Iraq No Hindrance to the US Election

On occasions, one reads an article that seems to be out of charactor with the author's natural bias. In the soon to be mogulised Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Sheehan, someone whom I think of as being firmly on the right, takes a critical view of the incumbent US President and the mess he and his government have created in Iraq.

Nine marines died in Fallujah over the weekend. Their names have not yet been released but the names of the US forces who have previously died in Iraq are available. The roll call has its own momentum......

.......And so it goes, week after week, month after month, because President George Bush wanted to avenge his father, George Bush snr, whose failure to finish off the mocking, bellicose Saddam Hussein cost him the presidency. That sits at the core of the "war on terrorism".

I would have included here the added bonus of Iraq being in the middle of the world's largest oil field.

To settle this family debt, vast amounts of American power, credibility, blood and money have been squandered. Eleven hundred American military personnel are dead and 8000 have been wounded or injured since Bush the younger let loose the dogs of war in Iraq on March 19 last year.

More than 90 per cent of these casualties have occurred since May 1 last year, the day a giant "Mission Accomplished" sign was placed behind Bush during a photo opportunity aboard the aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, sailing off the coast of California.

One of history's more disquieting chapters will be written tomorrow, November 2, election day in the United States, if the man who avoided combat during the Vietnam war, George Bush, defeats the man who served with courage in Vietnam, Senator John Kerry.

Kerry served and Bush deferred. Kerry was wounded in combat, Bush ambled through the Air Force reserves and has dissembled about it ever since. Yet it is Kerry who has been attacked and hunted for his military service. He has no case to answer......

It's not only the Americans who have suffered casualties. The Iraqis have sufferred much worse.

.......take [the US] casualty list and multiply it tenfold, and you have the Iraqi list. Credible estimates of civilian dead have been about 10,000, but last week the British medical journal, The Lancet, published a survey estimating that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died as a result of the US-led invasion.

This is a highly contentious claim for such a prestigious journal to publish, but one thing is certain: many more civilians than combatants have been killed by the unintended consequences of this invasion.

Because of the stupid adventure in Iraq, Bin Laden was able to emerge from the ether and lecture the US on the eve of the election. A direct consequence of not completing the job in Afghanistan.

Before this President committed the US to invading Iraq, America had the moral authority bequeathed by the dead of September 11. On Bush's bold initiative, it had routed the Taliban in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda was in retreat, the international community was supportive, and the difficult rehabilitation of Afghanistan had begun. The US military cast an unassailable image of being able to deploy immense firepower into any theatre. Saddam's psychotic regime had been locked down. America's intelligence resources were concentrated on the threat posed by Islamic terrorism.

Today, none of this applies. Huge resources of manpower, money, prestige, credibility and intelligence has been re-routed to the Texas grudge in Iraq. Iran brazenly marches towards acquiring nuclear weapons. Israel continues to receive a blank cheque from Washington as it devolves into an apartheid state. Yet Bush is running for re-election on the strength of his record as the leader of the war on terrorism, even as he weakens that war effort with the enormous diversion in Iraq.

It's the bit about nuclear weapons proliferation that is the saddest and most frightening consequence of the Iraq misadventure. Observing the way the US invaded Iraq, but has tip-toed around the nuclear capable, but dysfunctional state of North Korea, other rogue states now know that possessing a nuclear weapon is insurance against US intervention.

As far a Iraq goes, the damage is done, and the 'coalition of the willing' has no option but to stay to 'finish the job' one way or the other. How this is going to be achieved to attain a peaceful, democratic Iraq is anyones guess. The coalition may try to build up the Iraqi defence forces and slowly disengage. With the western forces gone, and if the country doesn't become a theocracy, I suspect a 'hard man,' similar to the one deposed, will take over and use whatever means is needed to quell the ethnic and religious factions. Iraq may revert to a one party party state.