Four years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. It's the anniversary few want to remember; and yet, for all the disillusionment in this country, getting out of Iraq doesn't exactly seem to be on the agenda either. Not really. Here's a little tip, when you want to assess the "withdrawal" proposals being offered by members of Congress. If what's being called for is a withdrawal of American "combat troops" or brigades, or forces, then watch out. "Combat troops" turns out to be a technical term, covering less than half of the American military personnel actually in Iraq.
Here's a simple argument for withdrawal from Iraq (suggested recently in a reader's email to this site) and not just of those "combat troops" either. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reports that, in January 2007, attacks on American troops surged to 180 a day, the highest rate since Baghdad fell in 2003, and double the previous year's numbers. Let's take that as our baseline figure.
Now, get out your calculator: There are 288 days left in 2007. Multiply those by 180 attacks a day remembering that the insurgents in Iraq are growing increasingly skilled and using ever more sophisticated weaponry and you get 51,840 more attacks on American troops this year. Add in another 65,700 for next year remembering that if, for instance, Shiite militias get more involved in fighting American troops at some point, the figures could go far higher and you know at least one grim thing likely to be in store for Americans if a withdrawal doesn't happen. (I first wrote a piece at Tomdispatch, "The Time of Withdrawal" back in October 2003, laying out the full reasons why I thought withdrawal was imperative and, unfortunately, it remains grimly relevant three and a half years later.)
Today, Anthony Arnove considers what that fourth anniversary means in
Iraq, offering a few figures and comparisons of his own. Arnove is the
author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, a small paperback modeled on a famous volume Howard Zinn
wrote way back in 1967, arguing for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. If
you want to make the case and it's a compelling one to friends,
neighbors, workmates, those who disagree with you, your Congressional
representatives, or anyone else, this is probably the book you should
have in your hands. Tom
Four Years Later... And Counting
Billboarding the Iraqi Disaster
By Anthony Arnove
As you read this, we're four years from the moment
the Bush administration launched its shock-and-awe assault on Iraq,
beginning 48 months of remarkable, non-stop destruction of that country
and still counting. It's an important moment for taking stock of
Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Here is a short rundown of some of what George Bush's war and occupation has wrought:
Nowhere on Earth is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
some two million Iraqis have fled their country and are now scattered
from Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to London and Paris. (Almost none
have made it to the United States, which has done nothing to address
the refugee crisis it created.) Another 1.9 million are estimated to be
internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighborhoods
by the U.S. occupation and the vicious civil war it has sparked. Add
those figures up and they're getting worse by the day and you have
close to 16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead to the
displaced, and that figure rises to nearly one in five Iraqis. Let that
sink in for a moment.
Basic foods and necessities, which even
Saddam Hussein's brutal regime managed to provide, are now increasingly
beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis, thanks to soaring inflation
unleashed by the occupation's destruction of the already shaky Iraqi
economy, cuts to state subsidies encouraged by the International
Monetary Fund and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the
disruption of the oil industry. Prices of vegetables, eggs, tea,
cooking and heating oil, gasoline, and electricity have skyrocketed.
Unemployment is regularly estimated at somewhere between 50-70%. One
measure of the impact of all this has been a significant rise in child malnutrition, registered by the United Nations
and other organizations. Not surprisingly, access to safe water and
regular electricity remain well below pre-invasion levels, which were
already disastrous after more than a decade of comprehensive sanctions
against, and periodic bombing of, a country staggered by a catastrophic
war with Iran in the 1980s and the First Gulf War.
In an
ongoing crisis, in which hundred of thousands of Iraqis have already
died, the last few months have proved some of the bloodiest on record.
In October alone, more than six thousand civilians were killed in Iraq,
most in Baghdad, where thousands of additional U.S. troops had been
sent in August (in the first official Bush administration "surge") with
the claim that they would restore order and stability in the city. In
the end, they only fueled more violence. These figures -- and they are
generally considered undercounts -- are more than double the 2005 rate.
Other things have more or less doubled in the last years, including, to
name just two, the number of daily attacks on U.S. troops and the
overall number of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded. United Nations
special investigator Manfred Nowak also notes that torture
"is totally out of hand" in Iraq. "The situation is so bad many people
say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."
Given the disaster that Iraq is today, you could keep listing terrible
numbers until your mind was numb. But here's another way of putting the
last four years in context. In that same period, there have, in fact,
been a large number of deaths in a distant land on the minds of many
people in the United States: Darfur. Since 2003, according to UN estimates,
some 200,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal
ethnic-cleansing campaign and another 2 million have been turned into
refugees.
