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NEWS & LETTERS, June -July 2007Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mitch WeerthAs Iraq war and deaths enter fifth yearAs the Iraq war and occupation continue into a fifth year, U.S. and Iraqi casualties have remained high. April and May saw the highest two-month U.S. death toll since the war began, with no end in sight. U.S. public opinion has turned sharply against the war, coming closer to world opinion, which opposed it from the start. But the U.S. government remains locked into the war, also with no end in sight. Congress, now dominated by supposedly anti-war Democrats but fearful of Bush’s charge of failing to support the troops, has ignominiously caved in on the war budget. Only a pitiful 29 Senators voted to de-fund the war--by March 2008! --after months of posturing. Inside Iraq, the Sunni jihadist resistance, part of which is linked to Al Qaeda, continues to launch attacks at will against military, government, and civilian targets. Despite the "surge" of U.S. troops designed to stabilize Baghdad, the jihadists have lobbed shells into the heart of the Green Zone, headquarters of the U.S. occupation and the Iraq government. In another attack, they managed to kill over 150 people waiting at a bus hub in Shi’a Sadr City. In response, Shi’a fundamentalist militias with links to the state have exacted an equally terrible revenge upon Sunni civilians. Baghdad is slowly being divided along sectarian lines, with many Sunnis being driven out of the city altogether. In the largest exodus in the Arab world since the flight of Palestinians from Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mainly Sunnis, have fled to neighboring countries, especially Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. At the same time, thousands of non-Iraqi Sunnis from all over the Arab world and beyond continue to pour into Iraq to fight the U.S. and the Shi’a-dominated government. Some of them are being recycled back to their home countries to launch jihadist attacks, in a pattern reminiscent of the "Afghan" Arabs of the 1990s. In fact, Iraq offers far better training than Afghanistan’s mountains for operations in the urban centers of North Africa and the Arab Middle East, or even Europe and North America. The other clear beneficiary of the war is the Iranian fundamentalist state. The U.S. invasion has removed Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, which invaded Iran in 1980 and used poison gas during the long Iran-Iraq war. That war, which lasted until 1988, killed hundreds of thousands on both sides. Today, a pro-Iranian regime is being consolidated in Baghdad. The U.S. encounter with Iranian diplomats in Baghdad on May 28, which was the two countries’ first public meeting in over three decades, is a tacit recognition of these facts on the ground. The genuinely progressive Iraqi forces--the small leftist parties, the feminist groups, and the trade unions--have up to now been overwhelmed by religious fundamentalists, whose civil war is beginning to turn Iraq into another Lebanon. |
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