http://www.boulderweekly.com/?site_id=619&page_id=18323&id_sub=18323
March 20-26, 2008
editorial@boulderweekly.com
A fall in U.S. power, prestige and influence
by Warren P. Strobel
5 years after Iraq's "liberation," there are worms in the water
by Hannah Allam
A personal accounting of Iraqi dead
by Liz Sly
---
Five years ago, the United States embarked on what has clearly become
a disastrous war, not only for the people Americans supposedly hoped
to liberate, but also for the United States and, ultimately, the
world. Well, hindsight is 20/20, as they say.
Except, in this case, foresight was also 20/20.
In the months leading up to the war, the mainstream media, apparently
bored with covering the news, went on a bender of coverage that, if
not outright pro-war, was at least not critical of the president's
plans to attack Iraq. Then, about a week before the attack, headlines
announced that Americans overall weren't really opposed to this war
and many were openly supportive of it.
However, alternative newsweeklies across the country joined
independent media sources denouncing the war and challenging the
perceptions being promoted by slumbering corporate news giants. At
Boulder Weekly, we spent a week covering every anti-war event in the
county, putting them together in a timeline as incontrovertible proof
that many Americans were opposed the war before it started.
But we didn't stop there. Together with dozens of alternative papers,
we tried for months to explain to our readers what would happen if
the United States unleashed a pre-emptive war on Iraq.
Digging through the rhetoric coming from the White House and using
expert sources, we warned that there were no weapons of mass
destruction. We warned of the lost international standing should the
United States invade a weaker nation without provocation. We warned
of the corporate plundering of our tax dollars, setting our sights
early on Halliburton and other military contractors. We warned about
the high death toll, describing how lack of clean water, lack of
medical supplies and lack of electricity would cost the Iraqis
thousands upon thousands of lives. We warned of the potential
backlash of invading another country an increase in terrorism. We
warned that it wouldn't be easy to get out of Iraq once we were there
and that Americans would be making the world less safe for democracy,
not safer. And we warned of the American kids, many of whom joined
the military because they couldn't otherwise go to college, who would
be maimed and killed to carry out the greedy ambitions of rich, old
men like George W and Cheney.
Sadly, we were right. As we reach the fifth anniversary of "shock and
awe," Boulder Weekly takes a look at the cost of the war not only in
terms of dollars, but also in terms of lost goodwill and increased
human suffering.
The consequences of this conflict continue to mount, and none of us
can truly know where it's going to end. But Americans can't claim
they were duped. They can't say that they didn't understand. They
can't claim they didn't know. The same information that was available
to the independent media was also available to every single American
citizen, and millions of Americans chose to ignore it. We walked into
this pathetic and terrible war with our eyes wide open.
Shame on us.
Pamela White
--
A fall in U.S. power, prestige and influence
by Warren P. Strobel
It was a decision that only President Bush had the power to make:
About 9 a.m. on March 19, 2003, in the Situation Room in the basement
of the West Wing of the White House, he gave the "execute order" to
begin Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Now, five years later, the consequences of that act will soon be
beyond Bush's grasp. In 10 months, they'll land on the desk of his successor.
Thanks in part to the Iraq war, the next U.S. president Republican
or Democrat, black or white, man or woman will take office with
America's power, prestige and popularity in decline, according to
bipartisan reports, polls and foreign observers.
"The winner of the 2008 elections will command U.S. forces still at
war in Iraq, Afghanistan and against elusive terrorists with a deadly
reach. The U.S. economy will remain burdened. ... America's moral
leadership and decision-making competence will continue to be
questioned," begins a study of foreign-policy choices for the next
president, which a Georgetown University task force released last month.
"Restored respect will come only with fresh demonstrations of
competence," the study said.
The numbers don't inspire confidence: Oil prices are at an all-time
high, the dollar at new lows against the euro. Surveys find the
United States' popularity and respect slipping in every part of the
globe except Africa. A poll of 3,400 active and retired U.S. military
officers by Foreign Policy magazine found that 88 percent agreed with
the statement that "the war in Iraq has stretched the U.S. military
dangerously thin."
Not all of the challenges facing Bush's successor can be blamed on
the invasion and the failure of civilian leadership to plan for what
would happen next in Iraq. There are other forces at work,
foreign-policy specialists say, including an increasingly globalized
economy with new centers of wealth and power, China's rise and the
growth of Islamic extremism.
The federal government's inept response to Hurricane Katrina dealt
another blow, causing some prominent U.S. allies to question not
America's intentions or its wisdom, but its competence, a prominent
Arab ruler once told a top U.S. diplomat.
But because of the invasion of Iraq, "America's strategic position in
the world has worsened," said Josef Joffe, the editor and publisher
of Die Zeit, a German weekly that's sympathetic to United States.
