How We Failed in Iraq

Six Reasons We Failed in Iraq



The Iraq Study Group report is out for public view now and I am heartened, if only for its accessibility. However, these days even NPR is little comfort; even they are missing the point. In a conflict where so few journalists venture outside their hotel rooms and the military propaganda is tired but still perpetuated, I would like to offer an alternate perspective based on my time as a human rights worker in the country during the early days of the U.S. invasion and occupation.



1. Failure to preserve infrastructure: This was not the Iraqis fault. At the point we captured Baghdad, it was us in control and us who had responsibility to prevent the looting, the breakdown. We were arresting anyone who had any association with the Ba’ath party, forgetting that a person had to register with the party even to get an elementary school teaching position. We took pride in ‘casting a wide net,’ and it was wide enough to do maximum damage. We decided that we didn't need to arrest those who began to loot government buildings and cultural heritage sites. Our 10,000 troops were too busy hanging out in the front yard at the Ministry of Oil.



2. Failure to rebuild: Again, we guarded the ministry of oil; even a year later, when driving through Baghdad and the surrounding countryside, the only evidence of U.S.-supported building you could see was massive military bases--in stark contrast to the numerous rotting hulks of municipal and federal buildings in the city center. This was humiliating as well as debilitating. We also left Iraq's previously functional phone network in a shambles and only gave phone connections to foreigners and occupying military. U.S. corporations' corruption left schools paid for but not rebuilt. Our shutdown of the military created mass unemployment and resulting mass hunger.



3. Failure to treat Iraqis as fully functional human beings: We could not bring ourselves to admit that they are as educated and capable of doing most of the work we insisted on doing poorly for them. We degraded them for the violence we provoked.



4. Failure to observe human rights and Geneva Conventions: This includes the first Fallujah massacre (where we used lethal force against a group of unarmed protestors, and lost our goodwill in that city); and the myriad devastating house raids, injury and killing of civilians, substandard prison conditions, the practice of 'disappearing' thousands of Iraqi citizens in our prison campus, and torture--which we never could admit was happening at a systematic level instead of only through seven 'bad apples.'



5. Failure to learn from history: When the British came to occupy Iraq, they employed 'divide and conquer,' placing the Sunni minority over the Shi'a majority. They were also run out in a year, when it became obvious that this was an occupation rather than a liberation. When we arrived to occupy Iraq, we tried to ally with Sistani, who didn’t really care, but his supporters did; in doing so we proved to the Sunni that none of them were safe in the New Iraq; nor were the Christians once Bush and our troops and our evangelists declared holy sanctioning of our actions there; and we sure invited the ire of Muqtada al Sadr, who believed that his Shi'a people should not align with us as the occupying power. This ushered in, perhaps more than anything, the sectarian violence and death squads we now hear the death tolls from daily.



6. Failure to recognize proportionality: We again ignore the enormous damage we have done in our human rights violations: A few pieces of candy or donated school supplies do not make up for killing a family member. But we hear it all the time, how kind and benevolent our soldiers are to the common Iraqi people.



None of this is news to us; except perhaps in its dissemination. All of this information we had readily available to us from on-the-ground experience of the human rights and relief organizations from year one of our military occupation. We were not willing to hear, and we have lost so very many lives since on account of our stubborness.



Still, I posit, we really succeeded at all we actually wanted to do: Bomb heavily, get rid of the man blocking us from the oil, and take the oil, making lots of money for our corporations in the meantime. We planned for that and we did that. (While Iraqi citizens were lined up on the roads in 24-hour waits to get a tank of gasoline, we were reporting record exports). We didn’t have any other real goals beyond that, and that is why we did not plan for those parts.



If anything, we created the situation we are now in to be even more profitable to us: We can’t possibly leave now; we’ve been saying that for a couple years now—we’re making so much money, and But it’s already a civil war. How much worse do you really think it will get? And it’s only the puppet government, with all its own human rights violations, that’s worried we might leave.