Pride And Petulance
Today is Victory In Iraq Day. For Iraqis. Well, actually, it is the day American troops (yes we are the only ones left; even our "special friends", the Brits, left long ago) officially marked their exit from urban areas to be concentrated in centralized bases in the countryside. From the New York Times:
With parades, fireworks and a national holiday, the Iraqi government celebrated the final withdrawal of American troops from the country’s cities on Tuesday, trying to exploit a political milestone to trumpet what the prime minister called sovereignty from foreign occupation.
Indeed, in spite of the still tenuous security situation in many areas, it is and should be a day of celebration of the return of another piece of sovereignty for the Iraqis. They will never truly stand until they stand on their own; it will be painful, fitful and slow, but it is a necessary process.
And how are neocons and some elements of the military (by no means all) taking the events of the day? Not well of course. The Dick, Cheney, is concern trolling that the U.S. troop withdrawal might “waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point.”
The neocons and PNACs who ginned up this war, and lied us into it, are worried about the frailty of the situation because of the American sacrifice. There were no WMDs, no links to al-Qaida, no threat form Sadaam to the US or anybody in the region at the time, and the one real power in the region, Iran, has been strengthened. And Dick Cheney marks the occasion by whining about our sacrifice. The Iraqis must be thrilled to here those words.
As CNN’s Michael Ware reports in the attached video clip, no one, whether American, Iraqi or otherwise, should demean or devalue the efforts and lives lost by the American military, they did the job they were told to do, but the bigger picture on the Iraqi adventure is very ugly, and contrary to Dick Cheney, it is the sacrifice of the Iraqis that ought to be considered, because the American loss is insignificant to the hell we hath wrought upon Iraq. The US military and coalition forces have lost about 4,500 casualties (and nearly 1,400 contractor deaths which no one ever mentions).
The carnage on the Iraqi populous has been far more devastating however:
Thus, the best guess we can make at present is that at least 200,000 people died through violence since the US-led invasion, and that the true figure may be far higher. Moreover, an additional number that could be in the hundreds of thousands may have died from nonviolent causes — e.g., lack of clean water and healthcare — associated with the conflict, but this figure is uncertain. No matter what the correct figures turn out to be, it is clear that far too many have died as a result of this war of choice and subsequent occupation which may have deposed a dictator but which also disrupted an entire society.
As Stephen Soldz indicates, 200,000 Iraqi deaths is likely critically low, once non-violent deaths such as infant mortality, dysentery, unavailability of medical resources and other factors are considered, it is surely far higher. Yet Cheney, the Dick, makes no reference to the Iraqi sacrifice.
What a load of sanctimonious American exceptionalism baloney. The Iraqis are proud and should be celebrating; they are starting to get their country back, and they have sacrificed unimaginably. Giving the Iraqis their country back was supposed to be the point in the first place. But petulant whiners like Dick Cheney don’t care about that. They never did.
in the final analaysis, these “American exceptionalism” assholes exceptionalized America right into the shithole
hopefully future generations will not be as stupid as the current ones are
It’s been a long time since anyone caused the kind of death and destruction that Dick has. He needs to just shut up until his trial.
Or at least show the courtesy of taking up Spanish.
bmaz is right in marking this day. It’s worthwhile going into the WayBack Machine: through the joke of the SOFA “negotiations”; through “we’ll stand down when the Iraqis stand up”; through “the Surge is working”; through “it’s not torture”; through “bad apples”; through “no way it’s over a million dead Iraqis”; through What in hell are people doing voting for this moron AGAIN?; through “we did it for Democracy”; through “we did it to defeat oppression”; through “Mission Accomplished”; “coulda-woulda-shoulda-mighta-musta-gotta-lotta” wmds; through Axis of Evil; through Bush v Gore; through What in hell are people thinking voting for this moron?; through the best part of a frickin’ DECADE; and ask: How is this day different from high-tailing it out of Nam in 1975?
Hey Iraqis: sorry about that.
And you get the pundits whining about the gains in Iraq and Afghanistan going to waste, too. (Not that they’ve ever explained what those gains actually were: I don’t think they could, even on their best days.)
The long-term effects of this “sacrifice” will be with us well after Deadeye has moved on to the great last quail hunt.
