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The
American Disaster in Iraq
By
Richard
Falk,
TFF Associate
Albert G. Milbank Professor of
International Law Emeritus, Princeton University;
Visiting Professor, UCSB, 2002-2004 and Chair, Board,
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Falk is the author, of The
Great Terror War (2003)
and Declining World Order (2004).
See other books by Richard Falk in "The
100 Best Books"
June 17, 2004
Originally written in April 2004
After the bloodiest week in the
American occupation of Iraq, the same tired slogans about
"seeing it through" and "staying the course" are about
all that our leaders seem able to say. Such a paucity of
moral and political imagination does not serve well the
citizens of this country or of the world, and seems a
recipe for a surefire descent further into the political
inferno that Iraq is daily becoming. It is fine to wonder
aloud whether 9/11 could have prevented by due diligence
at the White House, but it is no excuse for not focusing
on the least disastrous endgame for Iraq. Let us recall,
as the Pentagon Papers demonstrated, that it took
American leaders a decade of bloodshed to acknowledge in
public the failure that they privately had come to
recognize the Vietnam War to have been. It may be up to
the American citizenry to shorten the learning cycle this
time around, with so much more at stake.
The steady descent into an
American-led foreign policy whirlpool allows us to
consider the worst features of the Bush approach to the
challenges of world order.
First of all, unilateralism with
respect to waging war in flagrant violation of the UN
Charter and international law, underscored by the
American president's arrogant assertion in the 2004 State
of the Union Address: "America will never seek a
permission slip to defend the security of our country."
Secondly, the mission impossible
associated with imposing democracy on a sovereign state
by force of arms in defiance of national aspirations.
This undertaking is being daily exposed as a recipe for
policy failure in Iraq, a country beset by internal
religious, ethnic, regional conflicts and a political
tradition with zero receptivity to American-style
democracy.
Thirdly, the imperial claim that
America embodies the only model for political and
economic success. As expressed in the important White
House document of September 2002, National Security
Strategy of the USA: "The great struggles of the
twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism
ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom--
a single sustainable model for national success: freedom,
democracy, and free enterprise." All other political
arrangements are illegitimate in the eyes of Washington,
and it is some pathological version of this model that
remains the blueprint for Iraq despite the overwhelming
evidence that the Iraqis want to decide their future by
themselves, and do not accept either prescriptions for
their future whether issued as decrees by the occupiers
or by their designated Iraqi representatives on the Iraqi
Interim Governing Council.
And finally, the obsessive
preoccupation with the Middle East as the pivot of the
American grand design for world domination. The neocons
shaping the Bush presidency view strategic control of the
region as vital for their conception of global security,
which includes oil, safe havens for American private
investment, and a lethal partnership with Israel. This
was all made clear in their definitive planning document
prepared in the months before George W. Bush came to
Washington under the auspices of the Project for a New
American Century. It is notable in this latter regard,
that Israel's approach to the Palestinians has inspired
the tactics and structure of the American occupation of
Iraq, with similar results of deepening indigenous
resentments and gradually imposing on an oppressed people
the stark choice between abject surrender and violent
resistance. Also nightly more in evidence is the American
use of tanks, missiles, and bombers against unarmed or
lightly armed Iraqi resisters.
As matters stand, there is no
favorable endgame for this war. There is not yet in the
American political or media mainstream, including the
Kerry presidential bid, even a hint of withdrawal. The
consensus in Washington is that the stakes are too large
to admit failure, and that any hasty departure from Iraq
would trigger a vicious civil war with adverse regional
effects. At the same time, the much heralded transfer of
sovereignty on June 30 seems like a fig leaf designed to
disguise the realities of continuing military occupation,
and is unlikely either to mean anything substantive about
the exercise of authority in Iraq or to fool a single
person in Baghdad. To begin with, how can the US
Government transfer what it does not possess? Or put
another way, if Iraqi sovereignty is a reality, what are
American occupying forces doing in the country against
the expressed will of the Iraqi people and their
authentic representatives? And how are we to explain the
current construction of 14 large military bases for US
forces designed to accommodate a permanent military
presence in the country? This is a terrain of American
dreams, Iraqi nightmares!
So far, the American political
leadership has not faced up to the failure of its Iraq
policy, and so is paralyzed, caught in a cycle of
escalating violence that recalls Vietnam. Because of the
strategic importance of Iraq, many think the better
analogy is the French prolonged inability to acknowledge
defeat in Algeria. It took all the prestige and patriotic
credibility of Charles DeGaulle to extricate France, and
even then France came perilously close to
self-destructing in the aftermath. We here in the United
States need to be asking ourselves and others, with a
sense of urgency, what will it take to bring the Iraqi
disaster to closure.
On the broader front, the warnings
and opportunities associated with the Madrid train
bombings of March 11th are instructive. The Spanish
citizenry immediately opted in its general elections
three days later for an anti-war opposition party, and
responded to their 9/11 with the slogan "No to terrorism!
No to war!" If only America had displayed such political
wisdom. Although it is late, it is not too late. A change
in presidential leadership in November, although unlikely
to offer much immediate prospect of change, will create
some needed political space for moving in new, more
constructive directions, and will at least rid the United
States and the world of the current extremist worldviews
that have given rise to the tragic ordeal of
Iraq.
©
TFF & the author 2004
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