IPA Newspack
  • Home
  • now
  • politics
  • business
  • markets

IPA /

IPA Special

IPA Special

The Bloodbath In Iraq Shows The US Can Never Be A “Global Policeman”

By Nadine Talaat

“The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country since World War II, nothing like that has happened,” said US president Joe Biden last month, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Twenty years after the United States sent hundreds of thousands of troops to launch a full-scale, unwarranted invasion of Iraq, Biden’s assertion suggests that the United States has erased the unwanted memories of the war. Biden’s failure to see the hypocrisy in his statement is a testament to the enduring dominance of American exceptionalism: the belief that the United States is fundamentally different from other nations and has a unique mandate to dominate and impose its values across the world. It holds that America is synonymous with freedom, and that the liberal world order is structured around its hegemony.

Today the nature and scale of US military engagements across the globe has certainly changed since it first invaded Iraq, but the underpinning ideology that the United States is not bound by the same rules that govern others remains fundamentally unchallenged.

Every anniversary regurgitates “fresh” articles reflecting on tactical and operational mistakes. The recurring question is whether Iraq is better off today because of American intervention. Those defending the war may point out that many more Iraqis now have a cell phone plan, and that life expectancy increased from sixty-seven in 2001 to seventy-two today, conveniently omitting that this increase still lags behind the global average increase. Self-justificatory pieces, like one by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, often argue that the United States saved Iraq from a Syria-style civil war by establishing some form of democratic governance. “They [Iraqis] gained a chance,” Frum writes.

It would be hard to overstate the devastation wrought by the Iraq War. Brown University’s Cost of War project estimates that roughly three hundred thousand innocent Iraqi civilians were killed as a result of direct fighting. Millions more died indirectly from its consequences, such as malnutrition, disease, and poverty. More than nine million were displaced from their homes. Today much of the political instability, corruption, and sectarian violence in Iraq can be traced back to the devastation of the war. Domestically, the invasion of Iraq cost US taxpayers $2.4 trillion and fuelled the military-industrial complex. Regionally, it birthed an Islamist insurgency that would become the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), destabilizing the region from Syria to Yemen and Libya.

Despite this, the invasion of Iraq continues to be held in American consciousness and the mainstream political establishment as a mistake, yes, but one that had good intentions and that was based on sound logic — namely, that Saddam Hussein represented a threat to the US-led world order and needed to be removed. Despite a track record of disastrous wars and interventions like Vietnam, Libya, and Afghanistan, Iraq is seen as an aberration in American foreign policy rather than a symptom of American hubris.

Iraq bore no responsibility for or links to those responsible for 9/11, but then president George W. Bush and vice president Dick Cheney began arranging plans for its invasion just days after the planes struck. Not a single hijacker was Iraqi, and claims that Iraq had links to al-Qaeda were shaky at best. But that didn’t matter. In the aftermath of the attacks, America needed to reassert its hegemony. Saddam’s Iraq provided the perfect opportunity for it to showcase what would happen to those that threatened its power, and the disposability of the lives that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With the help of mainstream media, the Bush administration spun a narrative of Iraqi WMDs. They found the few Iraqis, most who had been living in exile, who would support their war and cherry-picked evidence to support their claims. In the two years after 9/11, Bush and top officials in his administration repeated lies about the threat Iraq posed to the US public nearly a thousand times. Mainstream media largely failed to challenge these claims, silencing any dissenting voices. In the two weeks before and after Colin Powell’s United Nations speech, just 17 percent of commentators on major networks expressed skepticism at the war. These efforts to shape public opinion worked: by September 2003, seven in ten Americans believed that Saddam was in some way responsible for 9/11.

Officials and media would later claim that they were misled, that the intelligence was faulty, and that they did the best they could with the evidence they had at the time. But even in 2003, at the height of the propaganda campaign, not everyone believed the official narrative. In the lead-up to the war, an estimated 36 million people across the world took to the streets to oppose the invasion in what is now considered the world’s biggest coordinated protest. These protesters did not take to the street that day just because they did not believe the claim of WMDs, but because they fundamentally rejected the notion that the United States had any moral justification to launch a war. They rejected the role America had designated itself as the global police and defender of the liberal world order.

