The War in 2008: What Can We Expect and What Can We Do About It?

by Sayre Sheldon, National WAND Board Member and NGO Representative for WAND at the U.N.

Who could have predicted when the invasion began in March of 2003 that we would still be at war in Iraq? Or that almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers would have died and as many as 60,000 come back wounded, many so severely that they will have to be taken care of for the rest of their lives? Or that the cost of the war has swelled to an ungraspable over one half a trillion?

The answer is of course: all of us who opposed the war from the start and predicted much if not all of what would inevitably go wrong.

What we didn’t predict was that the American public would have lost interest in the war.

There are many reasons why--one being that the presidential campaign has absorbed most of the little interest Americans have in politics and most of the attention of the press. When the candidates began to learn that domestic issues surpassed foreign policy ones, they began to drop the latter. Today growing fears of a recession and rising awareness of the economic vulnerability of millions of Americans fuels the increasing concentration on domestic issues.

Equally important has been the “surge” and the unrelenting campaign to prove to U.S. citizens that the war is “working.”  “Winning” this war in the conventional sense has always been an impossibility but Bush still speaks of victory. “Working” was enough for the public when the number of casualties dropped along with the attacks on Iraqis. An uneasy respite in fighting prevails along with the almost entire absence of any progress in a functioning government for Iraq which was the ostensible purpose of the surge.

Lastly, the strategic importance of Iraq has plummeted. Policy-makers have switched to Afghanistan where there are many indications that the campaign is going badly and now to Pakistan where increasing prospects of chaos and violence cause us to wonder if it isn’t the real source for jihadist threats. Given evidence that Iran has stopped its nuclear program, plans for invading there have subsided and controlling Pakistan’s very real nuclear weapons is now the focus it should have been all along.

The Bush administration wants to keep Iraq in 2008 out of sight as much as possible. Barring some unexpected “upsurge” in conflict there, they will hope for things to continue pretty much unchanged until 2009, when the new administration comes in. Small numbers of troops will come home due not to policy, but to it being impossible to extend troop rotations. This will lull the public into inactivity even further, comforted by frequent scenes of the president, along with grateful families, welcoming soldiers home.

We won’t hear much about civil war in Iraq because the neoconservatives who engineered the war have scaled down its goals: a form of regionalization is now being put forth as acceptable especially for the Kurdish population. The Shia-Sunni divide has largely taken place geographically and the U.S. has acquired the services of Sunni chieftains who agree to fight terrorists instead of us in return for large amounts of weapons and cash. All these arrangements could be overturned and there are new threats such as increasing problems between Turkey and Kurdish militants.

The refugee crisis in Iraq will continue growing: there are 4 million refugees now. Those Iraqis who have been encouraged to come back will have trouble finding places to live; those like some of the Kurds who were driven out by Saddam Hussein will continue to camp in temporary places; those who endangered their lives and families to work for the U.S. will find only a trickle are being admitted to this country. Electricity and sanitation will continue to be in short supply; schools and hospitals, if running at all, will still be miserably equipped; Iraqi women, once the most advanced in any Arab country, will continue to be mostly confined to their homes, struggling daily to feed and protect their families.

In the U.S., further downgrading of the war will take place—more accurately it will look more like the occupation it has been all along. Without much publicity, more steps will be taken to make the U.S. presence in Iraq permanent. Privatization of Iraqi industry will continue and the world’s big oil companies will establish themselves there. The world’s biggest and most expensive embassy, 107 acres, provisions for 4,000 employees in 27 buildings behind bomb-proof walls may even be completed, having gone way over budget. When even Democratic candidates are predicting that our troops will still be there in 2013, the public have to be lured into getting used to the costs of occupation as a permanent drain on funds which may be needed elsewhere in the world and certainly are needed here at home.

What should we who opposed invading Iraq and steadfastly oppose the concept of a permanent U.S. presence there be doing? We don’t accept the Bush carefully-engineered diminishing of Iraq.  Knowing that polls show a majority still believing the war was wrong, we must keep the war in view by all the means we can use.

We must:

• Call for exposure and rejection of the policies and the people who led us into this war.
• Endorse the plans for beginning to get out of Iraq now as the only realistic course for both our countries. 
• Support those in our Congress who will continue to stand up against the administration’s open-ended funding of the war.
• Educate our candidates before and after the elections on what we believe can and must replace present failed military policies with multilateral and diplomatically based policies.
• Link unmet domestic and environmental needs to an ever increasing military budget.

Above all we must not ignore the destruction the U.S. invasion has brought to Iraq, to international human rights treaties, and to our trust in government here at home. We owe it to our children to make our best efforts to repair the damages of a failed war that was wrong from the start.