W is for Withdrawal

"From now on, the war they started is ours."

Seemingly
these words of an Iraqi soldier, noted in a Guardian U.K. story, were
uttered in pride. This was on June 30: National Sovereignty Day, the
day U.S. troops withdrew from Iraqi cities. Sorry, but it sounds more
like someone enthusing over a case of venereal disease.

Oh national
sovereignty! Could its inadequacies as a concept - as a means of
dividing and governing the human race - be more painfully exposed than
in Iraq on its day of faux-celebration? Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
got his chance to strut and reclaim some of the old glory from the,
ahem, Saddam era. Fireworks went off. Troops marched in review. Trucks
hauling scud missiles were part of the day's show-and-tell.

"The
war-ravaged state's new military and police force rolled around the
giant war memorial that its executed president built," the Guardian
article explained.

"Yesterday's
parade started and finished near Saddam's crossed swords. . . . Iraq's
new leaders seemed willing to stake a claim on their country's former
glory, but not by stirring too many ghosts of its past."

Iraq is
still America's sovereign lackey: broken and smoldering. Some 130,000
U.S. troops remain in the country, withdrawn for the most part to the
permanent bases we've built over the last six years. The country's
infrastructure is shattered, and shocking bursts of violence remain a
common occurrence: 30 or so dead in Kirkuk from a car bomb the day
before the big withdrawal, or W Day. In recent weeks, even more
devastating blasts, generating horrific death tolls - 81 here, 78 there
- continued to add new meaning to that quintessential American
expression of indifference, "ho hum."

As I
recall, when we launched our little war on terror, we were championing
not only democracy but women's rights - or was that only in
Afghanistan? In any case, as Jodie Evans of Code Pink reported, six
years of U.S. occupation have left women's rights dead in the desert.

"Just
six years ago," Evans writes, "only the old and very religious were
covered, women were employed everywhere and Baghdad University was
bustling with young women. Now it is bleak. Zainab (Salbi, of Women for
Women International) was able to go uncovered, but it is still
mandatory for the Iraqi women. Most businesses she visited had no women
working, not to say they did not try, but they're just fired within
days. Some older women were able to keep their jobs but
young women have no way in. . . . Women, young women, have been sent
back to the dark ages."

Now, Evans
adds, the only flourishing work for women is prostitution - often
against their will. Young women - teens, preteens - may be abducted,
"sold," shipped abroad, used as prostitutes till they're used up, then
shipped back to Iraq, where, lacking papers, they often wind up in
prison. Oh, and prostitution-related abortions are also way up in
liberated and sovereign Iraq.

And lest we
forget, when U.S. troops were on the job, before the Iraqi army was
quite ready to step up and take responsibility, a million or so
civilians - no one knows for sure, no one was counting - died in the
invasion and occupation. And this doesn't include the increase in
cancers, neurological diseases, birth defects and such,
the inevitable consequence of war's toxic waste, including depleted
uranium munitions.

And the
future for sovereign Iraq? An AP analysis quotes an estimate by Stephen
Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations that, if full-scale civil
war erupts, the civilian death toll could be as high as 2 million.
"Given its role in precipitating the war in Iraq, the United States
would bear special responsibility for such a catastrophe," Biddle wrote.

Special
responsibility! That's the closest I've seen any mainstream analysis
come to hinting that America in its ideological heedlessness has loosed
tectonic forces in Iraq, or come to suggesting that what goes around
comes around.

To
pretend that Iraq is sovereign - to pretend that there's such a thing
as "Iraq" at this point, stalwart, gutsy, ready at last to take
responsibility for its own defense - is just the latest insulting
verbal Quonset hut the Washington military-political-media
establishment has constructed for its own temporary shelter.

Meanwhile,
the puppet prime minister of Iraq half-pretends to be Saddam Hussein
himself and that glorious national unity is just around the corner.
Behold our scud missiles! And as the missiles lumber past,
sweat-drenched young men, so the Washington Post reports, chant, "Out,
America, out!"

Truly, my
fellow Americans, this is a moment to savor: the culmination of all the
sacrifices we've made, the hardships we've endured, the multi-trillions
we've poured into the sand. Now it's your turn, Iraq. We've given you a
war. Make the most of it.