Iraq, an American ‘Nakbah’

American Taliban council of war

By Tony Karon

"The Arabic world nakbah, denoting “catastrophe” best describes what George W. Bush and his American-Taliban administration has wrought in Iraq — and, as a result, what it has meant for the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of Bush’s failed attempt to violently reorder the politics of the Middle East; 4 million have been displaced from their homes; more than 4,000 American troops have been killed and some 60,000 maimed in a war that smart estimates suggest will cost the U.S. economy $3 trillion — it currently costs America $12 billion a month to maintain an occupation whose time-frame remains open-ended. The Financial Times reported today that the war has already cost the average American household of four (like mine) $16,000 in taxes.

And this blood-drenched disaster has done absolutely nothing to advance U.S. strategic interests; on the contrary, it has dramatically debilitated U.S. strategic influence by graphically demonstrating not the extent, but the limits of American military power. The “shock and awe” mantra that the U.S. media so dutifully chanted at the war’s commencement sounds like a pretty sick joke now.

The fifth anniversary of the Iraq catastrophe will see the usual endless hemming and hawing in the media over tactical mistakes and over whether or not the “surge” is working (as Chou en-Lai once said of the French revolution, “too soon to tell”; check back 15 years from now… I know, that’s not funny…); over how the U.S. will extract itself. (No matter what the debate in Washington, as argued here previously the reality is that the U.S. will not be in a position to withdraw for the foreseeable future, at least to the extent that it retains its superpower view of its national interests.)

Expect precious little serious discussion on how America got into this mess, not least because so much of the mainstream media was so complicit in enabling it by failing to do its job and challenging the patent nonsense that was being fed to the American people by an Administration whose dissembling was plain to see, even back then.

I recently looked up a couple of pieces I wrote in December 2002 and January 2003, which I used to mail out to a list of a few hundred people before I launched this site. And what those reminded me was just how obvious it was that the case for war being offered the American people was bogus......"