I spent last night coaching a family member with Iraq-acquired PTSD through a situation which to other people might not have been so challenging. It took several hours, right up until noon today, for this person to relax. This is just a mild case, from just a single tour of duty.
We have tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans who’ll be living with this same problem at best, and gods help us, their families about the worst they will live with.
And we now have at least one entire middle eastern nation which will live with PTSD across its multiple cultures as well, affecting their decision-making and causing untold ripples across the politics of the middle east for decades to come.
Wasting the tremendous sacrifice, my ass. We’ll still be making this sacrifice long after his sorry butt has fired his last Perazzi.
and no body will give a fuck
Good on ya.
Republics will take comfort that all members of their Royal Family, the Bush Family, are safe and unharmed. It does not even trouble Republics that, while Price Harry actually did serve, not one member of the Royal Bush Family was willing to serve, not even in the Bush War of Choice, Iraq.
Rayne and LabDancer – both of you have hit on exactly what struck me. Namely, what a load of crap from an expected source (and i am sure there are others out there too saying the same or worse). Combine the treasure, both in human lives, national fortune, and time misspent and the cost of the Iraq boondoggle is just fucking staggering. But even more than that, if it was to ever mean anything, today should be a day both Iraqis AND Americans celebrate. If they are enthusiastic in the face of what still lies ahead of them, we sure as hell should be too. Cheney is one sick puppy.
You know, when I got the first panicky phone call last night, it hadn’t even dawned on me that I was dealing with anything but the usual latent PTSD we’ve been dealing with for the last 5-plus years.
It literally just dawned on me that he might have been unconsciously responding to increased media about the war during the last 24 hours, making the slightest challenge more stressful.
Media coverage which of course includes quoting that stupid, lazy fuck Cheney’s puling about the wasted sacrifice.
That monster is going to continue to twist the shiv every chance he gets, and we’ll be stuck dealing with fallout for cosmos knows how long. Damn bastard; in his case it would be nice if the media rolled over, played dead and ignored him the way it ignored the facts before the war.
Maybe Americans and Iraqis can both celebrate when we really leave the country, but I agree that we should have marked the day as well as Iraqis today.
We owe the Iraqis a whole lot more than a celebration, though.
Photos from Iraq today.
Let’s be clear. There will be no restoration of Iraqi sovereignty in the near to middle term because the US will continue to control the materiel required for national defense, armor and air capability. Also, the Iraqi security forces will continue to depend on the US logistical tail to deal with any external threats. Or, ftm, US nukes and aircraft carriers as a deterrent.
IOW, any Iraqi government is still subject to the approval of the US, in exchange for providing this defense capability. That is a power paraphrase of Juan Cole’s response to that question in an interview I did with him a couple of months ago.
(An irrelevant aside. It was great seeing Marcy at the PDF event in NYC, and I do appreciate the kind words Rayne had for me in response to my attempt to provide some livetweet coverage of some of the sessions. There were, by the way, a remarkable number of shout outs to Marcy, from panelists like Froomkin, karen Tumulty, Dan Gilmore.)
OT — Thanks again, Jay, it was the next best thing to being there to have you covering the Personal Democracy Forum. There were other people doing similar work in Twitter from PDF, but there’s a greatly enhanced quality of understanding what’s going on when people with different perspectives cover an event, and having someone trusted like you to cover the event is even better.
Very nice to hear Marcy getting the shout-outs she’s deserved, too.
Somehow, I prefer this scene to that of people hanging on to the skids of helicopters.
Ten-hut!
Dick Cheney has never heard or understood sunk cost.
He is a fucking egomaniac.
No more mulligans… let’s get the hell out of Iraq.
Wonderful article, thanks.
U.S. General Daniel Bolger hands over a symbolic key, the one we stole at gunpoint, to General Abud Qambar.
The lesson of the 2000 election was if you just say it and do….everyone will forget you shouldn’t have done it in the first place.
The evil our government has become- not done, continues to do- will not be ended. American Progress has been thwarted, only minor changes along the edges of human justice will now occur in our national business. The Iraq War is added to the list of American hypocrisies we chant on July 4th.
Pockets of resistance in a mythical landscape do not a nation make.
That is quite the report from Michael Ware. It sounds as though the anchor wasn’t exactly ready for anything quite that honest and emphatic.
