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Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

QUAGMIRE II: It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This
(Carol Brightman, AlterNet, July 14, 2003)
"Quit beating around the bush," snaps the Wall Street Journal: "America faces a guerrilla war." And so it does. But an odd paralysis still grips the U.S. military command. While the number of American soldiers killed or wounded in ambushes increases by the day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and proconsul Paul Bremer continue to speak of "remnants" and "bitter-enders" who can't get with the program, even as word spreads through the ranks that there is a well-organized resistance campaign underway in Iraq. . . . In prewar Pentagon estimates, this was to be a different war. Occupation forces would be quickly cut to 30,000 to 40,000. Small contingents of peacekeepers would remain to safeguard the reconstruction of Iraq's infrastructure, including oil pipelines and wellheads, and the building of four American military bases (one, called "intelligence city," already underway in the North). . . . In prewar Pentagon estimates, this was to be a different war. Occupation forces would be quickly cut to 30,000 to 40,000. Small contingents of peacekeepers would remain to safeguard the reconstruction of Iraq's infrastructure, including oil pipelines and wellheads, and the building of four American military bases (one, called "intelligence city," already underway in the North). . . . Thus, there is a grim irony to the fact that the first pillar of Middle East policy to fall in occupied Iraq is the credibility of American power. Iraqis express surprise, frustration, and fury that months after "victory" was declared, the "Authority," as the Coalition Provisional Authority is called, is unable to bring order to Baghdad. Looting and sabotage continue; electricity runs only intermittently; water and sewage systems remain unrepaired; food distribution is spotty; and medical services, overloaded with mounting casualties from the fighting, are near collapse. Meanwhile, there are no jobs for a vast unemployed workforce, which includes hundreds of thousands of demobilized Iraqi soldiers and Baathist office workers dismissed by the Authority without pay. . . . It's hard to imagine a set of conditions more conducive to the conversion of a desperate citizenry into partisans for resistance. Moreover, when you consider that civilian deaths from the three-week war are estimated at 5,500 to 7,000, with military deaths exceeding 10,000, and overall nonfatal casualties totaling 50,000 – all together touching family and friends reaching into the millions – you have another grave condition feeding insurrection. . . . That the resistance will ultimately dwarf Baathist "bitter-enders" (who now include – another grim irony – Saddam himself) seems quite possible, especially if elements of the volatile majority of Shi'ites in the South enter the fray, along with increasing numbers of non-Iraqis. . . . No wonder many American soldiers are demoralized and angry. Some have written their congressmen requesting repatriation. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," runs one such letter, quoted last week in the Christian Science Monitor. And another: "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all." And another: "We feel like pawns in a game that we have no voice [in]." . . . Naturally the V-word: Vietnam, is turning up frequently in reports from the front. . . . The mix of falsehood and bad faith that feeds America's Iraqi venture is probably greater than it was at the start of the Vietnam war. But the other major difference is that all Iraq is under military occupation. The ultimate in-country authority is Gen. David McKiernan, while Paul Bremer, Baghdad's de facto mayor, reports directly to Secretary Rumsfeld. A Texas millionaire and former Army officer, Roger "Buck" Walters, governs Southern Iraq, and a career Army officer who served in Vietnam and Somalia, W. Bruce Moore, runs the North. Iraqis, an educated people with some experience of empire are unlikely to kowtow to this kind of slapdash corporate-style administration. . . . What Team Bush faces in Iraq is more than guerrilla war. It is the first crack in the larger Mideast campaign in which Iraq was the starting point. This is the vision that has intoxicated defense planners such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and Kenneth Pollack for a decade. It's the dream of imposing a Pax Americana on the Arab world that is modeled on the imperial order Britain imposed in an earlier era. And it's off to a bloody bad start.

posted by LoZo 1:31 PM