by Oliver Stone
The commander of the Afghan National Police (ANP) marches before cadets at the Afghan National Police Academy graduation ceremonies. No better at ensuring stability than the members of the Afghan Local Police (ALP)—who were accused of raping and murdering villagers whom they were supposed to be protecting—the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan found “compelling” evidence to conclude that members of the ANP were systematically torturing detainees.
The final tally would be almost 4,500 U.S. troops killed and more than 32,000 wounded. Tens of thousands more suffered from PTSD and other psychological ailments. Estimates of Iraqi deaths ranged from 150,000 to over 1 million. In October 2006, a team of U.S. and Iraqi epidemiologists reported 655,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths resulting from the U.S. invasion.165 The United States had spent close to $1 trillion dollars, but that was a small down payment on what the final cost would amount to.
Obama welcomed the troops home at Fort Bragg. But instead of honestly treating the Iraq War as the unmitigated disaster it had been for the United States, drawing some poignant lessons, and thanking those gathered for their sacrifice, Obama felt compelled to cloak the war’s end in the kind of patriotic drivel that conjured up the powerfully haunting words of Rudyard Kipling, the erstwhile proponent of empire, who had convinced his son to enlist in the First World War, only to have him die his first day of combat. In his “Epitaphs of the War,” Kipling wrote: “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”166 Obama’s lies would sear just as deeply and painfully. “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people,” he told the troops, praising their “extraordinary achievement.” The “most important lesson,” he declared, was “about our national character . . . that there’s nothing we Americans can’t do when we stick together. . . . And that’s why the United States military is the most respected institution in our land.” He commended their willingness to sacrifice “so much for a people that you had never met,” which, he insisted, was “part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right. There can be no fuller expression of America’s support for self-determination than our leaving Iraq to its people. That says something about who we are.” Having rewritten the history of Iraq, he turned to Afghanistan, claiming that the troops had also “broken the momentum of the Taliban.” The wars, he assured them, had made “America stronger and the world more secure.” Reaching deep into the repository of America’s sacred myths, he saluted the source of U.S. greatness, “the values that are written into our founding documents, and a unique willingness among nations to pay a great price for the progress of human freedom and dignity. This is who we are. That’s what we do as Americans, together.” He reminded them that they were “part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries—from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you—men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.”
Villagers work to destroy a poppy field in the district of Por Chaman in Farah Province, Afghanistan. Such efforts had little effect, as the opium trade boomed during the years of the Karzai administration, leading to both spiraling addiction and rampant government corruption.
One would be hard-pressed to know where to begin dissecting the distortions and debunking the myths, but, as we have shown throughout these pages, the notions of American altruism, benevolence, and self-sacrifice might be a good place to start, especially when combined with an explicit disavowal of interest in territories and resources. Obama identified America’s uniqueness among nations as its “willingness . . . to pay a great price for the progress of human freedom and dignity.” The wars, he absurdly claimed, had made the United States “stronger and the world more secure.” He compared the troops who had slaughtered hundreds of Iraqi civilians in Fallujah to the American colonists “who overthrew an empire” and to the World War II generation who “faced down fascism.” Perhaps he hadn’t seen the American-flag burning jubilation of Fallujah’s crowds during their Day of Resistance and Freedom that commemorated the U.S. departure from Iraq. Perhaps he hadn’t read the accounts by U.S. marines of wanton and often indiscriminate killing of Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in Haditha and elsewhere throughout the country. Perhaps he hadn’t seen the commander of U.S. forces in Anbar Province’s explanation of why he didn’t investigate U.S. troops’ random killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha. “It happened all the time . . . ,” he explained, “throughout the whole country.” And in what was either the most contemptible lie since the early days of the Bush administration or unfortunately sloppy and careless phrasing, Obama congratulated the troops for having “fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11,” adding credence to the Bush-Cheney fabrication that the invasion of Iraq was somehow justified by Saddam’s support for Al-Qaeda and perpetuating the dangerous illusion that the occupation of either country, as of 2011, had anything at all to do with that initial Al-Qaeda attack.167
The words were barely out of Obama’s mouth before “stable” Iraq fell back into chaos. Within days, the country was wracked with a series of suicide bombings that left scores dead and hundreds injured and the country on the verge of relapse into civil war. Sunnis were feeling particularly aggrieved. The coalition government that U.S. officials had finally managed to cobble together nearly eight months after the 2010 election had effectively collapsed. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, had issued an arrest warrant for Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni, charging him with running a death squad out of his office, and had tried to unseat the Sunni deputy prime minister. Hashimi fled to the Kurdish region to escape arrest. Maliki’s security forces had already arrested hundreds of Sunni opposition leaders and former Baathists in recent weeks while Maliki tightened his control over the army and police. Opponents accused him of becoming a dictator. Sunnis and secular critics boycotted Parliament. For months, Sunni provinces had been demanding greater autonomy, along the lines the Kurds had established in oil-rich Kurdistan, which had its own Parliament, president, and security forces. The country threatened to split into three separate regions.
