4-15-08, 9:26 am
No End In Sight by Charles H. Ferguson Public Affairs, 2008
Original source: Morning Star
This is the book of the film that has won awards in the US for best documentary.
Interviews with US top officials, generals and war reporters, interspersed with incisive summaries by author Charles H Ferguson, throw glaring light on the US disaster in Iraq.
They highlight the brutality of the initial war, in which most of the huge total of civilian dead were victims of millions of cluster bombs which were rocket-fired by the army.
The costs includes about 4,000 US deaths, with 60,000 to 80,000 wounded and 'perhaps a quarter of a million Iraqi deaths,' although the 2004 Lancet figure of 650,000 is also mentioned.
The indifference of the US administration to the welfare of the Iraqi people is well brought out. The problems with the electricity and the contaminated water are worse. Ferguson says: 'All the Iraqis that I spoke to said that life in Baghdad was unbearable.'
The forecasts mostly expect the situation to worsen, but they do not condemn the invasion and make no reference to the US corporate stake in oil, trade and investment opportunities and, of course, permanent military bases. They follow the fashionable line of censuring the inadequate planning for the occupation, as though better management would have made things go right.
Iraq is summed up as a warlord society with a defunct central government, its individual ministries captive to various political parties and their militias.
The parliament rarely gets a quorum and has passed no significant legislation since it came into being, apart from the constitution.
The only two laws that it passed in 2007 were one that allow themselves and their families to have diplomatic passports for travel to Europe and one that allows them to retire a year after they join the parliament and keep 80 per cent of their salaries.
That is the reality of the democracy that our smug Foreign Secretary Mr Milliband says has been promoted by armed intervention.
Three rival Shi'ite militias and parties, including the Mahdi army, fight for control of Basra, the oil port city in the south. Secular or nationalist Sunni groups fight Shi'ites and al-Qaida and foreign fundamentalists for control of Baghdad and its surrounds. And they all fight the occupying forces, as a general rule. Third, the Kurds fight Arabs, Turkmen and Christians for control of Kirkuk, the northern oil-producing area.
By early 2007, the US military 'had effectively lost control of the country.' However, potential terrorists have been given first-class training by fighting what is said to be the best-trained army in the world.
What about the military surge under General Petraeus? It is not widely known that it was combined with a policy of buying off 70,000 armed Sunnis with money and weapons. It sounds like a crazy idea, storing up trouble for later - well worthy of Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22, who bribes the German airforce.
Contributors agree that there been a reduction in violence, some say in time to influence the US presidential election campaigns, but they believe that it will not last.
The US soldiers enter a neighbourhood and the insurgents adopt the classic guerilla tactic of stopping fighting to deceive the enemy into thinking that they have gone away.
There is sharp division of opinion on the question of US withdrawal, those against using the well-worn argument that it would cause a bloodbath, countered by those who point out that there is one already and it could get worse.
A compromise view favours a timed withdrawal, putting pressure on the political leaders to find agreement. Only Christopher Hitchens thinks that it tenable for the US to stay indefinitely.
From Morning Star