As bmaz says, if the Iraqis can celebrate in spite of everything, then that is the cue to follow. For sure the least of his sins, but Papa Dick just ain’t got no manners.
And since we’re doing anniversaries:
1 July 2002: The Rome Statute of the ICC came into force. The ICC can prosecute only crimes committed on or after that date. Everyone pull out your timelines …
1 July 1867: Canada, eh? Instead of the national anthem, I decided to play Kate and Anna McGarrigle for fellow Canucks today. That starts off looking like a documentary, but give it a moment and it turns into an animation every kid here likes to twirl to.
OK, that does it, skdadl! I’m headin’ north to find me a log-rolling man.
Didja notice the moose in the video? Either that log-rolling man is in some very shallow water or the moose has very very long legs.
If you find a good one, you have to promise to share.
ETA: Moose can get very big. Very very big. Maybe not at the corner of Dupont and Christie, where I usually go hunting, but out in the wilds of Quebec. Those are some moose.
And then there are the refugees and those made homeless inside Iraq by this mis-adventure . . .
Per the UNHCR:
2.8 million (give or take) internally displaced people
1.9 million (give or take) Iraqis living as refugees in other countries (principally Jordan and Syria)
That’s 4.7 million people.
Now give that some context: per the US State Department’s 2007 estimate, the entire population of Iraq is 27.5 million.
That means 17% of the population is homeless inside Iraq or has fled the country entirely.
Heckuva job, Mr. Cheney!
Cheney’s concern about the “waste” has a lot more to do with Exxon coming up empty-handed in the oil and gas contract *auction* than anything else.
Right after we went in, Chalabi was ready to start handing over 20% and higher participation agreements to US & multinational oil companies (almost all of which rely heavily on Halliburton), especially Exxon.
Here’s how that WOULD have worked. The Iraqi oil and gas fields are pretty well tested, by seismic, drilling and other geophysics, so unlike some wildcatter drilling a shallow well in Tennessee on a hope and a prayer, you pretty much have a “known reserves” situation with those Iraqi fields. IOW, instead of searching for a new oil and gas field and bearing a lot of risk, in the Iraqi fields you pretty much just have to get it out of the ground.
Granted, that takes some technical expertise. But what had been happening in the ME over the years was that countries were forming their own national oil and gas companies to do their own pumping, so that they needed the multinational oil company expertise less and less. But the multinationals had gotten very spoiled over the years, because they had become accustomed to having the US and Britain etc. set up a strongman dictator who could then claim national ownership and “grant” deals to the oil and gas companies that did not involve jus paying them for their technical services in getting the oil out of the field – instead, those dictators backed by the US intelligence and military gave out participation agreements, giving the oil and gas companies an actual percentage of the oil and gas they helped pump out. That meant not only did they get a lot more than you would pay on just a technical services contract in general, but also that they participated on a percentage basis in the excess revenues if oil prices went up.
And that’s what Chalabi was ready to hand off when we first went into Iraq – participation agreements (of around 20% and more IIRC). Now if you take a 200millbbl known reserves field and are handed 20% of it, you’d have to be able in the cold hard world to go out and find a 40millionbbl field all on your own hook and with risk and negotiating with landowners and mineral owners etc. to get to the same point that you get to with a stroke of a pen otherwise.
In any event, over time not only did Cheney screw up things for all the people who have died and been maimed and lost parents and children and homes – he also screwed the pooch for the multinationals. Bc now, with a lot of Iranian input no doubt, the Iraqis have come out offerning only service contracts and they and the multinationals aren’t seeing eye to eye on what to pay for the service contracts at all –
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/…..7_BRvZj9XE
The only deal cut to date was with a BP/Chinese consortium to pump the Rumahla field
Meanwhile – Shell is cutting a deal with Russia too.
Cheney – he no did so good.
So that’s the result of that long-ago secret meeting between Dick “Dick” and Big Oil! Nothing.
Karma is a Big Deal. And if it plays out righteously, Dick “Dick” has much to look forward to in terms of the death, destruction and misery that resulted from that secret meeting.
And leave it to an Aussie(?) to speak the unvarnished truth!
But props to the anchor for driving home the no WMD, no connection to 9/11 facts.
