Fifth Anniversary of an Inherently Flawed War at Iraq

Dana Perino, the White House Press Secretary, in a press conference last week said that the President of the United States, George W.Bush, spends a considerable time of his day in lamenting the death of US soldiers at Iraq and is grieved on every lost American life in the war. This is perhaps the most extreme childish remark that I’ve heard this year, since it is nothing but a ludicrous political rhetoric aimed at painting a noble picture of the President in front of the people of the United States and the world over. But such pretentious utterances of concern on a war initiated by his willful misjudgment can hardly prevent George W. Bush from gaining the dubious distinction of being the most incompetent of all American Presidents.

The world observed the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war last week. As of now there are 1,40,000 US troops located at Iraq and the death toll of the US soldiers had reached a very ghastly number of 4000, and this is a very serious situation. From the beginning itself this war is a flawed one with officials in the Bush administration showing an insidious and evil swiftness in kick starting the war. Some of the administration members, especially the Vice President, Dick Cheney and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had sexed up evidences against the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein accusing him of keeping sinister designs of waging a nuclear war against the United States. They came up with concocted evidences that suggested that Saddam Hussein had links with the al-Qaeda and it’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, which has never been proved up to now. The Vice President, Dick Cheney pressurized the CIA to come up with evidences that would prove that Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi administration is having Weapons of Mass Destruction or the WMD. He was skillfully supported by Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress in coming up with false evidences to support the claim and persuaded the US President and it’s allies to announce a war on Iraq. So the President of the United States declared the war on Iraq on 19th March 2003 christened “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.

Saddam Hussein was not a saint as being portrayed by a lot of Leftist political organizations in India. He was an autocratic ruler, a despotic tyrant who had committed some of the most serious and appalling crimes of genocides in the history of mankind. Saddam was the perpetrator of the heinous crime of massacring 1,80,000 Kurds in the 1980s for suppressing a mass upheaval against him and it was during this period that he had used the notorious poison gas to kill 5000 Kurds at Halabja in Iraq. A majority of Iraqis were against Saddam and his acrimonious administration and this was evident from the celebration that was witnessed at Baghdad on the fall of Saddam’s regime. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein had to be brought under justice for his crimes against humanity, but the fact of the matter is what moral authority did the United States had in bringing Saddam under justice and under judicial courts and jurists handpicked by themselves.

One of the most important reasons for the Iraq war getting awry was the power struggle in the Bush administration. There were serious differences in opinion between Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State and the duo of Vice President Dick Cheney and the former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. While the former was for diplomatic efforts and UN resolutions for bringing Saddam under justice, the latter team wanted war at any cost to bring Saddam Hussein down. Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s exceptional interest in engaging in a war with Iraq has always been a big mystery for the political gurus.

Now that the war is on for five years, humanitarian crisis is increasing day by day. With the fall of Saddam Hussein there has been a huge increase in the number of terror strikes by the insurgents and this is creating a lot of human loss to both sides, military and civilian casualties are on the rise, starvation and hunger is prevalent; killing, looting, rape and arson are on the increase and there is the big trouble of handling and managing the criminals and detainees of the war. The inhuman treatment of the detainees by the United States administration at different prisons including the Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib are subject of serious and fiery discussions in the international arena with the human rights organizations and the Bush administration at loggerheads. While Colin Powell wanted PoW status for the detainees of the war so that they would get human treatment based on the Geneva conventions, Cheney and Rumsfeld didn’t thought so and they wanted abhorrent and brutal methods of torture to be adopted for interrogation of the detainees or what they call the “enemy combatants”.

Now Iraq is a mess, made of destructed buildings and obstructed peaceful life, an agonizing place for invidious ethnic conflicts, a safe haven for treacherous insurgents and a breeding ground for gross human rights violations. The US troops are a confused lot, oblivious of any available strategies to counter insurgents and unaware of any policies on how to get out of the quagmire at Iraq. There are no exit strategies at hand and the sabotage of human lives and properties by the rivaling Shia and Sunni militants are on the rise, with the Mahdi army, loyal to the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and hostile to the US army and its allies, continuing its assault on various cities in Iraq, particularly Basra. There seems to be no end to this unjust war and its implications on the world economy and world polity is quite alarming. And this war provides a very uncomfortable challenge to the US administration and to the US President whose popularity ratings are on an all time low. We could only hope that the new President of the United States – John McCain, Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama – would take some effective steps to stop this incendiary combat.