the Middle East is no doubt complicated, but American involvement has historically been relatively straightforward, even when covert. When George W. Bush told former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner that war would “grow the US economy” what on the surface might be understood to mean “military Keynesianism”, the economic argument that government spending on munitions and equipment boosts economic growth, can more properly be understood as imperial prerogative.

The gangster accounting that Mr Bush was using put US munitions sales, oil company profits and rebuilding contracts in the ‘plus’ column while failing to deduct the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the displacement of four million more, the near total destruction of a modern nation-state and the setting in motion of historical forces that will continue to wreak havoc for decades, if not centuries, to come.

It is no accident that Mr Bush also forced a developed, explicitly extractive, neo-liberal economic ‘system’ on Iraq after it was believed that military “success” had been achieved.

Were US goals strictly political and “democratisation” one of them evolution of an economic order favoured by the people of Iraq would have been in order. — Counterpunch.