FunnyWheelieDiva
Cheney’s all about oil, right? And the Iraqis have just refused bids by the majors to rip off their oil fields. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, and Cheney’s a sore loser.
Since he’s never had any imagination, or any capacity to meet reality on its own terms, he can never prevail–a very fortunate thing, given his evil urges and the relentless drive to fulfill them. He destroys whatever he touches, but the destruction never meets the intended goal. He turns even fool’s gold into base metal.
Democrats owe the man more than they’ll ever know.
“…military commissions cannot use statements gotten through torture…”
…duh…
And thanks so much for the article, bmaz. I recognize the estimates of Iraqi deaths are no doubt an undercount, but those estimates need to be put in front of the American public frequently. Excellent context for presenting that info, too.
Michael Ware, CNN’s palpably freaked-out Baghdad correspondent, reminds me of the Dennis Hopper character in Coppola’s Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now, which was loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.
The Hopper character is a ’60s druggie journalist who has fallen under the spell of a demented rogue US Army Special Op (Marlon Brando), who’s playing God somewhere up the Mekong River.
Like Hopper, Ware has been ‘up the river’ too long, and seen too much.
Michael Ware, CNN’s palpably freaked-out Baghdad correspondent, reminds me of the Dennis Hopper character in Coppola’s Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now, which was loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.
The Hopper character is a ’60s druggie journalist who has fallen under the spell of a demented rogue US Army Special Op (Marlon Brando), who’s playing God somewhere up the Mekong River.
Like Hopper, Ware has been ‘up the river’ too long, and seen too much.
Wow. You don’t usually see Ware this passionate. Well, maybe the negative way when he has to call someone an idiot, but this bit here is surprising.
I celebrated before I heard the Iraqis celebrated and that made it all the sweeter for me! I’m so sorry about all of this and relieved that this milestone has been met. I’m truly overjoyed for the Iraqis. I wish them all the best in the coming days. And the celebration means that the OCCUPATION has indeed been a huge part of the problem, of course. We did them no big favor. ANY loss to the US is of our own making: both treasure AND blood.
As for Cheney: spit. Remember him saying recently that he for one was mightily disappointed that the Iraqis had not ”stepped up” in the early days of the occupation and done their part. Well they were pretty busy dying and burying thier dead … the ones they could find. And trying to make a living and trying to find clean water … fuck Cheney.
Cheney probably feels the same way about the Iraqi public as he does about the detainees: ”they got what they had coming.”
And, hey to Mary: I read about the oil contracts too and how Iraq is driving a hard bargain. Good on ’em. It’s fascinatin.’
Looks like Cheney has stayed true to form: everything he has touched in his career has turned to crap. I just hope they don’t let him ”do” anything else.
Oh, and happy Canada Day!
Take care, Rayne: I hope there’s solace and comfort for all there, including you.
As to whether the US military follows the terms of SOFA re combat operations, etc, we’ll see.
Proly depends less on them and more on the forces that benefit from keeping them in the shit, don’t ya think?
There may be some of that but I’m more concerned about what they call “actionable intelligence.” Garrison troops get antsy after a while. A little action to break the routine could create a disaster. Hard to get promoted as a garrison officer, out there in the boonies an’ all.
“they never did” care.
Has the Lancet ever made such a big mistake before?
200,ooo dead Iraqi people and counting is plenty enough but guess what most Americans do not give a rats ass about Iraqi lives. And that is the frightening truth
The figure is far higher than 200,000. Ans you’re right Americans couldn’t care less. It’s a sad fucking state of affairs.
Great post title… and unlike Austen’s title which referred to two different people, yours could easily refer to a single person, or to several, but still with both pride and petulance attributed to each of them.
In fact, you could even write: Pride + Petulance = American Exceptionalism.
…not to mention the millions (?) of refugees, and the thousands (?) of girls and women who have had to resort to prostitution.
Or the “pleasure marriages”
http://montages.blogspot.com/2…..under.html
Micheal Ware “the Iraqi people have been living this”
“end of a foreign occupation” well the very beginning of we hope an end
But what are they going to do with that big ole American embassy. Sure looks like we have our headquarters set up. Could see those Iraqi care plates in my minds eye just after we invaded.
Iraq..
51st state
“birthplace of civilization”
That would be “the Iraqi populace“