How far it was from the triumphant departure of the much-hailed liberator, with young women blowing kisses and throwing flowers and children waving miniature American flags! A furtive ceremony behind acres of concrete, blade-wire and sandbags (three days before schedule, to wrong-foot the bombers), a two-sentence handover, and the liberator-in-chief hops into a helicopter and hot-tails it to safety. It was a fitting climax to a uniquely American shambles, born of a stubborn refusal to learn from history, a macho faith in arms and national hubris.
But of course it is not over — the Americans have not left Iraq, and real authority has not been transferred to the interim Iraqi government. The powers of the new regime are severely circumscribed, and it would not survive one minute without the firepower of 140 000 US soldiers and 20 000 other foreign troops. The new government must rebuild a country shattered by sanctions, war and sabotage, with an oil industry under constant terrorist threat as its only resource. The killing of three more GIs less than 24 hours after the handover underscores the stark reality that the resistance war continues, directed as much against a government viewed as an American stooge as against US forces themselves. In recent weeks, there has been a significant shift in the targets of violent insurgency, towards policemen and other servants of the new Iraqi state.
American author Gore Vidal speaks of the “United States of Amnesia”. So much of what is happening is Iraq, and seems doomed to happen in the months ahead, recalls the tragic US misadventure in Vietnam. There, also, the US tried to create and shore up a “friendly” government, allegedly founded on democratic values. As in Iraq, the mightiest military behemoth the world had seen floundered in a morass of unconventional warfare. Because it could not win and dared not be seen to lose, it poured more and more men and material into the conflict. More bombs fell on Vietnam and Cambodia than were dropped by all sides during World War II — without changing the outcome.
The Mail & Guardian would like to think that peace, democracy and economic progress will at last come to the Iraqi people. But the likelihood is that the $126-billion the US has already spent on the war will continue to escalate as military spending did in Vietnam, until casualties, the drainage of resources and American public opinion force an ignominious troop withdrawal. And, as in Vietnam, the likelihood is that the interim government, and any American-sponsored successor, will become more authoritarian, more isolated and more unpopular as insurrectionary violence and economic sabotage continue. Already there is talk of imposing martial law.
Far from bolstering security in Iraq and the Middle East, the US has stoked an ideological hornet’s nest. The mass of ordinary Iraqis may indeed want peace — but the hardliners drawn to the Iraqi jihad from every corner of the Islamic world will not rest until the US is driven from the region. Is it too far-fetched to imagine that Iraq, once under the essentially secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, may emerge from its current US-inspired upheavals as a theocratic tyranny, or set of tyrannies, along Afghani or Iranian lines? That would be richly — and tragically — ironic.
It is hard to be optimistic about Iraq’s future, but some good may yet come from this star-spangled cock-up. One large gain could be George W Bush’s growing domestic unpopularity and defeat in the US presidential election later this year — opinion polls encouragingly signal that he may be on the skids. As salutary as Bush’s downfall would be the toppling from power of the hard-eyed neo-conservative dogmatists that surround him, men and women who believe implicitly in the grand civilising mission of US arms and US big business.
Is it too much to hope that Americans, like children who burn their fingers once too often, will learn lessons from Iraq that Vietnam failed to teach them? The first of these is that unilateral force, without the sanction and collective wisdom of the international community, is both likely to fail and destructive of human solidarity. The second is that the most sophisticated military hardware is powerless in the face of an unconventional, “people’s” war — a lesson the British army should have learned in Northern Ireland. The third, as The Guardian‘s Jonathan Freedland argues in this edition of the M&G, is that democracy cannot be imposed at the sharp end of a smart bomb. The effect of the US invasions of both Vietnam and Iraq was to heighten nationalist resistance and recast the “liberator” as a sanguinary oppressor.
The world of the 21st century desperately needs the democratic values enshrined in the Constitution of the US, as well as its wealth, organisational skills and scientific and technical brilliance. But until it learns to partner its fellow-nations, and sheds the habits of coercion and military adventure, it remains a deadly threat to us all.