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Bell tolls for US empire in Iraq
George Galloway
December 19, 2011
'With shock and awe the empire dominated the skies over Iraq. But the American never controlled a single street in the country.' Photo: Goran Tomasevic
SO THE Yanks are going home - apart from the thousands of their servicemen and women whose lifeblood they are leaving in the sands of Iraq. And minus the trillion-plus dollars they have expended on destroying an Arab country (which may have lost a million souls), fanning the flames of fanaticism, making Iran more powerful, and unleashing a wave of sectarianism throughout the Muslim world.
Nice work, but hardly ''Mission Accomplished'', as the valediction delivered by President Obama at Fort Bragg last week made clear to the discerning.
The more he talked about what he once called the ''dumb war'', the more obvious it was that his was the task of holding the dipped banner of defeat. This is the death knell of American empire, the end of the brief unipolar world. For the Project for the New American Century, it will be never glad, confident morning again.
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The war that was waged - yes, for oil and Israel - was waged above all to terrify the world (especially China). It turned into the largest boomerang in history.
What has been demonstrated is the limit of America's power. Far from being cowed, America's adversaries - and its enemies - have been emboldened. With shock and awe the empire soon dominated the skies over Iraq. But the Americans never controlled a single street in the country. One alone - Haifa Street in Baghdad - became the graveyard of scores, maybe hundreds, of Americans.
Fortresses such as Fallujah entered history alongside Stalingrad as symbols of the unvanquishable power of popular resistance to foreign invasion. Crimes such as occurred at Abu Ghraib prison entered the lexicon of the barbarism of those who invade others, flying the colours of their ''civilising'' mission. China now knows it has nothing to fear from an America in which a third of the population are living in poverty or terrifyingly near it, and whose imperial hubris met its nemesis on Haifa Street.
I told the then British prime minister Tony Blair - outside the men's lavatory in the library corridor of the House of Commons, to be precise - that the Iraqis would fight them, with their teeth if necessary, until they had driven them from their land. I told Blair that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq, but that if he and George Bush were to invade there would be thousands of them.
But two things, as Bush would put it, I ''mis-underestimated''. First, that when the lies on which the case for the war had been constructed were exposed, the credibility of the political systems of the two main liars would collapse. And second, that the example of the Iraqi resistance would trigger seismic changes from Marrakesh to Bahrain.
Almost nobody in Britain or America any longer believes a word their politicians say. This malaise has fuelled both the Tea Party phenomenon and the Occupy movement, even if the word Iraq seldom crosses their lips.
And from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, the plates are moving still.
GUARDIAN
George Galloway was an MP in the British Parliament, for Labour and later the anti-Iraq war Respect party, from 1987 to 2010.
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George Galloway
December 19, 2011
'With shock and awe the empire dominated the skies over Iraq. But the American never controlled a single street in the country.' Photo: Goran Tomasevic
SO THE Yanks are going home - apart from the thousands of their servicemen and women whose lifeblood they are leaving in the sands of Iraq. And minus the trillion-plus dollars they have expended on destroying an Arab country (which may have lost a million souls), fanning the flames of fanaticism, making Iran more powerful, and unleashing a wave of sectarianism throughout the Muslim world.
Nice work, but hardly ''Mission Accomplished'', as the valediction delivered by President Obama at Fort Bragg last week made clear to the discerning.
The more he talked about what he once called the ''dumb war'', the more obvious it was that his was the task of holding the dipped banner of defeat. This is the death knell of American empire, the end of the brief unipolar world. For the Project for the New American Century, it will be never glad, confident morning again.
Advertisement: Story continues below
The war that was waged - yes, for oil and Israel - was waged above all to terrify the world (especially China). It turned into the largest boomerang in history.
What has been demonstrated is the limit of America's power. Far from being cowed, America's adversaries - and its enemies - have been emboldened. With shock and awe the empire soon dominated the skies over Iraq. But the Americans never controlled a single street in the country. One alone - Haifa Street in Baghdad - became the graveyard of scores, maybe hundreds, of Americans.
Fortresses such as Fallujah entered history alongside Stalingrad as symbols of the unvanquishable power of popular resistance to foreign invasion. Crimes such as occurred at Abu Ghraib prison entered the lexicon of the barbarism of those who invade others, flying the colours of their ''civilising'' mission. China now knows it has nothing to fear from an America in which a third of the population are living in poverty or terrifyingly near it, and whose imperial hubris met its nemesis on Haifa Street.
I told the then British prime minister Tony Blair - outside the men's lavatory in the library corridor of the House of Commons, to be precise - that the Iraqis would fight them, with their teeth if necessary, until they had driven them from their land. I told Blair that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq, but that if he and George Bush were to invade there would be thousands of them.
But two things, as Bush would put it, I ''mis-underestimated''. First, that when the lies on which the case for the war had been constructed were exposed, the credibility of the political systems of the two main liars would collapse. And second, that the example of the Iraqi resistance would trigger seismic changes from Marrakesh to Bahrain.
Almost nobody in Britain or America any longer believes a word their politicians say. This malaise has fuelled both the Tea Party phenomenon and the Occupy movement, even if the word Iraq seldom crosses their lips.
And from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, the plates are moving still.
GUARDIAN
George Galloway was an MP in the British Parliament, for Labour and later the anti-Iraq war Respect party, from 1987 to 2010.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
