Iraq's New Beginning?
Update: For a different slant, Tim Dunlop has also written on the same article.
Iraq now has sovereignty, of sorts, and like most fair minded people, I hope that the citizens of Iraq can pick up the pieces and move forward from this day on.
My hopes for the Iraqi people in no way change my view that the American led assault on Iraq was not justified. Hopefully, by the end of the year, regime change will have occurred in both the US and Australia, largely as a result of the dishonest way the leaders of these counties took us to war.
A discussion by John Keegan about the reasoning for our involvement, America's sense of mission has been no match for Iraq's ugly reality in the Sydney Morning Herald demonstates the clouded thinking by the people that got us into this mess. It also shows some clouded reasoning by the author himself.
The war was conceived and conducted in the honest belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. It was justified by United Nations Security Council resolutions 678, 687 and 1441. It was, moreover, as a military operation, astonishingly successful, probably the most successful war ever fought between a democracy and a dictatorship.
"Honest belief?" There's more than enough evidence coming out over the past months to prove that the people in the intelligence gathering organisations did not believe Iraq posed any sort of threat from WMDs.
[The war] was justified by United Nations Security Council resolutions 678, 687 and 1441.
Funny, my recollection is that the UN didn't authorise the action against Iraq. Isn't that why the US and France are hardly talking to each other?
It was, moreover, as a military operation, astonishingly successful, probably the most successful war ever fought between a democracy and a dictatorship.
and this ....
The war itself cost the lives of fewer than 100 US servicemen...
Well, yes, an army depleted by years of sanctions and backed up by unwilling conscripts will go down to the most technologically advanced force ever known. True it cost less than 100 US servicement, but it is a sobering thought that some thousands of Iraqis lost there lives during this period.
Keegan then goes on to the reasons why the neo-cons thought the Iraq would be easy to govern after the US had taken over. They likened Iraq with Eastern Europe.
Inside any people's democracy ...... there is a real democracy struggling to get out. In the case of eastern Europe, they [the neo-cons] were genuinely right. Fifty years' experience of Marxist orthodoxy had conditioned every intelligent East European to yearn for democracy and to embrace it warmly wherever it showed itself......... So, when planning for the government of postwar Iraq, the lead agency, the Pentagon, dominated by neo-conservatives, jumped to the conclusion that, as soon as Saddam's tyranny was destroyed, Iraqi democrats would emerge to assume governmental responsibility from the liberating coalition and a pro-Western regime would evolve seamlessly from the flawed past.
In my opinion, Keegan is correct with this assumption. The neo-cons really believed that the Iraqis would peacefully accept the occupation and all work together to form a viable democracy. They ignored the fact that Iraq was created by the agreement of the British and the French after WW1, with boundaries drawn up that took no account of the ethnic mix they enclosed. They ignored the termoil that has been Iraqi politics for over 80 years. They were ignorant of, or chose to ignore, the different forms of Islam that exist in Iraq, and the traditional tensions that exist between them.
It is religion, of course, which the US neo-conservatives have come up against in post-Saddam Iraq.
Yes, it is. Although Keegan hopes it won't happen, by destroying the secular Iraq, the most likely long term outcome will be an Islamic government, or another strong man dictatorship.
And one last thing that I sincerly hope he's got wrong ...
Let us hope that the neo-conservatives and their Democrat equivalents have learnt a lesson, since it is unlikely that this is the last time the US will have to undertake an exercise in nation-building.(my emphasis)
Hopefully, the lesson they have learnt is to leave this part of the world well alone. (And you wonder why this blog is titled as it is .....)
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I am also one of those who believes we need Howard out after what he has done in Iraq. And I'm putting my money where my mouth is and running as an independent in the PM's seat of Bennelong.
He might be a Goliath, but the fact of the matter is that safe seats like Bennelong don't fall to the other parties. When they fall, they only fall to independents. Wilkie made a huge mistake by throwing his lot in with the Greens - he could have won as an independent, but as a Green the majority of voters will see him as representing part of "the other side or politics", or in extreme cases "the enemy".
So, Wilkie having blown it, I'm stepping up to the plate to take on the PM as an independent. We don't have to rely solely on the vote in marginal seats to oust Howard - safe seats, contested by independents, can and should be part of the mix.