Seven years of mayhem in Iraq

20 March, 2010, 12:40

It is seven years to the day since the US and its allies launched their invasion of Iraq. Initially hailed as a decisive coalition victory, that view was quickly dispelled as the insurgency spread.

Although US forces are now talking about leaving the country, unrest remains a grim reality there.

Seven years after United States forces invaded Iraq on the premise of finding weapons of mass destruction and toppling the infamous dictator Saddam Hussein, critics of the war are calling Operation Iraqi Freedom a failure.

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Iraqi policemen guard their base at al-Jihad suburb in Baghdad 06 November 2003 (AFP Photo / Ahmad Al-Rubaye)
“Basically, in Iraq today the entire nation is really suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. How can they not be?” asked Bill Hackwell, national organizer for the coalition Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER). “After continuously having to live in an occupation, where the war is surrounding you, where you or your family has known somebody or a member of your family has been killed.”

The US-led invasion has come at a high price, with some reports putting the figure of civilian deaths at over one million since the war began in 2003.

While many Iraqis on the ground say they are happy Saddam Hussein’s regime is over, there is concern over how the US government handled the situation.

Iraqi writer and political analyst Nazhm al-Kasaab told RT that “Everything points to the fact that the occupation resulted in complete disappointment. It particularly concerns Baghdad, which used to be secure and which is an important city both for the Arabs and for the entire world. The war made the Iraqis flee the country in search of security.”

Since 2003 war has taken its toll on the capital city of Baghdad, but with recent elections promising a new government, the Obama administration has declared that it is time to pull out.

“I think the ultimate success of Iraq is going to depend on the people,” declared Lt. Darryl Frost of Joint Area Support Group in Baghdad. “Obviously we are still here in the middle of the election, it has taken a little while to count these votes, but as long as the Iraqi people feel their voices were heard in this latest election, then I would consider that a success for us as we continue to draw down.”

At the forward operating base Prosperity in the center of Baghdad, right in the heart of it all, things are different to what they were seven years ago when the US first got involved in Iraq. In fact, the people there say their mission is entirely different.

“Right now we are really just transitioning and the Iraqis really are in control,” Lt. Darryl Frost stated. “Here in the International Zone where we are today, they are in charge of the entry control points, the access points that actually come into this place, there is still a little bit of US presence on those checkpoints, but we are continuing to draw down as we speak today.”


A US soldier of the 1st Armored Division salutes an Iraqi policeman during a ceremony in Baghdad 09 November 2003 (AFP Photo / Zuhair Al-Sudani)
While areas like the International Zone in central Baghdad are fortified and secure, there are scattered areas on the outskirts of the city and in the disputed borders between Arab areas and Kurdistan where violence is still prevalent. Because of this, not all Iraqis believe the Americans should leave so quickly, hoping that US money will help stabilize the country after the troops have gone.

Security and intelligence chief of Kurdistan Masrour Barzani believes that “Some sort of US presence in the country may be necessary. I am not talking about numbers, but the symbolic presence of the US in the country so that will help and give confidence to the Iraqis to build up their capacity.”
However, there is skepticism as to whether the US will be able to let go of Iraq at all.

“Americans brought to the Iraqis only suffering, destruction and political mayhem,” blamed writer and political analyst Saadi al-Sabah. “It is absolutely obvious that the Americans will not pull out from Iraq. Iraq boasts vast riches; that is why the Americans will stay in Iraq for a long time.”

Meanwhile, Zayd Alisa, political analyst, believes the situation in Iraq is slowly changing and thinks American troops “will move out of Iraq.”

“The security situation in Iraq is actually slowly but surely improving, the real power – political power – is slowly but surely shifting from the hands of Americans to the hands of Iraqi politicians,” he added.


Watch interview with Zayd Alisa

The intertaining war

Mainstream media coverage of the conflict in Iraq has received almost as much criticism as the war itself in the US.

Independent filmmaker and blogger Danny “The News Dissector” Schechter says American TV channels often just provide the official version of events, forcing viewers to give up on the news and turn to entertainment.

“The networks tend to march in lockstep with the government. In America they used to criticize soviet television for a ‘party line’ – this is a [sort of] ‘party line’ too. They narrow the range of the debate,” Schechter exclaimed.

“We saw during the dramatic Iraq War almost everybody selling war, rather than [talking] about the war,” he said.

“It is dangerous because the Americans are not learning from the television; they get their views reinforced,” evaluated Danny Schechter, also adding that “in that environment, a cartoon network seems like a pretty good idea.”