"From a coldly realist perspective, Iraq was the wrong war against
the wrong foe at the wrong time."
The removal of Saddam Hussein strengthened Iran and "by entangling
itself in an interminable civil war, the U.S. has lost power to
spare," Joffe said.
Bush has never wavered in defending the most fateful choice of his presidency.
"The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early
in my presidency, it is the right decision at this point in my
presidency and it will forever be the right decision," he told
religious broadcasters earlier this month.
With improvements in security in much of Iraq over the past year, it
still seems possible that the country could someday experience
stability and even prosperity, thanks to its vast oil deposits.
"The prognosis in Iraq is potentially a lot more promising than it's
been in a long time," said Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign
Relations, who was in Iraq in March and April 2007 as part of
commander Gen. David Petraeus' staff.
But even under the best of circumstances, tens of thousands or more
U.S. troops may be needed to stabilize Iraq throughout the next
president's first term and beyond.
That could limit the next president's options, even as he or she
deals with more basic questions about how to restore the United
States' standing in the world.
U.S. credibility also has been undermined, at home and abroad, by the
administration's false claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction and ties to al-Qaeda prior to the Iraq war.
Several recent blue-ribbon panels recommended that the next president
make major changes in how the United States deals with the world.
He or she, they said, should rely more on "soft" or "smart" power,
such as diplomacy, promoting U.S. values and rebuilding alliances;
use persuasion rather than coercion to achieve goals when possible;
and invest more in non-military tools such as public diplomacy and foreign aid.
More provocatively, they advocate replacing the "war on terrorism"
which has colored virtually every aspect of Bush's foreign policy
as the focus of American security strategy. Instead, they say, the
United States should be the leader in advancing peace, liberty and
prosperity worldwide.
"Since 9/11, the United States has been exporting fear and anger
rather than the more traditional values of hope and optimism.
Suspicions of American power have run deep," Richard Armitage, deputy
secretary of state under Bush, and Joseph Nye, a Pentagon official
under President Clinton, wrote in a December report published by the
Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"At the core of the problem is that America has made the war on
terrorism the central component of its global engagement," they wrote.
That doesn't mean going soft on terrorists, said Chester Crocker, the
co-chairman of the separate Georgetown University report, which also
called for a new guiding principle for U.S. foreign policy.
But Crocker, an assistant secretary of state for Africa under
President Reagan, said the war on terrorism has inflamed suspicions
of U.S. motives, forced Washington to look the other way when its
counterterrorism allies engage in bad behavior themselves, and led to
an over-focus on the Middle East.
"Obviously, we can't ignore these hotspots," he said. But "if all we
really care about is what's going on in the struggle within the
Islamic world, we're not a world power anymore."
Many specialists also advise a more subtle, patient and less
hectoring approach when it comes to advancing global democracy, which
was one of the justifications Bush gave for invading Iraq.
Instead, the invasion "set it back in multiple senses," said Larry
Diamond, a Stanford University expert on democracy promotion and
author of the new book The Spirit of Democracy.
"Number one, it didn't go well," he said. U.S. efforts to spread
democracy "were equated with insecurity, violence, refugees." Arab
autocrats then used the specter of instability to argue against
political liberalization.
"We have to approach the whole thing on fresh terms," Diamond said,
with a strategy that "is incremental, that is more gradual, that
doesn't over-reach."
Crafting a new foreign policy may not be easy, even for a new
president making a fresh start.
"Europeans may delude themselves in thinking that their problem was
with Bush, the president, and not with America, the superpower," said
Joffe, the German publisher and academic. But the next president
"will still be at the helm of the mightiest nation on earth, one that
faces more threats and has more means to combat them than anybody else."
Said Crocker: "We are substantially leveraged or mortgaged by
legacies" such as Iraq. "The next president has to figure out a way
to dig out of this hole."
MCT
---
5 years after Iraq's "liberation," there are worms in the water
by Hannah Allam
Iraq's most prominent clerics have ruled that using a water pump on
one's own pipes is akin to stealing resources from a neighbor, so
what does a person do when it takes half an hour to fill a cooking
pot with water from the tap?
Iraqis pray for forgiveness, then pump away.
To them, the real crime is that five years after the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq, they still swelter in the summer and freeze in the
winter because of a lack of electricity. Government rations are
inevitably late, incomplete or expired. Garbage piles up for days,
sometimes weeks, emanating toxic fumes.
The list goes on: black-market fuel, phone bills for land lines that
haven't worked in years, education and health-care systems degraded
by the flight of thousands of Iraq's best teachers and doctors.
When the Iraqi government announced that 2008 would be "the year of
services," workaday Iraqis had their doubts.
