Iraq as a nation is over, finished. It effectively ceased to exist in 2003 when U.S. forces invaded and toppled Saddam. Like all wars this one has winners and losers. The winners are the Kurds, the Shia, Iran, Islamic fundamentalists and al-Qaeda. The losers are the Sunni and the United States and America's Arab client states in the region, perhaps even Israel.
If you can only read one book on Iraq, Galbraith's is the one to get. First a look at the author. If the name sounds familiar to Canadians it's because Peter is the son to the late, great, Canadian-born John Kenneth Galbraith, world-renowned economist and advisor to a gaggle of U.S. presidents going back to FDR. Reading this book it's pretty obvious that Peter got a lot of his dad's smarts.
Galbraith brings more than two decades of personal experience and insight to "The End of Iraq." For many years he was involved in Iraq as a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, years that witnessed the Iran-Iraq war, the Kurdish genocide and the 1991 uprising. He also served as America's first ambassador to Croatia, a professor at the National War College and is the Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. He's been a regular advisor to the Kurdish leadership and advised them on constitutional autonomy in the post-Saddam Iraq. This guy is not some reporter off the street, he's not some general or a Bush insider. He's the real deal, something that will be obvious to you before you've finished the first ten pages of "The End of Iraq."
The book begins by tying together a string of atrocities that were splashed about, piecemeal, in the Western press. Put together, they resemble a tennis volley of hideous mayhem, a civil war that Washington and London are doing their utmost to deny. Where did it all go so terribly wrong? Galbraith writes:
"With regard to Iraq, President Bush and his top advisors
have consistently substituted wishful thinking for
analysis and hope for strategy. In July 2004, the
Central Intelligence Agency prepared a National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of the situation in Iraq.
Representing the coillective judgment of America's
most experienced Iraq analysts based on the best
intelligence available to the U.S. government, the NIE
warned of the danger of civil war. When President
Bush was asked about te NIE in September, 2004, he
shrugged it off: 'The CIA said life could be lousy, life
could be OK, life could be better. The Iraqi people
don't share their pessimism.'"
This is the guy who's defining the Global War Without End on Terrorism, the guy who has roped NATO countries like our own to fight America's battles in Afghanistan because his soldiers are stuck in a quagmire in Iraq of his own making, the guy who our Little Stevie adores and seeks to emulate.
"The Iraq War has failed to serve a single major U.S.
foreign policy objective. It has not made the United
States safer; it has not advanced the war on terror;
it has not made Iraq a stable state; it has not
spread democracy to the Middle East; it has not
enhanced U.S. access to oil. It has been costly. As
of this writing, 2,500 American troops have been
killed, more than forty thousand have been
wounded, and $300 billion spent. Some
economists have calculated that the total cost
of the war, direct and indirect, could exceed
$2 trillion."
Galbraith doesn't debate the American decision to invade. He, instead, focuses on the horribly flawed decisions and policies of Washington after Saddam fell.
"The main error has been to see Iraq not as it is
but as we wished it were. This led to an unrealistic
and futile commitment to preserving the unity
of a state that was never a voluntary creation of
its people, and that has been held together by
force."
The focus of "The End of Iraq" is to present ways the United States can salvage the best outcome from the partition of Iraq and to reveal the risks of further destabilizing the Middle East into an outright Shia versus Sunni, Persian versus Arab regional war that could cause enormous consequences worldwide. The greatest danger is whether the Leader of our Global War Without End on Terror, the Messianic Decider, can come to terms with reality.
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