The failure of the American misadventure in Iraq is all the more tragic as the engrossing occupation and insurgency moves side by side at a same pace. The insurgency, whether call it al-Qaeda or Shia, has turned into a dripping faucet that can’t be fixed. It has reached the most horrifying point where it seems that the country has declared a war against itself.
Of all the suicide bombings that we witnessed in the last four years of the Iraq occupation the latest in the two Yazidi villages near Mosul is out-and-out one of the worst attacks. Suicide bombings that may have claimed up to 500 victims in Iraq were in revenge for the last month’s stoning to death of a teenage girl.
The latest suicide bombings are high even to the cruelest standards of Iraq. It already go beyond the killing of just over 200 people in car bombings and mortar fire in Baghda’s Shia stronghold of Sadr City last November.
Ahead of a mid-September deadline, when there will be a serious review of whether the current strategy is working, Iraq has already shown signs of no return and the worst comes from Washington that is busy debating more about who to blame than what to do.
Since the ridiculously famous moment when President Bush stood under the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner declaring that ‘major combat operations in Iraq have ended,’ deaths have risen from relatively few into the range of nearly 1000 a month or more.
Although tired by the chaos and lack of basic services, most Iraqis applauded the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein but since the Bush administration invaded their country in March 2003, that almost two million may have fled to other countries, and that possibly millions more have been displaced from their homes in ethnic-cleansing campaigns. We also know that an estimated 4.5 million Iraqi children are now malnourished and that this is but ‘the tip of the iceberg’ in a country where diets are deteriorating, while children are dying of preventable diseases in significant numbers; that the Iraqi economy is in ruins and its oil industry functioning at levels significantly below its worst moments in Saddam Hussein’s day - and that there is no end in sight for any of this.
