{"id":4426,"date":"2021-01-01T15:37:42","date_gmt":"2021-01-01T15:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=145390"},"modified":"2021-01-01T15:37:42","modified_gmt":"2021-01-01T15:37:42","slug":"iraq-today-is-a-nightmare-that-americans-largely-sleep-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/01\/iraq-today-is-a-nightmare-that-americans-largely-sleep-through\/","title":{"rendered":"Iraq Today Is a Nightmare That Americans Largely Sleep Through"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What does it look like when you \u201cliberate\u201d a country that hasn\u2019t asked for it, when you unleash a violent chain of events creating the conditions for an even worse tyranny than before?<\/p>\n

Those who witnessed Iraq in the wake of the American invasion in 2003, the failures of reconstruction, and the rise and fall of ISIS, say one need look no further than that country today to get your answer.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post last week reported<\/a> that there are still a million internally displaced Iraqis who fled the 2014 takeover of ISIS and the ensuing war to overthrow it \u2014 with many living in soon-to-be-shuttered government-run camps. Meanwhile, COVID has sent an already fragile economy spiraling toward collapse<\/a>, with salaries in the major cities left unpaid, reconstruction projects stalled or completely aborted. A new central government is still trying to find its legs, more than a year after deadly street protests<\/a> washed over the country. According to experts who spoke with RS, direct attention from the Western powers that sent this country on its present course is scattershot, with aid easily corrupted by a burgeoning kleptocracy<\/a> across the provincial governments and Baghdad.<\/p>\n

American regime change has left Iraq even more dysfunctional and psychologically broken than it was before.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe trauma on Iraq has been despicable,\u201d said Abbas Kadhim, who spent his own youth in an Iraqi IDP camp in the 1990s before coming to the United States, where he observed the 2003 war and its aftermath from a distance. Now he is the director of the Iraq Initiative<\/a> at the Atlantic Council in Washington, trying to rebuild broad diplomatic and political bridges with Baghdad. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is really the part we have to reckon with when we talk about what happened in Iraq and what it will take to build back. There are things going on in that country that will take decades to undo,\u201d he said in an interview with RS. <\/p>\n

Peter Van Buren, a former U.S. foreign service officer who spent a year in Iraq leading two provincial reconstruction teams, later wrote about it in \u201cWe Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for Iraqi Hearts and Minds,\u201d<\/a> in 2012. He often talks about his disgust with the arrogance of the American project to remake the country in its own image, only to abandon it when the effort became untenable. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is part of the American way of making war, arriving unwanted in a third world country with promises to liberate, and then leaving as our domestic politics (or just losing) turn that war into an unwanted child,\u201d he said in an email to RS.<\/p>\n

Elijah Magnier spent years as a war correspondent in several major Iraqi cities during the war, including Baghdad at the height of the insurgency. To his mind, the United States left everything \u2014 the carnage of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the cratered cities and towns, the toxic environment, the terrorist breeding ground and sectarian strife \u2014 behind, with impunity. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not the way it works, we\u2019re dealing with human beings here,\u201d he said in a recent interview. \u201cSo the U.S. removed Saddam Hussein \u2014 who was a bad person and I\u2019m glad he\u2019s gone \u2014 but you don\u2019t interfere in countries where the population isn\u2019t ready. When people are ready, they will remove their own leaders. If not, it doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n

While that point seems to have been taken by numerous American scholars and military strategists in the years since, the lessons are far from academic in Iraq. They are visceral and ongoing.<\/p>\n

 \u201c(The Iraqis) did all of the heavy lifting in this war,\u201d said Kadhim, pointing in particular to the years after the U.S. began its withdrawal in 2009. At that point, the remnants of the Al-Qaida post-invasion insurgency, which was supposedly vanquished by the U.S. military \u201cSurge\u201d<\/a> from 2007 to 2008, was already regrouping in the form of a more deadly, more powerful ISIS (ISIL, or Daesh). <\/p>\n

Hobbled by corruption, ineffective intelligence, and festering sectarianism ignored if not inflamed by the Shitte administration of then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (Washington\u2019s man in Baghdad), the U.S.-trained Iraqi military didn\u2019t stand a chance. As the United States was preparing to leave in 2009, then-Gen. Ray Odierno said the Iraqi forces were \u201cready\u201d to take on their own security. In 2014, as ISIS raced across Iraq like a cancer, they fled<\/a>. Several divisions \u201cevaporated,\u201d with 60 out of 243 battalions unaccounted for, all equipment lost. <\/p>\n

