to realise what we have done to Iraq??
November 14, 2004 - Last week, as the ferocious battle for Fallujah began, the neo-conservative "scholar", Robert Kagan, paid a triumphal visit to Australia. Kagan was received by the Prime Minister. An edited version of the lecture he delivered was published in five newspapers. He was interviewed, respectfully, by almost every serious public affairs program on the ABC. Unhappily there was in all this virtually no discussion of the pivotal role Kagan had played in the origin of the invasion of Iraq.
Kagan is one of the more prominent of the group of neo-conservatives who came together in the mid-1990s in a bid to change the direction of US foreign policy. In 1996, Kagan co-authored with William Kristol, in the journal Foreign Affairs, a neo-Reaganite manifesto calling for the worldwide imposition of American ideals through the deployment of overwhelming US force. In 1998, he was a signatory on a letter to President Bill Clinton calling for the immediate overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
As soon as September 11 occurred, Kagan and Kristol began to put the case for the immediate invasion of Iraq in increasingly strident editorials in the influential Rupert Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard. They argued that Saddam was certainly involved in 9/11. They called him "the world's most dangerous dictator" and claimed that he was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb.
The pair waxed lyrical about President George Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech, which represented, they hoped, the beginning of a new era in world history. They backed the case for the invasion on the basis of their certainty about the existence of Saddam's vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. They were probably the last people in the world to maintain the faith. As late as May this year the pair argued that even President Bush had been "intimidated by the new conventional wisdom that Saddam has done away with his WMD".
A nightmare, in which we Australians are deeply implicated, has descended upon Iraq.This melancholy record of war-mongering misjudgement did not prevent a national red carpet from being rolled out for Kagan.
For those who remain interested in understanding what actually has occurred since the US-led invasion of Iraq, three very important sources of information have recently appeared.
In late October, the results of a sophisticated American study of post-invasion deaths were published by the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet. For this study interviewers were sent to 33 randomly selected neighbourhoods across Iraq. Their questions concerned household deaths in the 15 months before, and the 18 months after, the invasion of Iraq.
One of the randomly selected towns was Fallujah. In the 30 houses where interviews took place more than 50 violent post-invasion deaths were reported to have occurred, mainly as a result of US air strikes. If Fallujah were included in the calculations, the post-invasion death toll was 2.5 times higher than in the pre-invasion period. If it were excluded, the toll was 1.5 times higher.
In the final calculation Fallujah was excluded. The study estimated that, even so, the most likely number of excess deaths caused by the US invasion was 98,000. Of these, some 60,000 were estimated to have been caused by post-invasion violence. Because the sample was small, the margin for error was acknowledged to be large. The figure of excess post-invasion deaths might be considerably lower than 98,000. Equally, it might be considerably higher.
The right-of-centre Economist magazine has praised the study unreservedly. The study has been unpersuasively dismissed, however, by the pro-war party on obviously political grounds.
The costs of the invasion cannot, of course, be calculated exclusively according to the numbers killed. In September 2004, an authoritative study of conditions of life in post-invasion Iraq was published by the non-partisan US think-tank, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS surveyed 60 media outlets and 17 official public sources. It conducted hundreds of interviews across Iraq. In none of the areas studied - security, governance, the economy, the provision of services - has any significant progress been made. In most areas, since the invasion, the situation has grown worse.
Only a few of the findings can be outlined here. In Baghdad the current annual murder rate is 4500. Dozens of kidnappings take place every day. The dangers from crime and the insurgency are now so great that most Iraqis no longer feel safe even in their own neighbourhoods.
In all the major cities of Iraq electricity supply is far worse than before the invasion. The dangers from exposed sewerage are, however, probably even more serious. Water-borne disease is spreading; 60 per cent of Iraqis rely on rations, 50 per cent live beneath the poverty line.
Because of insecurity, by mid-2004 less than $500 million of the $18 billion reconstruction funds voted by the US Congress had been able to be spent. Iraqi public opinion has almost totally lost hope in the occupation forces.
In May 2004, 80 per cent of Iraqis had "no confidence at all" in their capacity to improve their security situation. While 90 per cent of Iraqis are keen to have free elections, the same percentage now yearn for the emergence of a political strongman who can take charge of the fearful chaos into the which the country has fallen since the Anglo-American forces arrived.
Over the past 18 months I must have read thousands of articles on post-invasion Iraq. Yet nothing I have read has captured the situation as vividly as a recently leaked private email sent by a young Wall Street Journal correspondent in Baghdad, Farnaz Fassihi, to her friends. Only a few sentences can be quoted here.
"I am house-bound . . . My most pressing concern every day is . . . to stay alive . . . Despite President Bush's rosy assessments Iraq remains a disaster . . . The Iraqi Government doesn't control most cities, there are several car bombs going off each day . . . The country's roads are becoming impassable . . . There are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings . . . The 'situation' basically means a raging, barbaric civil war . . . Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for security. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day . . . The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of America's mistakes, and it can't be put back in a bottle . . . I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections . . . His response summed it all: 'Go and vote and risk being blown to pieces . . . or murdered for co-operating with the Americans . . . are you joking?'."
Meanwhile, in Australia, when one of the intellectual cheerleaders of this unutterable disaster pays us a visit, we hang on his every, foolish word. A nightmare, in which we are deeply implicated, has descended upon Iraq. How long will it take before we see what we have done?
Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe
University.: r.manne@latrobe.edu.au
Illustration: Dyson
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