Iraq - 5 years of conflict

It is 5 years since George W Bush and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ launched the War in Iraq. Under the codename Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush said the action was necessary to rid the world of dangerous leader who possessed weapons of mass destruction. In 2003 in the days leading up to the invasion George Bush said, “If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means, sparing in everyway we can the innocent”. But five years on, it is mostly the innocent who have suffered and died.

A total of 4,300 coalition troops have died, 3,993 of them American troops [icasualties.org. But it is the Iraqi population that has suffered in the last 5 years. iraqbodycount.org reports the civilian death toll as exceeding 80,000. But some independent bodies suggest the figure could be as high as one million dead. Certainly the number of citizens displaced by sectarian violence has topped more than a million and hundreds of thousands have fled the country.

Besides a lull in the violence, bombings still continue daily. On Wednesday a Colonel in the Interior Ministry was killed, a truck bomb injured 14 people in Mosul and a female suicide bomber killed four in Diyalah province, 70 km north of Baghdad. Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, told CNN “The last five years have been a violent, difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy” he said, but admitted “Iraq still had a long way to go”.

“Many Iraqis feel more optimistic” besides the country having “paid a heavy price to gain the freedom promised by the coalition forces and the United States” the minister said.
But it was not optimism that was expressed on the ground. “Bush only wants to justify the US losses” says Abdul Qadir Al Aani, an Iraqi journalist who spoke to Al Jazeera on the streets of Baghdad. Abu Ammar, a lawyer told the news station, “Bush makes these comments because he doesn’t value Iraqi blood, his alleged democracy is a lie”. Similar sentiments were felt by women on Baghdad’s streets. “The people of Iraq have given great sacrifices“, said Fatma, a public servant, “we have seen what has happened with our own eyes”. A taxi driver was dismissive of the achievements the war aginst the Saddam regime brought with it. “war has taken us back 60 years”, said Laith, “the only things we gained from this war are destruction, killing and kidnapping. We don‘t have water to drink. President Bush has to experience the real life in Iraq, and then he can say whether the war was good or not”.

When President Bush spoke on Wednesday he said that great achievements had been made.
“On this day in 2003 the United States began Operation Iraqi Freedom. As the campaign unfolded, tens of thousands of our troops poured across the Iraqi border to liberate the Iraqi people and remove a regime that threatened free nations. Five years after this battle there’s an understandable debate as to whether this war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it”.

Mr Bush said that, “Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win”. But it is a war that has cost more than lives. The US has spent more than $500 billion in fighting the continuing conflict. Some recent estimates suggest the ultimate cost could exceed $3 trillion but President Bush described these estimates as “exaggerated”.

But President Bush insisted the war had not only stopped a tyrant and closed his torture rooms, children’s prisons and rape rooms but “because we acted the world is better and the United States is safer”. However many have argued that one horror has been replaced by another.
Mr Bush conceded the cost has been greater than previously anticipated, but that it was “a fight we must win”. He said that the world has seen a “young democracy rise from the rubble of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny”. He once more put the case that “defeating the enemy in Iraq will make it less likely we will face the enemy here at home”. The “surge” that President Bush initiated earlier this year had “driven the terrorists from places they had once held”. However, besides the diminishing violence and attacks, there was “still hard work to be done”.

“Osama bin Laden once said when people see a strong horse and a weak horse by nature they will take the strong horse. By defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq, we will show the world that Al Qaeda is the weak horse” President Bush said, “The future of the Middle East does not belong to terror, the future of the Middle East belongs to freedom”.

But according to one BBC correspondent, many Americans feel the war was not worth it. But as the US economy suffers, Iraq is far from many people’s minds. According to the BBC’s Richard Lister, the US TV networks are giving far less coverage to the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war.
Even anti-war protests on the streets are have been little covered in the press. But in the UK there have been several programmes covering the anniversary. BBC’s Newsnight gave over the entire programme to the events of the past 5 years of conflict. ITV 4 showed a retrospective introduced by Ragi Omar while the anniversary topped many news bulletins throughout the day. The anniversary was consigned to the inside of many UK newspapers. The Guardian’s front page was one exception, contrasting the words of George Bush with those of a Baghdad resident who spoke of living in a nightmare with “death and carnage everywhere”. Across Europe only the Herald Tribune and the US Military paper, Stars & Stripes, made the story its front page.
While President Bush pushed the case for continuing the surge in Iraq, Democrat hopeful Barack Obama was making his assessment of the continuing conflict. “Fighting a war without end will not force the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future. And fighting a war without end will not make the American people safer”.
[BBC / CNN / Al Jazeera]