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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Iraq folly revives ugly history

Dewayne Wickham The Spokesman-Review

President Bush observed the fourth anniversary of the pre-emptive war he launched in Iraq by trying to tweak the ugly reality of this folly.

This fight was started, he said in a nationally televised address from the Roosevelt Room of the White House “to remove Saddam Hussein from power” and “to eliminate the threat his regime posed to the Middle East and to the world.”

And then in the kind of segue that ignores most of the calamities that have occurred since then, Bush said: “At this point in the war, our most important mission is helping the Iraqis secure their capital. Until Baghdad’s citizens feel secure in their own homes and neighborhoods, it will be difficult for Iraqis to make further progress toward political reconciliation or economic rebuilding, steps necessary for Iraq to build a democratic society.”

He treats what’s happened in Iraq over the last four years as a continuum rather than as a conflict-gone-wrong that has plunged this Middle Eastern country into civil war. What Bush didn’t explain was how the war that was designed to remove Saddam as a threat turned into a struggle to make Iraqis stop killing each other.

He also didn’t explain why the Iraqis’ view of this nation’s involvement in their bloody civil war differs so sharply from his own.

“If American forces were to step back from Baghdad before it is secure,” Bush said, “a contagion of violence could spill out across the entire country.”

But more Iraqis (31 percent) blame American troops for the ongoing violence than blame al-Qaida and other foreign fighters (18 percent), according to a USA TODAY/ABC News poll released the same day the president gave his war anniversary speech.

Even worse, nearly eight of 10 Iraqis said they oppose the presence of U.S. troops in their country. Fifty-one percent said they approve of attacks on U.S. troops.

And get this – when asked about the impact of other nations on their country, 77 percent of Iraqis said they believe the United States is playing a negative role in Iraq. Just 12 percent said our presence in their country is having a positive effect; which ranks us behind Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia in that category.

How did it come to this?

From my journalistic perspective, there seems to be two possible answers: Either the president is tone deaf to Iraqis’ desire to chart their future without American intervention, or he never planned to let them do so. The current government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was foisted on Iraqis by a made-in-America constitutional process. It was the handiwork of the U.S. occupation forces, which cajoled Iraqis into accepting a government that wasn’t their idea.

Such behavior is a familiar tactic of American foreign policy.

In 1902, we used our military occupation of Cuba to force a constitution on that country that gave us control of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

We used the threat of military intervention in 1903 to create the nation of Panama and gain approval for our construction and control of the Panama Canal.

And in 1912 we did it in Nicaragua to prop up an unpopular pro-American government and protect U.S. business interests there.

More recently, American presidents have used military intervention to impose our will on Haiti, Grenada and the Dominican Republic.

It’s this ugly history that causes many people to worry that the continued presence of American forces in Iraq is more an act of hegemony than an effort to bring real self-government to the people of that troubled land