When Defeat is Victory

Obamacon told the West Point military cadets earlier this month that Iraq is "what success looks like". Not even those gung-ho professional soldiers in training can swallow that canard. As the last combat troops of the 2nd Infantry Division left for Kuwait early this morning a quick look around will tell you the reality of Iraq post Sadam is not for the better. The country is physically in ruins. Iraqis regularly protest intermittent electrical service, lack of sanitation, and potable water. Governance is almost at a standstill because the major ethnic factions are unable to form a coalition after the closely divided result of a basically fair election in March. Suicide bomb attacks regularly interrupt the country's tenuous hold on peace. On Tuesday, an attack killed 48 at an Iraqi Army recruiting center. High level government officials and police are targets of assassination. The famous troop surge neocons are so proud to claim is responsible for this "victory" is itself a fiction. The Sunnis decided to stop fighting the US because they were loosing the civil war against the Shia in Baghdad, and the US began paying off many of their tribal leaders in the "Awakening" movement. A most unwanted consequence of the war on Iraq is the increased influence of Iran's Shia government over its weakened neighbor.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot be considered a victory even if cynically measured in commodity terms. Only two US companies received long term oil contracts from Iraq: Exxon-Mobil and Occidental. Exxon and its partner Royal Dutch Shell got the West Qurna Phase I field; Occidental got the Zubair field in partnership with Italy's ENI and South Korea's Kogas. The largest field, Rumalia (17 billion barrels), was leased to British Petroleum and China's National Petroleum Company. The Majnoon field (12.6 billion) went to Petronas and Dutch Shell. So the lion's share of oil went to foreign companies, despite the fact the occidental blood spilled was overwhelmingly American. Combat troops may be largely be gone, but there will be Americans around every corner in Iraq even after the 2011 deadline for removal of all American military forces.

The cost of the Iraq War to America goes beyond casualties and money both of which are considerable in their own right. As a people we have become desensitized to violence and more xenophobic during the eight year occupation. We have witnessed a United States government engage in torture, seizure, assassinations and other serious violations of internationally recognized human rights. Our laws protecting citizen privacy have been abridged in the name of national security. Treaties and laws against torture were bureaucratically nullified. For the first time in our history as a nation, our military has created an offshore penal colony that is not close to being closed nine years since the terror attacks that brought it into existence. The legality of the Iraq war itself has been called into question. To say this is what victory looks like makes a mockery of our civilization.