It was a strange week for the US. As far as I know, nothing like it has ever happened before. It would be no exaggeration to say that the entire American political world has come out to confess, loud and clear and before the whole world, that the US invasion of Iraq 10 years ago was a horrific mistake. Never before have I seen such a unanimous admission of guilt come out of the US. It poured out from the right and left, from Democrats and Republicans, from research centres and political pundits, and from the ranks of the military, including some officers who boast medals of honour for their bravery and commendations for “their victories in the war in Iraq”. And to think that the greater majority of these, as well as the larger part of the media and the press, had been gung-ho supporters of that war. Not least among these were the heads of such quasi-military strategic research centres as the Rand Foundation and Senate members such as Hillary Clinton who, at the time, was among the ranks of the Democratic opposition. I recall very well the final years of the Vietnam War when riot police fired live ammunition into crowds of university students protesting the war at a time when similar protests raged throughout many world capitals. But I also have still fresh in my mind the time that followed Henry Kissinger's announcement of the Geneva Accords that moved the US into a new phase. The wave of charges and recriminations for the crimes and excesses perpetrated during the war continued long after the troops had been brought home and found their way into numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of Hollywood films. However, self-reproach has never reached such a degree of unison or such a height of remorse as we see today in that public outpouring that the US intervention in Iraq was misguided and that the American people must admit to and bear the burden of that guilt. The American confession will stimulate other confessions, but certainly not on the part of the Arab governments that encouraged Washington down the warpath and/or contributed troops and facilities. People now speak of a death toll of 160,000 Iraqi civilians and US 4,500 soldiers, and of thousands of mercenaries tasked with fighting, with impunity, outside the rules and conventions of war and in defiance of all humanitarian principles and feeling. They speak of two million displaced Iraqis who are still without a home, of the mass exodus of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Then there are the half a trillion dollars in war expenditures which is said to have been one of the chief causes of the current financial crisis, and the deterioration in numerous essential public services in the US which, in turn, helped precipitate the decline in America's international stature and its economic might. The Americans admit that when they entered Iraq it was a state, and that by the time they left it was a state in tatters. The biggest mistake in this regard, they say, was to send in Paul Bremer with the mission to “dismantle the state of Iraq”. Accordingly, government employees, soldiers and police officers were ousted on the grounds that they might be Saddam or Baathist loyalists. Then government ground to a halt and the country plunged into a condition known as a “failed state.” Astounding admissions and confessions keep coming, yet the Americans have not apologised. Nor will they. It is not in the nature of US politicians to apologise for a mistake, even if they admit to having made one. They did not apologise for what they did to the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Granada, Panama, Vietnam, some German cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or other such places that were the victims of appalling mistakes that were the making of US foreign policy design and implementation. They will not apologise for the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated in Iraq and they will not allow anyone in Iraq or elsewhere to bring US military officials and politicians — especially former president Bush and his close assistants, such as Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice — to trial for the crimes against humanity that they committed in Iraq. The Americans did well with this collective contrition over a mistake that cost the US so dearly. Some people in the US and abroad may have wondered, dumbstruck, why Washington and Barack Obama, in particular, were so reluctant to intervene militarily in Libya and then Syria. Now we know, thanks to the campaign of confessions. The “disastrous” US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq stood in the way, preventing Obama from embarking on similar experiments in Libya or Syria. Apparently this thinking applies more to Syria than it did to the Libyan case with regard to which officials in Washington felt that there would be no need for a full-scale intervention on the lines of the intervention in Iraq. Nevertheless, there are some who believe that the “reconstruction” Libya and Syria (and perhaps other Arab countries) is still high on the US foreign policy and national security agenda. In the Egyptian and Libyan cases, at least, there is evidence of plans to reconstruct existing political and economic infrastructures and institutions. Parts of these were presented to officials in both states and some of the blueprints are in the possession of the UN and ready for implementation bit by bit or after stability has been restored. I believe that a similar plan for Syria exists. Certainly the confessions, which US newspapers are racing to publish while politicians and security officials promise even more, indicate that the “reconstruction” of certain countries is as much a US foreign policy priority as it was at the time of the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. This is not about a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory, but rather about plans on the drawing table that are waiting for an opportunity to be put into effect. Such an opportunity presented itself in the form of a fraudulent report furnishing “evidence” of the existence of weapons of mass destruction being concealed by Saddam Hussein. A decade later we have a political “entity” in Iraq that is radically different in form and substance to the “state” known as Iraq that had existed on the eve of the invasion. Nor is there a conspiracy in the fact that the forces that have risen to the fore in all the countries of the Arab Spring belong to the Islamist faction. A number of Arab researchers have followed the growing interest among political and academic circles in the US and the West, in general, in this Islamist trend, and they have monitored the evolution in the contacts between the two sides and the pressures Washington exerted on governments in the Arab region to give representatives of this trend opportunities to participate in political processes and even in government if circumstances permit. In the US, today, they are admitting that “regime change” in Iraq was a dreadful mistake not only because it ended up handing Iraq to Iran or because it paved the way for a new confrontation between Tehran and Washington over spheres of influence in northern Iraq and what has become known as the “infertile crescent”, but also because it let the genie of change in the Middle East in out of the bottle in ways that went beyond the wildest imagination and beyond all the means that had been conceived to steer change and keep it under control. As confessions of crime and admissions of error in Iraq flowed out of the US in increasing depth and breadth, President Obama hesitated and faltered under the barrage of questions fired at him by Israeli and US journalists in the press conference he held immediately after his arrival in Israel. By the following day he had recovered. In his address to university students he was his usual confident and eloquent self as he wielded his most powerful instrument, namely a superb rhetorical flare and finely turned generalities about peace and the dreams of peace. One could not help but to be struck by the conflicting images — Obama stammering in the presence of Binyamin Netanyahu, and Obama smooth and articulate in front of the youth — because it epitomised America's current condition: it is more often wrong than right and it brings more harm than good. Obama was weak in the press conference because there he represented the US as it is: weak willed and unable to stand its ground in front of Israel due to its poor record of achievement in Iraq and Syria, and in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia where the domination of political Islam has complicated matters which, in turn, has thrown US policy into confusion. Obama was strong in his speech to the students because there, as was the case when he stood in front of students in Cairo University and large crowds in Istanbul and Accra four years ago, he represented the power of the dream that brought him to the White House and that he has since sought to convey to a new generation in every place he visits.
The writer is a political analyst and director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
