Watching America: The Life of Others

The Life of Others
Público, Portugal
By Sofia Lorena
Translated By Cindy Coutinho
20 August 2010
Edited by Heidi Kaufmann

July was the most violent month in Iraq over the past two years. August is the month in which U.S. combat troops leave the country, as envisaged in the security agreement signed between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President George W. Bush — as would happen anyway if no such agreement existed, and Barack Obama were, as he is, in power.

July was the most violent month of the last two years, the years in which violence continued daily but ceased to kill hundreds per day, and so we all thought that war had ended, and Iraq was safe. This August we will not know what's going to become of Iraq. But it was July that showed to those who didn't know — or didn't want to know — that all the wounds opened by Saddam and later by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, with Paul Bremer’s help, are still there.

“Bush burned down Iraq, and Obama will flee the fire,” one writer told us around cups of tea and too many cigarettes in the cups of coffee in a hotel in Baghdad. It was mid-July. Hamed al-Maliki really thinks that Iraq will get much worse than it was before it can start over. When that happens, he believes that Iraq won't be like the current Iraq, with 18 provinces and borders with Kuwait, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. There will be many Iraqs.

Joe Biden had a plan to divide Iraq. Bush and his brains had another. It was democracy, the government allied in Baghdad, with the domino effect tumbling to Damascus and, perhaps, to Tehran and Jerusalem. This plan scared many people. The king of Jordan warned that the numbers of Shiite Muslims would increase, uniting Hezbollah of Lebanon to Baghdad and to the Iran of the mullahs. Amr Mussa, head of an insignificant organization called the Arab League, warned that invading Iraq would be like “opening Pandora's box.”

Then, the plans were dashed and the warnings were confirmed. Bush only wanted to leave with as little humiliation as possible. Obama, before being elected, explained that there are necessary wars, and others that are just stupid, and that he never wanted this one to be his. Therefore, the Americans will surely leave - even if in doing so, they are “delivering Iraq to Iran on a plate,” as a Sunni sheik who began fighting the U.S. said, and now can barely believe that they are leaving without Iraq even having a government.