Iraq intervention ends with scarcely a whimper

The fact that there was no fanfare in the US to herald the end of the Iraq war is a telling commentary on how differently the war is viewed today, says Jim Lobe.

WHEN the United States formally ended its eight-and-a-half-year military adventure in Iraq on 15 December with a flag-lowering ceremony presided over by Defence Secretary Leon Panetta in Baghdad, hardly anyone in the US seemed to notice, let alone mark the occasion in a special manner.

Similarly, earlier in the same week, when US President Barack Obama hosted Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at the White House to discuss - apparently rather inconclusively - the future strategic relationship between the two countries, hardly anyone paid attention.

The surprising lack of interest could be explained by the distractions of the holiday season, the Republican presidential race or the health of the global and US economies.

It could also be due to the fact that people were all too aware that, even as the last 4,000 US combat troops in Iraq headed for home, Washington still has more than 90,000 troops engaged in Afghanistan. That situation, in the public mind, is not all that different from Iraq, particularly because former President George W. Bush depicted them both as part of the 'global war on terror', or, as some of his more extreme neo-conservative cheerleaders described it in their typically apocalyptic hyperbole, 'World War IV'.

Or perhaps people would just as soon forget as a bad dream what the former head of the National Security Agency, the late Lt. Gen. William Odom, called back in 2005 - just two and a half years after the US invasion - 'the greatest strategic disaster in United States history'.

Within days of the 20 March 2003 launch of Washington's 'shock and awe' military campaign, some 70% of the public told pollsters they supported the war and thought it was 'the right thing to do', against about 25% who said the US should have stayed out.

Eight and a half years later, those numbers are virtually reversed: in a poll conducted in November by CNN, 68% of respondents said they oppose the US war in Iraq, while only 29% said they favour it.

In a CBS News poll also conducted in November, 67% of respondents assessed the Iraq war as 'not worth the loss of American lives and other costs' incurred. Only 24%, including a plurality of Republicans, disagreed - eloquent testimony indeed to the deep disillusionment most citizens feel about a war whose costs its initiators utterly failed to anticipate, let alone prepare for.

On the US side of the ledger, the costs have been staggering: nearly 4,500 soldiers killed, with tens of thousands more wounded in many ways, including severe brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs) that haunt and disable their victims for the rest of their lives.

The war's official price tag of approximately $1 trillion over the eight years ignores the far greater indirect costs.

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, has estimated total costs of the Iraq war on the US economy, including the costs of health care for veterans, at more than $3 trillion, a significant amount given the difficult economic straits in which this country finds itself.

In addition, the US suffered an immeasurable loss in international credibility. The stated justifications for going to war - Saddam Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, a rapidly developing nuclear weapons programme - proved utterly unfounded, while the mightiest, highest-tech war machine in history failed to suppress a variety of rag-tag insurgencies.

Of course, material US losses pale when compared to those of the Iraqis - estimated at well over 100,000 dead, and countless others, including hundreds of thousands of children, injured or traumatised by their experiences.

Nor can the social costs also be ignored: the United Nations has estimated the number of people who have fled their homes since the invasion at nearly five million, roughly equally divided between internally displaced persons (IDPs) within Iraq and refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries, including much of Iraq's previously thriving Christian community, or beyond.

Moreover, the still-smouldering embers of sectarian violence between the Shi'a-led government forces and militias and their Sunni rivals, as well as unresolved tensions between the Kurdish population in the north and Arabs over territorial claims in and around Kirkuk, have not just reconfigured the country's demography and politics. They also remain largely unresolved and therefore potential sources of major future conflict, even civil war. - IPS      

*Third World Resurgence No. 255/256, November/December 2011, p 63