Why Bush Will Fail in Iraq

[miles-militis]

Why Bush Will Fail in Iraq by Karamatullah K. Ghori

 

George W. Bush is as unlikely to succeed in his bid to dovetail the UN in his touted re-construction of Iraq as in the effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

 

Bush and his neo cons. wilfully scorned the UN and treated it as a pariah. They were cock-a-hoop that they could dispense with an ‘ir-relevance’ like UN and do without it. The boot is now on the other leg, and the imperialists are being made to pay for their hubris. It’s the UN which feels that US presence in Iraq is a liability and not an asset for the arduous task of rebuilding that war-devastated country. There is little enthusiasm around to leave the Bush team in the driving seat and serve as merely an appendage to them.A UN subservience to US is not on the cards.

 

The tea-leaves in Iraq read no different. In fact, the American-occupied Iraq is a more snarled scenario than the UN. It’s a veritable can of worms that Bush’s mis-adventure has opened there.

 

There was no perspective of Iraq’s history with the Bush team, to begin with. To the Bushies it was an oil-rich booty ready to be plucked and plundered for the advancement of their global agenda providing for a series of pre-emptive wars, as General Wesley Clark has just revealed.

 

Victory in the war was never in doubt. However, for the war-aftermath they were fed wrong advice by self-serving Iraqi renegades like Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted bank-fraud felon, who were as much out of touch with Saddam’s Iraq as the Bushies. Rosy scenarios of American soldiers being welcomed as ‘liberators’ by a grateful Iraqi people were painted with deliberate mischief.

 

The architects of the war, like Wolfowitz, were cocky and bubbling with optimism that once conquered, Iraq will pay for its own re-construction with its huge natural resources. That was wishful thinking born of total ignorance of the colossal damage the Gulf War and 13 years of history’s most punishing sanctions had done to Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

 

Why did the Iraqis not welcome their ‘liberators’ as such? Because they have always detested foreigners coming in as their liberators and benefactors.

 

When Iraq was carved out of the rump Ottoman Caliphate in 1921 a scion of the Hashemites of Hejaz ( present-day Saudi Arabia’s west coast ) was foisted on the Iraqis as their king. They resented their alien ruler as much as the imperial power that had catapulted him. And when they tried to overthrow him, in 1936, it was the very same imperial power, Great Britain, that thwarted their movement and crushed it. They ultimately got rid of the royalists in the bloody military putsch of 1958. But Iraq’s patch-work entity—Sunni and Shiite Arbas, Kurds and Turkomans all jumbled together—remained wobbly because the military autocrats who succeeded the monarchy had as little finesse in dealing with Iraq’s ethnic mosaic as the royalists they’d overthrown.

 

Saddam was, no doubt, a tyrant and a ruthless ruler. But he’d two distinct advantages over his failed precursors.

 

One, he was truly a son-of-the-soil and had grown in the heartland of Iraq’s Sunni tribal belt. He’d, in his blood, all the subtleties of that tribal culture and knew, instinctively, how to tackle tribal sensitivities. And, two, by virtue of this innate knowledge he honed, over the years, the art of harnessing the hard core tribal strengths to his advantage.

 

Through bribes and bluster, Saddam garnered and ensured the loyalties of the tribal chiefs to his autocratic rule. That was a fail-safe formula, as far as the arcane tribal culture was concerned. Saddam knew that if the chief of a tribe was with him, the rest of the tribe would follow him without demur or rancour.

 

Even his autocratic style of governance served him well with the tribes. A tribal patriarch had to be authoritative or else he wouldn’t be respected. Saddam fitted that bill. He was effective and authoritative to the point of being ruthless. That’s something the Bushies, hooked on their own concoction of one-democracy model-serves-all, have no inkling of. A tribal society detests nothing more than outsiders telling them what’s best for them.

 

But Saddam didn’t rest on the tribal chiefs’ loyalty alone. He used Iraq’s oil wealth to bring worldly comforts to the Iraqi people. A fine network of roads and highways served him well too to consolidate his rule up to the far reaches of Iraq. Electricity was taken to the country’s remotest parts. A modern health-care system and an elaborate rationing scheme made sure no Iraqis suffered or starved. An excellent, education system, free from primary to university, crowned his welfare state.

 

The Americans have not even come close, in nearly 5 months of unbridled occupation,to addressing these basic needs of the Iraqis. Thy ought to know that the first priority of the Iraqi people is for these mundane things and not democracy, which has always been alien to them; they’ve no history of democratic rule.

 

Vis-à-vis the majority Shiites, Saddam followed different tactics. He knew the power of the hawzas ( seminaries ) over the Shiite followers and cracked the whip against them. He deprived the Shiites of grass-roots leadership by assassinating their religious leaders or driving them into exile. And yet the Iraqi Shiites remained loyal to their land. They proved the pundits wrong by not siding with their Iranian co-religionists during eight long years of Iran-Iraq War.

 

The Shiite lot became worse after the 1991 Gulf War when they were instigated by the victorious Americans to rise in revolt against Saddam but callously ditched, and fed to his wolves, when they did. Those, like this scribe, who lived and travelled in Iraq during the sanctions know what a colossal price the Iraqi Shiites paid with their suffering and toil for their ‘sin’ of having listened to the Americans. They were the worst recipients of Saddam’s wrath and the world’s callous disregard of them.

 

Do the Americans have a panacea for the Shiites of Iraq? No. The Shiites still suffer from insecurity as much, if not more, as the Sunnis. The brutal murder of their charismatic leader, Baqer Al Hakim, last month, left the Shiites in no doubt that the occupation forces have no blue-print for their security, interests or rights. And they have no fancy notions that the Americans would be inclined to give them a better deal than Saddam. The Bushies are still mired in the fiction that the Iraqi Shiites will hitch their wagon to Iran, although this nightmare was convincingly laid to rest during the Iran-Iraq War.

 

Foot-dragging by Bush on all these fronts in Iraq—security, re-construction, transfer of power to grass-root Iraqis et al—is a sure recipe for disaster. On top of it, American corporate greed and avarice reeks aplenty from the recent moves to put all of Iraq’s assets, save oil, up for grabs. That is like showing a red rag to the enraged Iraqis. To a proud people ferociously jealous of their 5 millennia-old attachment to the land between two great rivers nothing could be more galling. Tribal instinct doesn’t take forays from strangers lightly. The Bushies should take note of it.

........................

 

n/b: And here is a link to a political discussion forum of a different genus where the author's views with regards to the US invassion and occupation of Iraq are being debated if one were interested in particiating.

 

http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00002682&channel=civic%20center&start=0&end=9&chapter=1&page=1

[king_450]

Well the only success so far Amercans have done are the followings

1-They have stolen the Iraqi Treasure

2-They have stolen the Virginity of Iraqi Women,every day they are getting married to Iraqi women like they have never seen a women, that is what america is all about, steal the heart and soul of the Iraqi ppl.

3-Enrich The Jewish State by supplying Iraqi's Oil.

[Liqaye]

I wish i could be confident that iraq would prove a lesson to the U.S.A. but i cannot , in destabilising iraq and creating a constitution that will permenantly disadvantage the iraqi political process, i belive in this the will succed.

Look at this way either iraq is weak or even in civil war then they will accomplished further destabilising the muslim ummah and the middle east.

 

King_450 i doubt marriage is going on in iraq, what is happening is called RAPE