Iraqi disdain for the American “sacrifice” that had disposed of a hated dictator but resulted in death and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians was reflected in the fact that most senior Iraqis who were invited to what the Washington Post described as a “seemingly endless process of military ceremonies” did not attend. The United States had actually stopped holding large base-closing ceremonies the previous spring because insurgents were using them as an opportunity to launch attacks. One gathering particularly stood out. On December 17, U.S. and Iraqi officials assembled for a signing ceremony to turn Contingency Operating Base Adder, the last U.S. base in Iraq, which once housed 12,000 U.S. troops and contractors, over to the Iraqi Air Force. The Post’s Greg Jaffe described the scene. First, a “six-man Iraq band, clad in dirty blue uniforms, played a ragged marching song on dented trumpets and trombones.” Following that, “an Iraqi military officer cheered in Arabic, clapped and stomped his feet. Soon the mostly Iraqi crowd was chanting and cheering with him.” Jaffe noted that “an American military officer sat stiffly on the stage behind a sign marked ‘colonel.’ ” The Iraqi speaker next shouted, “This is the end of the American occupation. May God have mercy on our martyrs.” The remaining U.S. forces snuck off in the dead of night in what the paper described as “a secret predawn convoy to Kuwait.”168
The two wars had been unmitigated disasters. Even Gates, on some level, acknowledged the indefensibility of ever again plunging the United States into the invasion of another country. In February 2011, he told West Point cadets, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the pre
sident to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”169
Splattered with blood, five-year-old Samar Hassan cries desperately after her parents were killed when they mistakenly drove toward U.S. troops on dusk patrol in the Iraqi district of Tal Afar. Estimates of civilian casualties vary widely.
The consequences of years of misguided and shortsighted U.S. policies were coming home to roost around the world. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Middle East, where the United States was largely relegated to the role of bystander as the Arab Spring’s extraordinary democratic upheaval was fundamentally transforming the region that the United States had done so much to shape. Decades of uncritically supporting Israel while arming, training, and propping up one Arab dictator after another, as well as the post-9/11 use of Egyptians, Libyans, and others as surrogate torturers, had stripped the United States of all moral authority. Its professions of democracy rang hollow. Nor could anyone take seriously U.S. outrage about repressive regimes using force against their citizens after U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had directly or indirectly been responsible for the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Even the goodwill generated by Obama’s Cairo speech proved short-lived. Ghaith al-Omari, executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine, spoke for activists throughout the region: “It’s become fashionable now to ‘diss’ the Americans,” he said. “The prevalent mood now is to say that the United States is no longer relevant, that the Arab Spring is happening without the help of the United States.”170 Former International Atomic Energy Agency director and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mohamed ElBaradei blamed the United States for decades of backwardness and repression throughout the region. “America,” he charged, “is really pushing Egypt and pushing the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.”171
United States support for regime change and the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya on the pretext of preventing threatened atrocities reeked of hypocrisy when stacked against prolonged U.S. inaction in the face of actual atrocities being perpetrated by governments in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere or fierce internal repression in Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabi extremists continued to fund Al-Qaeda and other global jihadis. The lesson seemed to be that only U.S. allies were permitted to slaughter and repress their citizens.
In fact, when criticizing repressive Middle Eastern regimes, Obama pointedly omitted mention of Saudi Arabia, whose reactionary monarchy the United States had propped up for six decades in return for Saudi oil. Saudi Arabia had long been the largest purchaser of advanced U.S. weaponry. The Wall Street Journal projected that the sale Obama approved in 2010 might top $60 billion. Now with the Saudis helping thwart democratic reform throughout the region, intervening politically, monetarily, and, in the case of Bahrain, even militarily, the United States proved itself an unreliable ally for those seeking progressive change.
The United States was also trapped by its continued embrace of an Israeli government that had moved sharply to the right. Obama appeared to have more sympathy for the Palestinian position than his predecessors and his choice of George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East raised hopes that the United States would support an evenhanded settlement of the outstanding issues. Paramount among them was the presence of a half million Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Compounding this problem was the Israeli blockade of Gaza following Hamas’s election in 2006. Everyone, with the exception of Israel’s right-wing government under Bibi Netanyahu and members of the conservative Israel lobby in the United States, recognized that this was not only unjust and untenable, but that it threatened the continuation of Israel’s increasingly tenuous democracy.
