When he took over as leader, many of his country’s 35 million inhabitants felt he was their last, and perhaps, best hope for keeping the country from unraveling. Others adopted a Âwait-and-see attitude, while still others looked upon his accession as the definitive sign that only through armed resistance would they be able to control the future course of their lives.
While U.S. coalition forces and Abu Musab al Zarqawi were intertwined in a perverse deadly duel, Iraqis were caught in the crossfire. To most Iraqis Zarqawi was an American creation–he was just another foreigner using Iraq to stage his pyrotechnics under the auspices of spreading his ideology. Iraqis are happy to see him eliminated from the scene.
A date to remember will be the night of June 20, 2006. That’s the night Congress was fooled for the second time.
The news that Abu Masab al-Zarqawi and six aides and advisers were killed by a U.S. air strike last week is being hailed by some—again—as a “turning point” in the Iraq war.
Three years after U.S. forces captured Baghdad, Iraqis are suffering from unprecedented violence and misery. Although Saddam Hussein was indeed one of the world’s most brutal tyrants, the no-fly zones and arms embargo in place for more than a dozen years prior to his ouster had severely weakened his capacity to do violence against his own people. Today, the level of violent deaths is not only far higher than during his final years in power, but the sheer randomness of the violence has left millions of Iraqis in a state of perpetual terror. At least 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died, most of them at the hands of U.S. forces but increasingly from terrorist groups and Iraqi government death squads. Thousands more soldiers and police have also been killed. Violent crime, including kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery, is at record levels. There is a proliferation of small arms, and private militias are growing rapidly. A Lebanon-type multifaceted civil war, only on a much wider and deadlier scale, grows more likely with time.
Last February, former President Jimmy Carter said on the Larry King show, “Some of our top leaders never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they are looking for [staying] ten, 20, 50 years.” He continued, “I have never heard our leaders say that …ten years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq.”
Since the bombing of the golden-domed Askariya Shi’a mosque in Samarra on February 22, Iraq has been close to the outbreak of open civil war. While Iraqi leaders tried to bring calm it was clear that the masses behind them were not marching in step. As in the case of the nationalist Shi’ite leader Moqtadah al-Sadr’s movement, elites and militants pulled in opposite directions: while some of the most violent reprisals were apparently undertaken by his followers, al-Sadr and his top leaders sought to defuse tensions with the Sunnis throughout the conflict. Similarly, the legal political parties of the Sunnis and Shi’ites tried to limit the conflict while their followers were in the streets. The only thing common on all sides was placing blame on the American occupiers.
Amid all the talk of training Iraqi soldiers, heading off a civil war, and protecting a fledging democracy, one overriding agenda has been ignored in the debate over the timetable for bringing U.S. troops home. President George W. Bush will not withdraw our forces until U.S. oil companies have secure access to Iraq’s resources.
Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young’s arrests at the State of the Union for wearing opposing “protest” T-shirts is the latest illustration of how the Iraq War is the nation’s most provocative issue. The attack on free speech for both sides was in fact outrageous. But lost in the T-shirt battle is what really matters: President George W. Bush’s failure to tell the nation about the true costs of the war.
Last year, 5,736 Iraqis died and 845 U.S. soldiers died in the Iraq War, many at the hands of the estimated 2,000 foreign terrorist fighters based in the U.S.-occupied country. If this conflict is part of a larger war on terrorism as President George W. Bush claims, it’s clear the U.S. is losing the so-called “global war on terror.”