Five years of war: Philosophical failure of US and Britain in Iraq - PART I
Kurdishaspect.com - By Dr Kamal Mirawdeli
1. Introduction
I have not written about Iraq war for a long time. The article I am writing with this title (rewriting) now was intended to commemorate the third anniversary of the war this time two years ago. I couldn’t continue. Everything just seemed so absurd, so irrational, and so inhuman: an endless game of destruction, death, and blood, without real aims and enemies, without purpose and plan. This year I do not feel better about the war. In fact I feel worse, much worse. But I feel I need to finish the article I started and suppressed two years ago. If for nothing, for the benefit of this illusionary witness we call history.
The question is where I can start. What aspects of the war can I analyse and assess AGAIN? How can I tell readers, if there are any, now or in future, that I have seen five years of abyss that is going on because five months of rational solutions based on truth: the truth of reason , the truth of humanity and the truth of history were not allowed to be born. There is so much to say that any effort to keep a logical line of argument will be confounded by confusion. Therefore I resort to the tactic or technique I used before, just at the beginning war, to make my arguments simpler for the reader to understand: the technique of “questions and answers”.
Now, everyone talks about the failure of the war, lack of strategy and plan, etc with the benefit of hindsight. What makes me sad is that I said all these long time ago with foresight. I wish I were wrong in my predictions. But I was correct. I just saw the combined logic of history and geography which contradicted the logic of the most irrational irony that history has experienced so far: to liberate a country to suppress its liberation! I called this odd phenomenon ‘de-liberation” in an article I published in July 2004 when the toll of American dead had just reached 1000.
The article starts like this:
“US's deaths in Iraq passed the 1000 figure. Bremer's legacy in Iraq will drag on. US soldiers will continue to die if Allawi government fails to establish stability and security. They will also die, maybe in greater numbers, if Allawi government gets stronger and can establish stability and security! If the Americans see any contradiction in this statement, it is because of their ignorance about Iraqi politics and Bremer's foolish insistence on the de-liberation of Iraq.”
Now the US deaths are at 4000. Three thousand more deaths, 30,000 more injured, 300 billion dollars more in financial costs, and perhaps 300,000 more Iraqi deaths and three million more displaced people. Financial, economic and social costs for Iraq are immeasurable. But still the US is not serious and honest about the project of Iraqi liberation!
Therefore, I apologize to the readers for making frequent references to my earlier articles. This is necessary to demonstrate both the foresight and the tragic trajectory with some can only see now with hindsight.
2. Philosophical failure
Is Iraq war a failure? If so, how can you best describe this failure?
Yes, it is. The failure of US and Britain in Iraq is a philosophical failure. If the definition of philosophy brings together human reason, knowledge, freedom, morality and history in one complex epistemological formula, then the US and Britain’s intervention in Iraq, based on initially noble pretensions, is an abysmal failure on all these accounts. It is a failure of reason; a failure of knowledge, a failure of morality, failure of learning from history, reality and daily death; a failure of rational forward planning and the aftermath reflection and review.
It is approaching history in reverse and learning from it by blowing up its lessons the way bodies are blown up daily, frustrating its natural functions, and silencing its self-expressions. It is an immoral project because it cannot be justified even by ignorance as humans, by the reason of their faculty of reasoning, should at least be able to learn from experience and judge from basic senses if not from sensibility. This is something even animals are capable of. Who would watch the massacre of 4000 from their own species and maybe 400,000 of those they supposedly wanted to liberate and protect, and would get stuck in its place without vision, revision and solution? Which company, large or small, will repeat the same formula of failure, stick to the same objectives of absurdity and implement the same mission of self-annihilation and self-humiliation after one, two, three, four, five years of disastrous performance?
American deaths have reached 4000. What are American soldiers doing? They conduct daily house searches, arrests and killings, patrols and operations, in a country as large as Iraq looking for al-Qai’da and ‘keeping the security’ of the Iraqis as if they are the permanent local police of Baghdad and Babylon.. But what for? What do they want to achieve now or in future that they have failed to achieve in the last five years?
A basic vulgar rational SWOT exercise before or any time after the invasion, should have created enough ideas and guidelines to avoid the continuum of this murderous pandemonium. A serious review based on emerging facts and realities, rather than motivated and masterminded by the colonial interests of the oil oligarchy, arms industry and immoral prejudices of fascist lobbyists, could have produced by now a clear X-ray of the bleeding points and prescribed preventive measures to stop doing more of the same masochistic game.
The scale of the Iraqi tragedy and absurdity of the situation is so massive that reason shudders from accepting its actuality. If you cannot accept that numbers start with one, two and three, then any number of complex arithmetic equations can bear no results apart from further confusions and convulsions.
So what is wrong? What has been wrong all along? Does the US and Britain know they are fighting a war? If they do, what is the war they are engaged in? How do they fight it? What for? On whatever fronts? Are they winning the war in Iraq? For whom? Are they winning the war in Afghanistan? In Pakistan? In Darfur? In Lebanon? Has the conduct of the war in Iraq made life better for the Iranians, Palestinians, Darfurians, Kurds, and Afghanis? For women of Iraq and Afghanistan? Has it made America stronger and more respected in the world?
And what about Iraq? Patrick Cockburn, one of the most informed, honest and insightful leading reporters of the Iraq war, writes in Independent on 16 March 2008:
“Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.”
There must be something wrong that military strategy and killing machinery cannot fathom. There must be something wrong with the politics of the war.
I feel indignant to ask this endless series of questions because by now we should have had a whole clear blue sky of answers and inspiring achievements. I also feel indignant because I have already asked these questions again and again and again analysing the realities and possibilities with foresight rooted in understanding the intricate reality of these countries and cultures and the machinery of global politics. I wish I were wrong and I could see now the democratic Iraq that Bremer so foolishly and irresponsibly devised and promoted to enable his one-year robbery of Iraq’s billions.
I supported and welcomed the war of Iraqi liberation. I genuinely believed that if America’s neo-cons were genuine in its liberation project in Iraq, yes Iraq would become a beacon of freedom in the Middle East, and yes, the 21st century would be an American century.
Alas, it was all a dismal philosophical failure as I described it
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March 23, 2008
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