President Obama presented a flickering hope of confronting American exceptionalism and the hold it had on the political establishment. In a speech he gave on the campaign trail in 2008 in which he discussed the failures of the war in Iraq, he told voters, “I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” He used the failures of Iraq and his opposition to it as a major talking point of his campaign to set himself apart from Hillary Clinton and John McCain, both of whom were outspoken supporters of the invasion. He preached the need for diplomacy and international cooperation over military engagement.

By the end of his presidency, Obama had implemented a set of practices and norms that sanctioned a system of extrajudicial killings with very little oversight or transparency. Like his predecessor, Obama took for granted that the United States had the legal right and moral duty to bomb targets that it perceived as threats to its interpretation of global order.

When Donald Trump took office, preaching the need for “America First”, he revoked what limited oversight existed under Obama and ended the requirement to report on casualties. He continued to ramp up extrajudicial killings unchecked. In his first ten days in office, President Trump authorized three drone strikes and a US military raid in Yemen, reportedly killing up to thirty civilians. In just two years, Trump authorized 2,243 strikes.

Biden’s presidency has so far marked a significant decrease in drone strikes. The disastrous withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 and the Taliban’s swift return to power despite two decades of American fighting has defined Biden’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has certainly diverted attention away from the war on terror.

“I stand here today, for the first time in twenty years, with the United States not at war,” said Biden speaking at the UN in September 2021. “We’ve turned the page.”

It was a brazen and misleading statement. In fact, the war on terror has never been declared to be over. The legislation that the United States has relied on to conduct its military operations for the past twenty years, particularly the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Act, is still in place. Today America has more than 750 military bases spread across 80 countries with more than 40,000 troops in the Middle East, including 2,500 in Iraq. The drone program continues. And President Biden just requested a record-breaking defence budget of $886 billion.

On September 20, 2001, nine days after the terrorist attacks on US soil, George W. Bush announced the start of the “global war on terror.” He told Americans: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” He issued the United States a blank check for a war not bound by temporal or geographical boundaries, and a mandate to attack anyone anywhere deemed a threat.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the US invoked its right to self-defence, enshrined by international law. But as the years passed, the right to self-defence from an imminent attack became harder to claim. Instead, America has shifted to a policy of preemptive and preventive self-defence to defend itself against threats that have not yet materialized, a practice that violates international law.

The war on terror’s impact on the principle of sovereignty and legitimacy of the international order and are most evident today in Ukraine. In this case, Russia also justified its unilateral invasion with a weak claim to preventive self-defence against growing NATO influence. Today, as the world watches another illegal occupation go unchecked, the United States is repeating the mistakes of Iraq in its response to the Ukraine war. The reductive narrative of “good versus evil” is repeated over and over, while dissenting voices are silenced. International law has become an empty slogan.

Today, when the US and its allies condemn Putin’s actions, the rest of the world’s memories of Iraq diminish any principled stance they may claim to have. Major allies of the United States, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and India, have refused to join the Western sanctions bloc. Across Africa and Asia, from South Africa to Indonesia, Uganda to Pakistan, politicians and leaders have called out America’s selective concern for human rights and international law. Even Bush himself, when he accidentally called his Iraq War “wholly unjustified” instead of the invasion of Ukraine, can’t hide the hypocrisy.

Perhaps what is most detrimental to the authority of international law is the complete lack of accountability that the United States has faced for the invasion of Iraq and larger war on terror. It refuses to subject itself to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or abide by any international systems of law. No formal apology has ever been issued. The architects of the war have never been tried, and many of those responsible for carrying out war crimes have evaded justice. There has been no meaningful conversation about reparations for the Iraqi people or the nearly one million victims of the war on terror, from Fallujah to Guantanamo Bay.

The United States is not exceptional in its violation of international law, or even in lying about it. In fact, this is one of the most constant realities of the international world order. But what is exceptional is the underpinning belief in its own moral superiority, and the double standards it allows itself as the defender of freedom and democracy while simultaneously acting as the world’s main aggressor, with a global empire that answers to no one.