However, it was not Mitchell but Dennis Ross, Obama’s chief Middle East advisor, who prevailed in internal debates. Ross, a Wolfowitz protégé and advisor to presidents going back to Reagan, was a staunch defender of Israel. In May 2011, King Abdullah II of Jordan complained that “we get good responses” from the State Department and Pentagon, “but not from the White House, and we know the reason why is because of Dennis Ross.” Ross and Mitchell were at odds over whether the United States should propose a comprehensive peace plan for the region. Mitchell thought it might put needed pressure on a Netanyahu government that continued its illegal settlements policy and resistance to a meaningful two-state solution. Ross argued against pressuring Israel. The well-organized Israel lobby, which exercised inordinate influence in the United States, endorsed that view. Frustrated by Obama’s buckling to pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Mitchell resigned in April 2011.172
The United States again expressed contempt for world opinion over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with its veto of the UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory not only as illegal but as an obstacle to peace. The resolution was sponsored by at least 130 nations and supported by all 14 other members of the Security Council. While the Obama administration sought to curry favor with AIPAC—the most conservative branch of the powerful Israel lobby—much of the world looked toward a UN vote to recognize an independent Palestinian state despite the vociferous opposition of the United States and Israel.
Though Israel and the United States managed to sidetrack that effort, the Israelis had grown increasingly isolated. The ouster of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and growing Turkish support for the Palestinians had cost Israel two of its closest regional allies. Islamists were on the rise throughout the region. Thomas Friedman blamed this on “50 years of Arab dictatorship, in which only Islamists were allowed to organize in mosques while no independent, secular, democratic parties were allowed to develop in the political arena.”173 The uprising in neighboring Syria against the brutal Assad regime, although a major setback to Iran and Hezbollah, added another element of instability on Israel’s border, exacerbated by the danger that Syria’s large stockpile of chemical weapons might fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. Still, Netanyahu and his right-wing allies remained intransigent, expanding settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in defiance not only of Obama but of universal opinion and knowing full well that such actions would undermine the prospects for a two-state solution.
Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, wondered if Israeli leaders had any intention of finding an equitable resolution. “Can we continue to exist without a perennial adversary, without being victims of persecution?” he asked. Distinguished Israeli intellectual Zeev Sternhell provided an answer in an article in Haaretz aptly titled “Israeli Right Needs Perpetual War.”174
It was war with Iran that most captivated the right-wing Israeli imagination. Israeli hawks tried to build support for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, which they alleged were being used to produce a nuclear bomb. There was good reason to make sure that Iran did not reach that point, particularly because it might trigger a nuclear arms race throughout the region, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and possibly others quickly following suit. In September 2011, Iran inaugurated the Middle East’s first nuclear power plant at Bushehr, a Russian-built model. But other Middle Eastern nations were not far behind, with dozens of nuclear reactors set to come on line beginning in 2017 or 2018. Iran insisted it had no intention to build a bomb and continued to allow international monitors into the country. Israel, on the other hand, was widely believed to possess some 200 nuclear weapons. The U.S. intelligence committee stood by its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had stopped working on nuclear weapons in 2003 and not restarted the program. U.S. officials warned the Israelis that a preemptive attack would not only likely fail to achieve the desired results, it could lead to disastrous and destabilizing consequences in the region and beyond. They hoped that strengthening sanctions against Iranian oil exports and Iran’s Central Bank would qu
iet the demand for military action.
Israel had come dangerously close to launching such an attack in 2010. In June 2011, Meir Dagan, who had headed the Israeli spy agency Mossad for eight years before stepping down the previous September, revealed that he, military chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi, and Yuval Diskin, director of the Shin Bet internal security agency, had managed to block such reckless behavior on the part of Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. But now that all three were out of office, Dagan feared what Israel’s leaders might do. Dagan explained, “I decided to speak out because when I was in office, Diskin, Ashkenazi and I could block any dangerous adventure. Now I am afraid that there is no one to stop Bibi and Barak.” Other reports indicated that President Shimon Peres, Israeli Defense Forces Senior Commander Gadi Eisenkot, and recently retired chief of military intelligence Amos Yadlin had also opposed attacking Iran.175
A majority of Israelis also rejected a military strike. A November 2011 poll found that only 43 percent of Israeli Jews backed an attack although 90 percent believed that Iran would succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons. Sixty-four percent supported turning the region into a nuclear-free zone even though that would require Israel to give up its nuclear arsenal.176
The erosion of U.S. power and influence has also been obvious in Latin America, where, like in the Middle East, the effects of a century of supporting dictators who favored U.S. business and political interests over the well-being of their own people had resulted in a wave of anti-Americanism that swept the continent in the early years of the twenty-first century. Aside from tolerating the ousting of President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, the United States had been largely unable to stop the leftist trend sweeping Central and South America. Even Colombia, the closest U.S. ally, had been reassessing its ties to the “colossus” of the north. Since taking office in 2010, Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos has not only taken steps to reduce the enormous gap between Colombia’s rich and poor, he has mended relations with Venezuela and Ecuador and now calls Hugo Chávez his “new best friend.”177