How would you know this? Well, if you lived in New
York City, at least, you could hardly take a subway ride without seeing
an ad that reads: "400,000 dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur." The New York Times
has also regularly featured full-page ads describing the "genocide" in
Darfur and calling for intervention there under "a chain of command
allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from
distant political or civilian personnel."
In those same years, according to the best estimate available, the British medical journal The Lancet's door-to-door study of Iraqi deaths, approximately 655,000 Iraqis
had died in war, occupation, and civil strife between March 2003 and
June 2006. (The study offers a low-end possible figure on deaths of
392,000 and a high-end figure of 943,000.) But you could travel coast
to coast without seeing the equivalents of the billboards, subway
placards, full-page newspaper ads, or the like for the Iraqi dead. And
you certainly won't see, as in the case of Darfur, celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq.
Why is it that we are counting and thinking about the Sudanese dead as
part of a high-profile, celebrity-driven campaign to "Save Darfur," yet
Iraqi deaths still go effectively uncounted, and rarely seem to provoke
moral outrage, let alone public campaigns to end the killing? And why
are the numbers of killed in Darfur cited without any question, while
the numbers of Iraqi dead, unless pitifully low-ball figures, are
instantly challenged -- or dismissed?
In our world, it seems, there are the worthy victims
and the unworthy ones. To get at the difference, consider the posture
of the United States toward the Sudan and Iraq. According to the Bush
administration, Sudan is a "rogue state"; it is on the State
Department's list of "state sponsors of terrorism." It stands accused of attacking the United States through its role in the suicide-boat bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. And then, of course -- as Mahmood Mamdani pointed out in the London Review of Books
recently -- Darfur fits neatly into a narrative of "Muslim-on-Muslim
violence," of a "genocide perpetrated by Arabs," a line of argument
that appeals heavily to those who would like to change the subject from
what the United States has done -- and is doing -- in Iraq. Talking
about U.S. accountability for the deaths of the Iraqis we supposedly
liberated is a far less comfortable matter.
It's okay to discuss U.S. "complicity" in human rights abuses, but only as long as you remain focused on sins of omission, not commission. We are failing the people of Darfur by not
militarily intervening. If only we had used our military more
aggressively. When, however, we do intervene, and wreak havoc in the
process, it's another matter.
If anything, the focus on
Darfur serves to legitimize the idea of U.S. intervention, of being
more of an empire, not less of one, at the very moment when the carnage
that such intervention causes is all too visible and is being widely
repudiated around the globe. This has also contributed to a situation
in which the violence for which the United States is the most
responsible, Iraq, is that for which it is held the least accountable
at home.
If anyone erred in Iraq, we now hear establishment critics of the
invasion and occupation suggest, the real problem was administration
incompetence or George Bush's overly optimistic belief that he could
bring democracy to Arab or Muslim people, who, we are told, "have no
tradition of democracy," who are from a "sick" and "broken society"
and, in brutalizing one another in a civil war, are now showing their
true nature.
There is a general agreement across much of the political spectrum that we can blame Iraqis for the problems they face. In a much-lauded speech
to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Sen. Barack Obama couched his
criticism of Bush administration policy in a call for "no more
coddling" of the Iraqi government: The United States, he insisted, "is
not going to hold together this country indefinitely." Richard Perle,
one of the neoconservative architects of the invasion of Iraq, now says
he "underestimated the depravity" of the Iraqis. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Democratic frontrunner in the 2008 presidential election, recently asked,
"How much are we willing to sacrifice [for the Iraqis]?" As if the
Iraqis asked us to invade their country and make their world a living
hell and are now letting us down.
This is what happens when the imperial burden gets too heavy. The natives come in for a lashing.
The disaster the United States has wrought in Iraq is worsening by the
day and its effects will be long lasting. How long they last, and how
far they spread beyond Iraq, will depend on how quickly our government
can be forced to end its occupation. It will also depend on how all of
us react the next time we hear that we must attack another country to
make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction, "spread
democracy," or undertake a "humanitarian intervention." In the
meantime, it's worth thinking about what all those horrific figures
will look like next March, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion,
and the March after, on the sixth, and the March after that
Put it on a billboard -- in your head, if nowhere else.
Writings 
Four years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. It's the anniversary few want to remember; and yet, for all the disillusionment in this country, getting out of Iraq doesn't exactly seem to be on the agenda either. Not really. Here's a little tip, when you want to assess the "withdrawal" proposals being offered by members of Congress. If what's being called for is a withdrawal of American 
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