Watch interview with Danny Schechter

Texas-based journalist and author Dahr Jamail shared with RT that the US mainstream media's coverage of the occupation of Iraq fails to draw people's attention to the real cost of the invasion.

“It is easy for people [in the US] to forget about those wars, because American corporate media does not keep those wars in people’s consciousness.”

For them, Dahr Jamail said, the war ended with the “Mission Accomplished” speech George W. Bush gave on an aircraft carrier.

“There is no attention paid to the cost of the war, to the people of Iraq, to the US military, financially, economically and in numerous other ways. For a lot of that, the corporate media is to blame,” Jamail added.


Watch interview with Dahr Jamail









Does U.S. really learn anything new in Iraq?


11:02, March 21, 2010


On the seventh anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the United States can point to many lessons from the conflict.

But some lessons are not new. Rather, they are forgotten lessons that had to be re-learned. And the question remains whether Washington is doomed to re-learn them yet again, experts said.

At the start of the war in 2003, the “shock and awe”campaign quickly overwhelmed Iraq’s armies and U.S. forces claimed victory in a matter of weeks. But as the Bush administration celebrated, attacks on U.S. forces began to occur. And after a period of denial, the administration was forced to concede that it had an insurgency on its hands.

But while the United States had engaged in a number of counter insurgency operations throughout its history, the Pentagon had forgotten how to fight an unconventional enemy.

Nate Hughes, military analyst at Stratfor, a global intelligence company, said the United States had forgotten much of the counter insurgency knowledge it gained in Vietnam.

After that conflict, the Pentagon shelved its counter insurgency manuals and busied itself planning for a “conventional war” – an army-to-army conflict on an open battlefield, as opposed to a “guerrilla war” – as Washington never thought the United States would fight another Vietnam, he said.

“It’s not that we wrote our first counter insurgency manual in the last decade,” he said. “We just stopped publishing one.”

Indeed the United States has fought insurgencies everywhere from the Philippines to Haiti – two long forgotten conflicts of the early 20th century. But some experts say the United States is doomed to repeat the mistakes it made in prior wars, including Iraq.

“As soon as Iraq and Afghanistan are over, and the resources are strained, are we going to retain all the knowledge we have gained or are we going to throw it aside like we've done every other time in the past?” said James Carafano, defense expert at the Heritage Foundation.


Experts said one major mistake in Iraq was a lack of a clear exit strategy, a blunder also made in Vietnam. Partly from that experience came the Powell Doctrine, named after General Colin Powell, secretary of state under the Bush administration.

But the doctrine, which calls for a clearly defined objective, the use of overwhelming force and strong international support for U.S. military operations, got lost once U.S. forces found themselves embroiled in a seven-year guerrilla war in Iraq.

Michael O'Hanlon, defense policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said some lessons learned in Iraq were old ones that had been forgotten, including the core principals of counter insurgence.

But the use of new tools such as surveillance drones, the specific methods for helping reform the Iraqi police and army, and means of countering suicide bombs and roadside bombs – one of insurgents’ most deadly tools – were in some cases new.

One major lesson was that a military force cannot fight its way out of an insurgency. Rather, proper counterinsurgency requires protecting the local population, developing intelligence networks by cooperating with locals and building up state institutions, he said.

In future wars, it is possible for the United States to forget the knowledge gained in Iraq, given the complexities involved and the opportunity costs when other military missions demand attention as well, he said.

Still, the United States will likely emerge from this period being more successful in counter insurgency than in Vietnam. Washington will also recognize that counter insurgence is even more central to U.S. national security today than it was in the 1970s, he said.

As such, the United States stands a good chance of remembering Iraq’s most crucial lessons, and military planners are still focused on counter insurgency in Afghanistan, he said.

Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, said that usually wars are so unique that few lessons carry over from one conflict to the next. So whatever the United States learned in Iraq may or may not be able to be applied to the next war, he said.

Rusty Barber, director of Iraq programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), said it remains unclear whether civilian organizations engaged in post conflict operations in Afghanistan are heeding the lessons of Iraq.

One problem in Iraq was a lack of coordination between non-governmental organizations and the military, an issue that could emerge in Afghanistan, said Barber, who led the USIP’s stabilization projects in Iraq.

Critics have also said Washington’s assumption that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops as liberators was naive at best and destructive at worst.

“We have this messianic need to spread democracy,” he said, “and have it bloom overnight. In other words, if we plant that seed – even if we have to use force to do it – it will take root. That isn't always the case.”

Source: Xinhua