"Under Saddam's regime, we had limited salaries but we had security
and decent services. Now, we have decent incomes but we lose it all
to water, propane, groceries, fuel. We save nothing," said Balqis
Kareem, 46, a Sunni Muslim housewife who lives in the predominantly
Shiite Muslim district of Karrada. "This government gives with the
right hand and takes away with the left."
At Kareem's modest, single-story home, a wall in the living room
sprouts a tangle of electrical wires, a reflection of the three power
sources she juggles throughout the day: the government's supply, her
own small generator and the neighborhood's larger generator. Even so,
for five years she hasn't been able to keep milk or meat in the
refrigerator for more than a few hours because it spoils so quickly
in the daily blackouts.
A kitchen cupboard holds a barely touched box of rationed tea, which
Kareem described as "so bitter no amount of sugar can sweeten it."
She said that she'd once used a magnet to clean metallic flakes from
a bag of government-supplied rice. She barred her four children from
drinking tap water after she found worms floating in a glass she'd poured.
The family's home phone rarely works, though earlier this month a
worker from the phone company showed up demanding payment for calls
that they both knew she hadn't made. Like so many employees of
government utilities, he wanted a bribe.
"I just got to the point and told him, 'Don't waste my time. How much
do you want?'" Kareem said. "He told me, I paid him and then went on
with my day. I'm practical."
As another scorching summer approaches, everyone has to improvise to
find electricity. Those who can't afford generators have to grease
the meter men to look the other way as they splice wires and steal
more than their permitted amount of power. At most, they'll be able
to run a TV set, a couple of fluorescent bulbs and maybe the water
pump. Of course, that's only when the electricity is on never more
than five hours a day and typically closer to two.
"Anyone who says that solving the services issue will take two or
three years is exaggerating. Iraqi cities need years of work and
billions of dollars," said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "The destruction that we inherited,
which was increased by terrorism, makes the suffering of Iraqis very
difficult. Ending this needs time and effort, but the prime minister
is determined to start the work and, God willing, Iraqis will feel
the improvement in the coming few months."
Increasingly, Iraqis are relying on militias and other armed groups
to fill the services void. Stories abound of neighborhood militiamen
commandeering power plants and forcing terrified engineers to flip
the switches even during government blackouts, turning militants into
heroes and further undermining the unpopular al-Maliki administration.
In some poor areas of Baghdad, militias or Iranian-backed charities
have become the main source of propane tanks, food staples, garbage
collection and other services that the government should provide.
"They always talk, but nothing is tangible so far," Karam Hussein,
60, a Shiite retiree, said of the government. He lives in Baghdad's
Shaab neighborhood, which is mostly under the control of the Mahdi
Army militia. "On the contrary, when they talk, things always get
worse. It's better if they just stop talking."
In the hardscrabble, mostly Shiite neighborhood of Shohada,
67-year-old Hani Abdel Hussein is desperately trying to sell the
family home in hopes of moving to an area with better services.
Damage from a stray mortar shell that plunged through the roof isn't
the only deterrent for buyers, however.
Trash collection is so sporadic that residents tie up their garbage
in plastic bags and fling them onto a reeking pile at the end of the
street. Electricity is mainly from a private generator, and water
shortages have forced Abdel Hussein to shower at a public bathhouse
in another neighborhood.
His land line has been dead for the past three years, though he
recently received a bill for about $70.
"If the phone actually worked, I'd be happy to pay today," the
soft-spoken father of three said. "I don't believe it's that hard for
the government to bring back services. But they had 50 sessions of
parliament just to remove the stars from the flag. I guess they're too busy."
MCT
--
A personal accounting of Iraqi dead
by Liz Sly
I asked my close Iraqi colleague, Nadeem Majeed, to write down a list
of the people he knows who have died in the five years since the Iraq
war began. It took a long time. And as Nadeem tapped away on the
computer, unknown to us, another name was being added to the list. A
friend, Nassir Jassem Akkam, 38, was among the 68 people killed in
the recent suicide bombing of a busy shopping street nearby, one of
the bloodiest attacks in Baghdad in a while. Akkam had slipped back
to Baghdad for a quick visit after fleeing to Syria with his wife and
1-year-old son. When he died, he had in his pocket a ticket to travel
the following day.
Akkam became No. 45 on Nadeem's list.
For me, one of the most striking indicators of the suffering Baghdad
has endured is to be found in our own office, in the number of people
known just to the Iraqis working in the Chicago Tribune's bureau who
have been killed.
Our news operation is small compared with most. But if we were to
open a Facebook account for our little bureau's social network of
relatives and friends, it would be littered with the faces of the dead.
I'm not talking about people we sought out to interview because of
their stories, or public figures and sources whose circumstances may
have predisposed them to death in a war zone. Plenty of those have died, too.
