Long, well worth it.---
The need for the White House to produce a fantasy picture of Iraq is because it dare not admit that it has engineered one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worse than Vietnam, because the enemy is punier and the original ambitions greater. At the time of the invasion in 2003 the US believed it could act alone, almost without allies, and win. In this it has utterly failed. About 1,950 American soldiers have been killed, 14,900 have been wounded, and its military command still has only islands of control. It is a defeat more serious than Vietnam because it is self-inflicted, like the British invasion of Egypt to overthrow Nasser in 1956. But by the time of the Suez crisis the British empire was already on its death bed. The disaster only represented the final nail in its coffin. Perhaps the better analogy is the Boer War, at the height of British imperial power, when the inability of its forces to defeat a few thousand Boer farmers damagingly exposed both Britain's real lack of military strength and its diplomatic isolation.
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This strangeness and separation from reality became more evident as the conflict escalated. The debate on why the US invaded Iraq has been over-sophisticated. The main motive for going to war was that the White House thought it could win such a conflict very easily and to its own great advantage. They were heady times in Washington at the beginning of 2002, as the final decisions were being taken on invading Iraq. It was the high tide of imperial self-confidence. The US had just achieved a swift victory in Afghanistan. The Taliban forces had evaporated after a few weeks of bombing by B-52s and the withdrawal of Pakistani support. Their strongholds in Kabul and Kandahar fell with scarcely a shot fired.
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When US troops began to spread out into Iraq after the fall of Baghdad they made a surprising discovery. Most people were armed, often with high-powered modern weapons. Saddam Hussein was reduced to introducing a buy-back programme in the early 1990s to cut down on the number of heavy weapons on the streets. Even so, his officials in south-east Iraq were astonished when a tribe turned up with three tanks - presumably purloined during the Iran-Iraq war - which they were prepared to turn over for a sizeable sum of money.
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At first the US did not believe that such complexities mattered. Paul Bremer, a supposed expert on counter-terrorism, caught the eye of President Bush and was made US viceroy. Much maligned in retrospect, Bremer showed little grasp of the reality of Iraqi politics. But then neither did his masters in Washington. He took months to realise that the most powerful man in the country was an ageing Shia cleric called Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, living in a house down an alleyway in the holy city of Najaf. Already staggering under the impact of armed resistance by the five million Sunni Arabs, the US dared not provoke a rebellion by the 15-16 million Shia of Iraq.
Independent UK
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