For now, the US continues to behave as the judge, jury, and executioner of world order. Until the ideology of American exceptionalism is reckoned with, the true lessons of the Iraq War will remain unlearned. (IPA Service)

Courtesy: Jacobin

 

IPA Special

Nepalese Prime Minister’s Four Day Visit Bring Ties With India Closer

June 3, 2023
IPA Special

What Will Be India’s Response To US’s Bid To Offer NATO+ Membership

June 3, 2023
IPA Special

Narendra Modi Has Been Most Successful In Using Technology For Governance

June 3, 2023
IPA Special

Law Commission Parrots Views Of BJP, RSS Rather Than An Expert View

June 3, 2023
IPA Special

Rahul Gandhi’s Alternative Vision Can Be A Good Basis For June 12 Discussion

June 3, 2023
IPA Special

Labour Market Recovery Still Under Hostage Of Multiple Crises

June 3, 2023
IPA Special

Erdogan’s Presidential Win Is A Clear Loss For People Of Turkiye

June 3, 2023
IPA Special

July 23 General Election In Spain Is The Test Of Left For Its Political Survival

June 3, 2023
Happening Now

One of Independent India’s worst rail accidents

June 3, 2023
Politics

Cong slams BJP for criticising Rahul’s remark on IUML

June 3, 2023
Politics

SGPC flays Rahul Gandhi statement about Guru Nanak

June 3, 2023
Politics

Kejriwal asks Cong to choose between Constitution and Modi

June 3, 2023
Politics

‘Free power’ parties will have to pay some way: Minister

June 3, 2023
IPA Special

Opposition Can Follow A Five-Point Approach To Defeat BJP In 2024 Lok Sabha Polls

June 2, 2023
IPA Special

Bigger Muslim Support To The Congress In Karnataka Poll Is A Positive Signal For 2024

June 2, 2023
IPA Special

Kejriwal Gathering Opposition’s Support Against Centre’s Ordinance

June 2, 2023
IPA Special

Modi Govt Is Planning To Make Sedition Law Stricter Before 2024 Polls

June 2, 2023
IPA Special

‘Deglobalisation’ Talk By Experts Means Tendency Of Western Powers To Discriminate Against China

June 2, 2023
IPA Special

Bengal BJP Revamps Its Campaign Strategy Focusing On Both Left And TMC

June 2, 2023
Happening Now

Law Commission backs sedition law with tougher punishment

June 2, 2023

An appeal

The legacy of IPA, founded by Nikhil Chakravartty, the doyen of journalism in India, to keep the flag of independent media flying high, is facing the threat of extinction due to the effect of the Covid pandemic. Only an emergency funding can avert such an eventuality. We appeal to all those who believe in the freedom of expression to contribute to this noble cause.
Click here to learn more

Share

Reply

  • 0
More on IPA

Nepalese Prime Minister’s Four Day Visit Bring Ties With India Closer

June 3, 2023 5:00 pm | IPA Staff

By Arun Kumar Shrivastav During his 4-day India visit, Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal completed formal engagements with the Indian leadership and is visiting...

IPA Special

What Will Be India’s Response To US’s Bid To Offer NATO+ Membership

June 3, 2023 3:37 pm | IPA Staff

By Girish Linganna In what could be a significant turning point in global geopolitics, the United States is reportedly contemplating extending an invitation to India...

IPA Special

Narendra Modi Has Been Most Successful In Using Technology For Governance

June 3, 2023 3:35 pm | IPA Staff

By Harihar Swarup Prime Minister Narendra Modi has completed his Ninth Year as Prime Minister. Look at how he has already left his imprint on...

IPA Special

Law Commission Parrots Views Of BJP, RSS Rather Than An Expert View

June 3, 2023 3:34 pm | IPA Staff

By K Raveendran The Law Commission has taken a political stand in its report about sedition rather than a policy stand, which a body of...

IPA Special

Nepalese Prime Minister’s Four Day Visit Bring Ties With India Closer

in IPA Special
Jun 3, 2023   ·  

What Will Be India’s Response To US’s Bid To Offer NATO+ Membership

in IPA Special
Jun 3, 2023   ·  

Narendra Modi Has Been Most Successful In Using Technology For Governance

in IPA Special
Jun 3, 2023   ·  

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Follow us on
Up Next: Mamata Taking Direct Charge Of Trinamool Affairs In Birbhum District Indicates Cracks In Party Unit
©2020 -2021 India Press Agency, All Rights Reserved.
Newspack by India Press Agency | Statement of Ownership | Contact Us
logo
  • Home
  • now
  • politics
  • business
  • markets