I'm talking about people already known to the Iraqis who work for us,
ordinary people who led ordinary lives until war came and turned
their country upside down.
There are no reliable figures for the number of Iraqi civilian
casualties of the war. A 2006 Johns Hopkins survey cited as many as
600,000 violent deaths, a count much in dispute.
A recent World Health Organization report, based on Iraqi Health
Ministry figures, came up with an estimate of 151,000 violent deaths
through the end of 2006. That excludes the thousands who died in the
violence that raged during the first half of last year, before the
surge strategy helped bring down the number of attacks.
The website iraqbodycount.org, which monitors civilian casualties on
the basis of news reports, puts the number at 82,000 to 89,000 to
date, a figure that is almost certainly too low because many
incidents go unreported.
Among the unreported killings was Media Majeed, the sister of Nadeem
and his brother Arfan, who also works for us. A random bullet fired
in an exchange between police and insurgents ripped through her brain
on April 13, 2006, as she sat in the family car. She was on her way
to Nadeem's wedding party.
Instead, the brothers drove her to the hospital, blood spouting from
her forehead onto the wedding flowers piled in her lap. She died four
days later, at age 27, an unremarkable and unnoted death in a much
larger war, except that it changed irrevocably the lives of one still
grief-stricken Iraqi family.
Another death that hasn't been logged is that of Ayad Saleh, 35, one
of Nadeem's closest friends. He had been a regular visitor to our
office, for coffee and chats about the situation. On October 26,
2006, men wearing police uniforms called at his home and said they
were taking Ayad away for questioning.
Days later came the ransom demand, for $100,000, which the family was
told to leave at the gate of a nearby farm known to be occupied by
insurgents from al-Qaeda in Iraq. The family didn't have that kind of
money. They negotiated the figure down to $25,000, and paid as instructed.
Ayad hasn't been seen since. It's all but unthinkable that he's still alive.
Nadeem's list includes victims of all the different ways to die in
Iraq. He lived in the notoriously violent neighborhood of Dora, which
was overrun by al-Qaeda in 2005. The vast majority of his dead
friends, Sunni and Shiite alike, were gunned down by al-Qaeda, most
of them in a two-block area around his home.
But there are also those who fell prey to Shiite death squads, those
who died in bombings and those killed by American gunfire. A
7-year-old next-door neighbor, Rowayed Fa'ez Hanna, was shot dead
with his baby brother when U.S. soldiers opened fire on his family's
car in 2005. Two uncles and two cousins from the violent northern
town of Tal Afar also are on the list.
You don't bounce back from losing people like this. Nadeem and Arfan
visibly shrank after their sister was killed. I saw it in other
people too the two front-desk managers of the hotel where we keep
our bureau each lost only sons in 2005. They haven't looked the same since.
The Majeed family relocated to Syria after Media's death, joining the
exodus of 2.4 million Iraqis who have fled the country. Nadeem and
Arfan live with us in our bureau; their neighborhood is still
considered dangerous.
"I sometimes wonder what would be worse," Nadeem remarked to me
recently. "To never be able to go home again, or to go home and have
to live with all these ghosts."
For me, this has been the hardest part of covering Iraq not the
dangers or the hardships, but the experience of watching people die,
and of watching the lives of those they leave behind fall apart. You
feel the collective weight of accumulated grief hanging over the
streets of this worn-down, crumbling city.
Of course, there are parts of Iraq that have been relatively
unaffected by the violence and where people's experiences have been
very different. Baghdad has been at the epicenter of the killings,
both of the sectarian strife and the terrorist bombings, and my
anecdotal insights on the war's toll are based on the lives of those
living here.
There was a time, starting in 2005 and running into 2007, when the
stories of death were coming thick and fast, when almost every day it
seemed someone was coming to work with a new tale to tell of the
neighbor shot dead on the street outside his home, the mangled body
of a college friend found in the morgue. Death became the stuff of
water-cooler gossip.
That has now changed. The surge strategy, the Shiite militia
cease-fire and the Sunni revolt against al-Qaeda have sharply reduced
the number of attacks. Baghdad residents are enjoying a relative
reprieve from the horrors of the recent past.
But the violence hasn't stopped, and the stories still trickle in. A
February suicide bombing nearby killed the woman who ran the little
store from which we always bought our stationery. The son of one of
Nadeem's friends who visited us for tea a few years back was blown up
along with six American troops in a house bombing in January.
We didn't know them, so their names don't belong on the list.
For me, these small connections to the daily death toll bring a pang
of sorrow for the grief of others. And, yes, there's also that guilty
sense of relief that the victim wasn't one of our own.
For the Iraqis who live this war, there are no degrees of separation
from the dead.
MCT
.
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