Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy

6. Anatomy of a Disaster: Class War, Iraq, and the Contours of American Foreign Policy

82 BLOOD IN THE SAND Anatomy of a Disaster 6 Class War, Iraq, and the Contours of American Foreign Policy Lest We Forget There was a new game in town after President Bush declared : “Mission accomplished!” The political establishment decided it was time to forget the lies and blunders associated with the Iraqi war. Europe was ready to reaffirm its bonds with the United States, the United Nations was trying to placate the superpower, and smaller nations were desperately trying to make a deal. The angry demonstrations of the past, the loss of “the street,” no longer seemed relevant. It was time to “get on with the job” of securing the peace. June 30, 2005, has passed, however, and American troops are still in Iraq. American soldiers are dying, bombings in public areas occur daily, and there is no end in sight to the violence. Elections took place in January 2005. The Sunnis boycotted them, the Kurds kept speaking of an independent state, and the voters chose from lists of anonymous candidates. No consensus was achieved, the character of the future constitution is uncertain , and the legitimacy of the new state will assuredly remain weak for a long time to come. Major cities such as Adamiya, Karbala, Kufa, Najaf, Shula, and Falluja—with its 300,000 inhabitants —have been mercilessly bombed, invaded by tanks, and turned into virtual ghost towns. A pattern of prisoner abuse has further undermined the already plummeting image of the United States throughout the region. 83 ANATOMY OF A DISASTER Democracy in Iraq is a hope, at best, not a reality. It is the same with the victory proclaimed by President Bush so many months ago. Precisely for that reason, however, it is important to recall how the American public was manipulated, the world bullied, and the fragile nature of the democratic discourse endangered by an administration whose declaration of war was inspired by imperialist fantasies and guided by reactionary ambitions . New crises are already presenting themselves in Iran and Syria, and it seems that the Bush administration is employing the same strategic mixture of deceit and belligerence. Too often ignored, however, is the way that this imperialist foreign policy, fueled by militarism and hypernationalism, is cloaking a new domestic form of class war. Battling the latter calls for understanding the former. This turns the need to remember into a political issue. Winning the Hearts and Minds There are countless dictators in the world, and Saddam, bad as he was, was probably not the most gruesome. The United States cannot intervene everywhere. The question is why an intervention should have taken place in Iraq. It has now been revealed that Saddam actually made various last-minute overtures to avoid war; his concessions apparently included unrestricted investigations for nuclear weapons by American inspectors and even free elections. Perhaps the offer was fraudulent. We’ll never know. Whatever the possibility for peace or the prospect of negotiations, it was never taken seriously . But that’s not all. Reports by the State Department forecast the difficulties associated with rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, the looting that would follow the opening of the prisons, and the resentment that would greet American troops. These reports were also ignored. 84 BLOOD IN THE SAND Two major studies by American experts commissioned by the Bush administration, one by David Kay and the other by Charles Duelfer, state that Saddam Hussein was not building nuclear arms or in the possession of large quantities of chemical weapons; it seems that his nuclear program was abandoned in 1991 and his chemical weapons program in 1996. Meanwhile , Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted long ago that no proof existed of an Iraq–al Qaeda link. This obviously undermines the claim that Iraq constituted a genuine threat, let alone the genuine threat, to the national security of the United States. As for the claim that the purpose of the invasion was to further democracy in the region: staunch American allies such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, even after a limited experiment with municipal elections, are not exactly testaments to the democratic spirit. Nor can the invasion be considered a logical outcome of the assault on Afghanistan, in which a genuine international coalition supported an attack on the Taliban regime because of its clear complicity in the events of 9/11. Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, put the matter well: “Iraq was a war...