Iraq: New evidence on the folly of the war

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

For the last year, the Iraq war had become almost invisible in the eyes of the American media and the U.S. public. The reasons include the decrease in violence in the country, the gradual drawdown in the number of U.S. troops, and the official end of U.S. combat operations. In contrast, the ascent of the Obama administration, the recent upsurge in deadly violence in Afghanistan, and the rapid escalation in the number of U.S. troops there has focused the attention of the media and Washington policymakers on the Afghan question. What had been, during the long Bush years, the forgotten war now became the center of attention.

Iraq is on the map again. Last week’s release by the web site Wiki Leaks of nearly 400,000 secret documents chronicling, in excruciating detail, the U.S. war in Iraq has once again placed in stark relief the folly and the tragedy of that war.

Before posting the documents online last weekend, the whistleblower web site had made the documents available in advance to a select number of media outlets, including The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel.

The new information shines a bright spotlight on the toll that the U.S. invasion and occupation has inflicted on the civilian population of Iraq. The Wiki Leaks release revealed the death of 15,000 Iraqi civilians that had not previously come to light. Incidents occurring at U.S. military checkpoints alone have led to the deaths of scores of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. And, as Iraqi civilian casualties were piling up, the U.S. military was keeping count while all the time insisting to the media and the public that they were doing no such thing. Thus a war entered into on the basis of a pack of lies was portrayed as less bloody than it really was by keeping the public in the dark about the extent of the civilian carnage.

On several occasions, U.S. helicopters accidentally killed civilians. In one incident, a U.S. helicopter spotted Afghan combatants who made gestures of surrender. A military lawyer back on base told the chopper’s crew that it was not possible for the Afghans to surrender to a helicopter, leading to the helicopter firing on the surrendering insurgents, with deadly results.

One of the pretexts used by the Bush administration to justify the war was the creation of a more democratic and humane government in Iraq. But the Wiki Leaks documents demonstrate that the Iraqi forces created and nurtured by the United States have often murdered or tortured their prisoners and have been responsible for numerous civilian deaths. Meanwhile, American and British forces had standing orders to basically look the other way, specifically by reporting the outrage to the same Iraqi units that had carried out the abuses.

Another aspect of the American war in Iraq underlined by the Wiki Leaks revelations is the unprecedented extent to which in this war the United States has relied on mercenaries, or “contractors” to use the official euphemism. This reliance, now being replicated in Afghanistan, is likely to increase as more U.S. troops leave Iraq. The outsourcing of wars to mercenary forces leads to many troubling questions, including accountability. Already, the all-volunteer military created in the wake of the Vietnam War in order to depoliticize U.S. involvement in foreign adventures, has created a chasm between the minute percentage of the population engaged in war directly or indirectly through family ties and the vast majority of Americans who go about their daily lives oblivious to the deadly dramas being played out in Baghdad and Kabul. Outsourcing war to mercenaries would go one step further in reducing the political cost of engaging in senseless and unnecessary conflicts.

In the end, the Iraq war has inflicted an enormous cost in lives, money, and prestige on the United States. To what end? The Wiki Leaks documents demonstrate the enormous influence that Iran has acquired in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. Thus, the irony: one of the main results of the enormous suffering of the Iraqi and American people and the colossal economic cost of the Iraq war has been to advance the strategic interests of that American nemesis, the Islamic Republic