\u201cISIS took 40 percent of the country. Some of these cities were completely destroyed,\u201d said Kadhim, noting that much of the real destruction came when the areas were later liberated in 2017 by Iraqi forces with the help of U.S. airpower and Iranian militias. At its peak, ISIS territory included the provinces of Mosul, Anbar, Saladin, as well as major portions of Kirkuk and swaths of outer Baghdad. Entire religious sects like the Yazidis<\/a> in Northwestern Iraq were massacred, kidnapped, sold, and blown to the mountain winds like sand.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cYou\u2019re talking about cities that are no longer habitable,\u201d some, like Mosul<\/a> still have unaccounted-for bodies lying under rubble, IEDs and unexploded ordnance still dotting the urban landscape, said Kadhim. There are booby traps everywhere. Reporter Mizer Kamel, writing in October<\/a>, was overwhelmed by the apocalyptic scene in Mosul, two years after the city\u2019s \u201cliberation\u201d from ISIS.<\/p>\n

At one point he entered a house that served as an ISIS headquarters, with several families \u2014 a total of 64 people \u2014 living there during the central government\u2019s fight to retake the city in 2017. Two missiles had hit the home at one point, igniting oil barrels stored in the basement. Men, women, and children were set on fire, their screams heard for two hours before an eerie silence. The injured had been taken away by ISIS, a neighbor told Kamel, who spotted human bones in the remains of the building. Some 50 bodies were never recovered.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Neighbourhood] residents, without exception, speak of the heavy psychological toll on their mental and physical health due to the unrecovered bodies under the rubble,\u201d Kamel writes. \u201cThe house has become a health hazard, a breeding ground for stray dogs and a den for snakes, scorpions and insects.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said 80 percent of old Mosul was \u201cwrecked\u201d with many residential neighborhoods completely flattened. \u201cAl-Shahwan (district) feels like a Second World War movie set. The destruction is terrifying, with torched cars piled up on tons of rubble, wreckage from destroyed houses, and skeletal human remains.\u201d<\/p>\n

This of course is feeding on the minds of the denizens of Iraq\u2019s doomed IDP camps in Nineveh and Anbar provinces<\/a>. They know what awaits them when they try to go home. But there are other traumas: Six years ago, many of these children were being indoctrinated in ISIS classrooms. They saw parents and family killed or taken away. Those born under the so-called ISIS caliphate are not recognized by the Iraqi government today. They are now citizens of nowhere because no one wants them. \u201cYou need an army of psychologists and psychiatrists to undo the damage, if it can be undone,\u201d said Kadhim. \u201cMany of these efforts just aren\u2019t in the government\u2019s toolkit. You\u2019re talking about a really scarred society.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to a September report <\/a>by Brown University\u2019s Costs of War project, the post-9\/11 wars led by the United States created at least 37 million refugees in the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan over the last two decades. By 2007 in Iraq, some 4.7 million had left their homes. During the ISIS takeover in 2014, two million were forced out. While the majority have been resettled, there are still more than a million displaced. Most in the camps today are those whose homes had been destroyed, either by ISIS, the subsequent liberation, or at the hands of their neighbors, said Magnier. <\/p>\n

Most are innocent, but they are victims of a tribal culture in which they pay the price for the direct or even indirect links through family members to Daesh or Sunni rebels who did not renounce ISIS. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you commit a crime or you violate the law in Iraq, your entire family must pay the price. It\u2019s a tribal mentality,\u201d Magnier added. That is why you see women,elderly, even children who were not even born during the ISIS period, at risk of arrest, local retribution, homelessness. \u201cKicking them out in the hope they go home will be disastrous,\u201d one aid worker<\/a> told the Washington Post. \u201cThere\u2019s no plan, and there are no guarantees.\u201d <\/p>\n

American regime change has left Iraq even more dysfunctional and psychologically broken than it was before, critics say. We can scrub our hands of it until they\u2019re raw, but truth, like tattoos, won\u2019t wash away.<\/p>\n

We (always) \u201cwalk away from the destruction we create, having burned out the jungles in Southeast Asia with Agent Orange and turned functioning countries like Libya, Syria, and Iraq who dare bark at the American Empire into failed states,\u201d charged Van Buren. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Joe Biden speaks of the need for American global leadership, perhaps he should first talk to those we have already left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kadhim said it is his mission to redirect Washington\u2019s attention to Iraq and to target existing U.S. aid more strategically, and directly. Without that, the Iraqi government, now facing the collapse of the Iraq economy, will be forced to put the IDPs and their struggles aside.<\/p>\n

Estimates for the reconstruction run upwards of $150 billion. \u201cThe Iraqis barely have a budget running at that level,\u201d Kadhim said. \u201cMore than two years have passed since the defeat of ISIS and there has been no significant help or aid given to repair the damage. I think people would do well to pay attention to these inconvenient facts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What does it look like when you \u201cliberate\u201d a country that hasn\u2019t asked for it, when you unleash a violent chain of events creating the conditions for an\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4427,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions\/4427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}