Just Let the Militias Have Iraq
Well dearest motherfuckers, I had published my doubts, but it appears that Old Man Biden is prepared to finally end our twenty year clusterfuck in Afghanistan by the end of summer after all. Well, sort of. Like any American peace deal, this one comes with a few bullet hole shaped asterisks. While “Combat” troops are set to fuck off by the end of August, the US still intends to keep a sizable contingent of heavily armed Americans at its 36 acre Branch Davidian style compound in Kabul along with Satan knows how many CIA agents. Biden is also maintaining colossal fleets in the Persian Gulf to keep up America’s air war on peasant goat farmers with so called over-the-horizon capability.
So peace may be a strong word for a weak gesture, but it’s still more than I had hoped for from a century long chickenhawk like Joe. And despite the incessant sob stories coming out of the mainstream media, who will have you and anyone unfortunate enough to listen believe that imperial conquest is the key to feminism in savage brown countries, there appears to finally be something of a bipartisan consensus that Afghanistan has been a gigantic waste of time and resources. Which frankly begs the question, what the fuck are we still doing in Iraq?
Out of the two flagship wars on terror, Iraq was always the more obvious mistake. At least Afghanistan had actually hosted the fuckers responsible for 9/11, even if they were more than willing to hand them over before we started shooting. The Iraq War had been precipitated on such obvious lies that I was able to expose them on my PC at 15 in between lesbian porno binges. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam fucking hated al-Qaeda more than we did. And yet we’re still there. Biden can call them advisors all he wants but some 2,500 troops are still in Babylon, ready to die for some hopped up neocon conspiracy to control the world’s oil supply.
There are currently two predominant excuses for our continued presence in hell and if taken together they are almost comically oxymoronic. Americans must occupy Iraqi soil to finish off what’s left of ISIS and contain the apparently Iranian backed Shiite militias who whooped their ass into submission. It was dangerous extremists like Kataib Hezbollah who helped the evil Iranians crush the Islamic State after the American trained quislings in the Iraqi Army literally turned tail and ran for the hills. What’s left of ISIS is hanging on by a thread and America is engaged in a heated tit for tat bombing campaign with the only people capable of finishing them off. Mind you that neither one of these “threats” to Walmart and apple pie would even fucking exist if it wasn’t for the forty years of incessant warfare made possible by US tax dollars.
Most people suffer beneath the hefty delusion that America’s current campaign in Iraq began in 2003, but the reality is it really began in 1980 when the dovish Jimmy Carter gave then ally Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Iran and it never really stopped from there. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that Saddam fucking wanted to. America supported and funded this insane crusade for greater Babylon because the Iranians had done the unforgivable and went and had a popular revolution against one of our bloodthirsty puppets. But America wasn’t content to simply fuel Saddam’s conquest. We secretly and often illegally armed both sides of the Iran-Iraq War in a cynical attempt to weaken both nations. The end result was an 8 year death match of Byzantine-esque proportions. There was trench warfare, tank battles, human wave attacks, and chemical warfare. By the time the shit show was finished over 500,000 people lay dead and America had lost interest in keeping our old buddy Saddam around anymore.
The first Persian Gulf War was essentially a trap. During the failed Iraqi conquest of Iran, Bagdad’s alleged allies in Kuwait had begun siphoning off oil from a hotly contested border region. The cash strapped Iraqis, who had never really recognized Kuwait’s independence from their territory to begin with, took the Bush Sr. regime at their word when they repeatedly expressed little interest in the outcome of such a conflict, and launched another invasion. Only this time the Americans changed changed their tune the moment Saddam crossed the border. After thwarting several peace attempts from the understandably confused Iraqi strongman, America launched one of the most disproportionately heinous military campaigns in modern history. As Jean Baudrillard famously observed, it could hardly even be described as a war. It was more like a CNN infomercial for Boeing with war crimes.
After 40 days and 177 million pounds of munitions, the modern metropolitan state of Iraq had been reduced to a pre-industrial hellhole. We bombed literally anything that moved and quite a few things that didn’t; hospitals, schools, power plants, oil fields, chemical weapons facilities, nuclear centrifuges, highways of retreating troops, highways of retreating civilians… We obliterated a civilian bunker, killing 1,500, mostly women and children. We demolished the nation’s power grid and sewage system, leaving their population to rot in a flood of their own filth. Over 200,000 people died as a result of the war alone, 60% of them were children. The news media celebrated the massacre like the Fourth of July, oohing and aweing over the advanced technology that went into destroying a nation. During their brief occupation of Kuwait, Iraqi soldiers had discovered a memo from Kuwaiti intelligence revealing a conspiracy by Kuwait and the United States to goad Iraq into an invasion in order to cut the nation down to a size that the two parties could split and fit in their wallets.
But the Persian Gulf War didn’t end in 1991. It continued without mercy through out the Clinton years with a crippling embargo that’s been described quite accurately by resigning UN officials as genocidal. Anywhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million Iraqi civilians died from starvation and medical neglect, all with the intention of torturing the populace into overthrowing a dictator we had armed and empowered for years. When revolts did finally come from Shiites and Kurds, America left them to be slaughtered after promising our support. When asked if all this carnage was worth it, Secretary of State Madeline Albright shrugged. Every time Clinton was caught porking another intern, he dropped a few more bombs on the defenseless country to distract the pyromaniacs at CNN. The road to a second Iraq war was paved by Democrats in the form of a bill that essentially declared war on what was left of the crippled fiefdom of Saddam Hussein. By the time Bush Jr. showed up, the gun was already loaded. He just had to wait until September for his excuse to pull the trigger.
After the easily preventable attacks on 9/11, everyone was too pissed and stupid to care who we invaded. After putting on a half-hearted show in Afghanistan, Dubya quickly lost interest in catching Bin Laden and shifted gears to finishing off Saddam. The results were catastrophic for pretty much everybody but Iran who came to Iraq’s rescue after the fruit of the surge ripened into ISIS and this is what our troops remain to fight; an Axis of Resistance to the horrors made possible by decades of American meddling. America likes to talk big on democracy in far flung places. Yet even Iraq’s own American cobbled democracy voted unanimously in parliament to kick us out of their country in 2020. Even the people we put in charge have clearly had enough of our bullshit, so why don’t we cut the name games and just get the fuck out.
I for one say we just let the militias have Iraq. They’ve done a better job governing it than we ever did. The truth is America doesn’t give a flying fuck about democracy. We never bothered promoting it in the liberated monarchy of Kuwait for Allah’s sake, and even if we did, that still wouldn’t make it right for Iraq. The current government in Bagdad is as corrupt as its ever been because the Iraqi people didn’t choose it. Just like Saddam, it was forced down their throats by certain enlightened white people convinced that the Westphalian nation state is the solution for savages everywhere. This system isn’t indigenous to the Gulf. The militias that formed in the vacuum of its repeated failures are. In many ways they resemble the armed nomadic tribes who ruled these deserts long before we fucked them up. The last thing America needs to do is go to war with them. They might be the best hope that god forsaken place has left.
posted by Satish Sharma at
16:11
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