A good sampling of the consternation felt in various parts of the world over the unapologetic stance of the Bush Administration on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War can be found in this op-ed from Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau. Karl Grobe writes, ‘The war isn’t over – not by a long shot. It has been transformed into a struggle of all against all – and it’s the Iraqi population that is paying the price: Over 700,000 civilian dead and four million refugees and displaced persons; the shattering of a once highly-developed health and education system; the collapse of basic services and the division of Baghdad’s millions into small, feuding, ethnically-segregated districts, behind walls and barricades.’
By Karl Grobe
Translated By Ulf Behncke
March 19, 2008
Germany – Frankfurter Rundschau – Original Article (German)
Earlier this week, Richard Cheney remarked on the “phenomenal” progress of the security situation in occupied Iraq. Meanwhile, a female suicide bomber killed over 40 people in Karbala and two U.S. soldiers died in an attack north of Baghdad – the most recent two of the nearly 4000 who have died since the beginning of the invasion five years ago today. And dead Iraqis are hardly even counted by the side represented by the vice president of the United States.
So much for security, which certainly does exist – at least for the invaders and collaborators in the “Green Zone,” the allied maximum-security wing in Baghdad. From there, distinguished guests like Cheney don’t dare venture far, and if they do, then [only] with an escort that resembles a medium-sized commando operation. And so it will remain: Cheney has announced that U.S. troops will not leave the country until the “job is done.”
From the triumphant banner “Mission Accomplished,” under which on May 1st 2003, commander-in-chief George W. Bush was filmed from the secure environment of an aircraft carrier just off the California coast – to the announcement by his deputy – it has been a long road. It’s been a road on which the guardrails have been negligence, failure, war crimes, torture – and messages about success, that have been as far removed from reality as Cheney’s statement.
So there they sit – the pretexts that were offered at the beginning to justify the invasion. The claim that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction (there were none); the lie that Saddam Hussein’s regime supported the al-Qaeda terrorist network (which has only became firmly established there since the invasion); and other falsehoods like the assumption that the war would be a “cake walk.”
The only true finding was that Saddam Hussein’s regime was a brutal dictatorship – which Washington saw no need to disrupt as long as the regime seemed useful in keeping Iran at bay. The paradox is obvious: First, it has only been since the regime was dismantled that Iran has uncomfortably become the most formidable regional power in the Gulf – the most important source of oil for the industrialized world. And only the dismantling of Iraq into innumerable smaller components, warlord-dominions, gang and clan regimes and unsettled areas of all kinds, has the land of the Ayatollahs become a factor in Iraq’s domestic politics.
True, the planners responsible for this war, which was not authorized under international law, knew little or didn’t want to know that their first errors – such as condoning looting – would be followed by even greater blunders. These included de-Baathification, which treated even minor officials who under Saddam’s system of government had to join the official Baath party -as if they, too, were major culprits.
In particular, the wholesale shattering of an essentially secular nation along ethnic or religious lines has destroyed a well-established civil society which might have been the basis for further peaceful development. The occupying forces had no conception of the actual conditions in the country – or at least they very successfully pretended as if they hadn’t.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the Iraq War five year anniversary.
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