Home >> Middle East >> Iraq  Email  Print What Bush wanted to do and what he did Saberi Roy - 5/23/2007 Almost anyone will agree that the Iraq war went horribly wrong. What did we get from it, other than Saddam’s head? Bloodshed and more bloodshed, 30 killed, 80 killed, 100 killed…. Is this what President George W. Bush wanted or anyone wanted? The excuse given is that no one anticipated that the country will be pushed to a sort of Civil War. Then what was anticipated really? Any foreign policy should be made considering the past, the present and the future situation in a country, the consequences likely as a result of such policies and associated actions, but none of these seemed to have been thought of by Bush and his clan.
So what was the past? The fact that the pro-Iran Shias and the pro-Saddam Sunnis were always bitter enemies and although Saddam’s reign somehow kept a civil war in check, the Shia-Sunni sectarian violence was like a dormant volcano ready to burst. This is a fact that the Bush government didn’t seem to know or simply ignored. So the fact remains that the past was ignored.
The present, when the war started was based on absolutely wrong information that Iraq has been hoarding WMDs and that Saddam Hussein had links with the Al Qaeda and posed a threat to US security. 9/11 happened and Bush wanted to topple Saddam even if there was no link between the two. As we all know, no weapon of mass destruction were found and Saddam had no great love for terrorists. So, the present was also flawed.
Now the future…of course, no blueprint, no game plan on what the US intends to do about the US soldiers or the people of Iraq. Let the soldiers die, let the people die, let terrorism continue, at least Saddam is gone. So, the entire Iraq exercise seems to have been based on ignoring the past, and the Bush government had simply no knowledge about the ‘past’ of a country there were supposedly trying to ‘liberate’. The war was also based on flawed information of the ‘present’ and US intelligence failed and of course what bothers everyone most is an uncertain ‘future’. What do we now expect in a country that has been looted, the national and historical treasures lost, the museums destroyed, simple lives uprooted and now completely controlled by Al-Qaeda, associated terrorist groups and Islamic fundamentalists? Iran has been facilitating sectarian violence according to news reports, the Al Qaeda has a stronghold in Iraq and now Bush’s great plan of eradicating terror after 9/11 has actually resulted in just the opposite. Iraq is now first and foremost a breeding ground for new terrorists. Bush has this great knack of ending up doing something opposite to what he initially planned and meant to do. Is the world a safer place after US bombed Iraq? That is anyone’s guess…
The Iraqis no longer consider Americans as liberators and Americans are now seen as occupiers. The Iraq war remains a Bush-Blair mistake but no one is ready to accept the mistake. Saddam could have been toppled in a different way, a political game plan could have been sorted out, a proper consideration of the ‘past, present and future’ of a country that was waiting to be bombed could have saved many lives. The fact remains that ‘bombing politics’ don’t work. No matter how influential the Churchill-Hitler standoff had been, if every other US or British leader wants to go down in history as the great ‘saviour’ of mankind with a flawed mission and no definite perspective, there will be more such wars and more human suffering. Iraq is a lesson in politics.
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