Unsustainable Bushistan

U.S. military deaths have exceeded 2000 and can easily reach 3000 and more. Over 30,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of insurgency attacks and U.S. military actions, that is an average of 1000 per month since the war started. Some estimates are much higher claiming that anywhere from 40,000 and 70,000 have died from all manner of war-related violence, including criminal activities. The Iraqi crime rate is now the highest in the Middle East, with around 10,000 homicides a year that would not have happened before the invasion. During 2002, Saddam Hussein’s last full year in power their were 1,800 violent deaths – not counting those executed by Saddam’s regime. These numbers are testament that America has not been able to bring security and stability to Iraq.

America was and continues to be ill-suited to handle counter-insurgency operations. In fact the U.S. “cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism,” Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was the second most senior officer responsible for training Iraqi security forces wrote in the U.S. army magazine Military Review.

The Bush administration “apparently paid little or no attention” to pre-war assessments by the CIA that warned of major cultural and political obstacles to stability in post-war Iraq. Two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 had predicted that a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraq society prone to violent internal conflict.

It is time for America to come to terms with the reality that a united democratic Iraq is unsustainable. A civil war in Iraq will lead to a broader Middle East conflict, pitting Sunnis against Shiites. U.S. National Intelligence Director and former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negraponte, admitted as much in a frank assessment in Early 2006 after the bombing of the Golden Mosque. “If chaos were to descend upon Iraq, or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country…this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region, and indeed, the world,” Negroponte told a Senate armed services committee. Saudi Arabia and Jordan would support Iraq’s Sunnis with Iran coming to the support of the Shiites. Despite these warnings, the Bush administration is in denial that Iraq is sliding into civil war and that the only peaceful democratic solution is to divide Iraq into three separate democratic countries.