The Iraq Obsession

As we near George W. Bush's next-to-last State of the Union address (yes! that's an accurate statement), I have to wonder about a curious phenomenon of contemporary American life. Namely, do you ever consider just how weird it is that this country's fate appears symbiotically connected to...Iraq? Do you ever ponder how something so strange ever came about? We devote an enormous part of the American "disposable" treasury (exclusive of entitlement spending) to the project. The national debate seems to be about nothing but Iraq. The last election was decided because of Iraq, and nothing but Iraq. The front pages are all about Iraq. The Sunday talk shows talk about Iraq. Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. All Iraq, all the time.

What is Iraq? Before we invaded, it was an artificial country stitched together out of 3 disparate parts by Winston Churchill in 1921, who later called it the "biggest mistake of my political life." In 2002, it was held together, as it had been for about 23 years, by the iron, despotic rule of Saddam Hussein. Sometimes the United States liked Saddam so much we helped him target the Iranian army for poison gas bombardment (this set a precedent for our casual dismissal of Geneva Conventions, such as the protocol against poison gas of 1925). Sometimes we didn't like him, such as when we needed to sell military spare parts to the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 to raise illegal money for the Contras.

We always liked the oil under the sands and and under the northern hills, the second largest reserves in the world. Without the oil, and without the perceived threat to Israel, Iraq is simply a Middle Eastern version of Darfur. Bad things happened there, but who gave a shit? Enter the Neo-conservatives, with their wistful theory of social engineering. At heart they were hawkish liberals armed with a reverse domino theory; if Iraq could be transformed, the rest of the Middle East would follow suit. Huh? you might say. No, that was actually the theory. They recognized it might seem implausible, so it was necessary to sell the Iraq invasion as a war of defense. The authorization for use of military force against Iraq in the fall of 2002 was easily passed by a compliant and lazy Congress, a Pass-Go card given to Bush by some of his current vociferous critics, such as Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, all those Democratic Senators running for President on an anti-war platform.

Saddam was no threat. At the time of the invasion 4 years ago, it had been 13 years since he had raised a belligerent paw against anyone. He had settled into a kind of senescent self-indulgence, building palaces and monuments to himself instead of offensive weapons. He still had all that oil, which he sold for cash to fund his own aggrandizement. He starved his people. He was an evil, rotten despot, but as evil, rotten despots go, he was relatively harmless.

Iraq has 25 million people, about one-third the size of Iran, about one-fourth the size of Egypt. The Kurds don't want to be part of Iraq, the Shiites want to establish an Islamic theocracy in alliance with Iran, and the Sunnis don't want to be ruled by the Shia. Our occupation simply delays the day when such centrifugal forces will split Iraq asunder.

Meanwhile, this weird monomania paralyzes the United States. Our politics, our budget, the national attention is held hostage to Iraq. There are so many interesting, helpful, fun things we could have been doing with all that time and money. We could have built a national railroad. We could have developed alternative fuels to make the oil of the Middle East irrelevant. We could have instituted universal health care. We could have used that last critical window of opportunity to deal with global warming. The opportunity cost of the Iraq War is staggeringly incalculable. It is not too much to say that it may be difficult for the United States to recover from this blunder. We have borrowed so much money from potentially hostile countries in order to keep the game afloat. That foreign debt casts a long shadow over the future, and right at a time when all serious bureaucratic adults recognize that the Medicare and Social Security funding crises are right around the corner. We could run out of money. We might default on our debt.

By acting as if Bush had some vague idea what he was doing, in refusing to challenge him and to shut this stupid war down, Congress and a large percentage of the American people have taken us to the brink of catastrophe. We forget, sometimes, that Bush is entirely capable of massive failure; his resume is a categorization of such failures, over and over. His private enterprise efforts were case studies in fiscal exsanguination. He's taken the national debt to 9 trillion dollars, and still he keeps borrowing to finance this war. He "balances" the budget by the simple expedient of not counting the money the nation actually spends, such as when it raids the Social Security "trust fund" and "supplements" the defense budget with more money for Iraq.

Where will it all end? Why won't Congress impeach him and stop the Iraq War? What strange gods are they serving?