Five years after Washington inaugurated its “shock and awe” campaign, striking Baghdad with cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs, it has become abundantly clear that the war of aggression against Iraq has produced the greatest geo-political disaster in American history.
The war’s costs, in terms of both US imperialism’s global position and sheer dollar amounts, have eclipsed the immense damage wrought by the protracted intervention in Vietnam nearly four decades ago. It has already lasted longer than the American Civil War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War. Even in Vietnam, after five years of major troop deployments, the withdrawal of American forces had already begun.
A “war of choice” that was launched as a demonstration of the overwhelming and irresistible force of American militarism has turned into an operational debacle that has strained the US armed forces to the breaking point and eroded the strategic position of the United States in every corner of the world.
The reality is that five years after a US invasion that was expected by its organizers to swiftly replace the government of Saddam Hussein with a stable US client regime, 160,000 US troops remain deployed in the country and—as the extraordinary security measures surrounding Cheney, even in the fortified Green Zone, make clear—no area can be claimed to be fully secure.
What is happening is that the same media that promulgated the lies used to promote the war in 2002 and 2003 is now—more than five years later—largely promoting the official story that the so-called surge launched by the Bush administration over a year ago has pacified the country, leading to a marked improvement in conditions there.
The mounting of the US death toll to 4,000—900 having been killed since the “surge” began—does not fit into this good news story. Therefore, it has received far less coverage than when the death toll topped 1,000 in September 2004, 2,000 in October 2005 and 3,000 in December 2006.
In reality, this appalling new statistic does not begin to reveal the massive human cost of the Iraq war. It has been estimated that for every fatality in Iraq, 15 troops are wounded—an unprecedented ratio attributable to better protective gear and improved medical technology. Many tens if not hundreds of thousands more have suffered serious psychological damage from their participation in a brutal colonial war.
According to credible estimates, for every American soldier and Marine killed in Iraq, some 250 Iraqis have lost their lives over the five years since the US invaded and occupied the country.
The prominent British polling agency, ORB, produced an estimate of 1.2 million civilian deaths last September, a figure that closely tracked the findings of a public health survey conducted 18 months earlier by a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University, which placed the most likely Iraqi death toll at 665,000 as of early 2006.
In addition to the dead, over 4 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes by violence—half of them forced into exile and the rest becoming refugees in their own country. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are imprisoned without charges in a US-run gulag, where many have faced torture and ill-treatment. Since the “surge,” the numbers of Iraqis arrested daily by US forces has doubled.