Rather than showcasing their strength, the American strikes in Iraq are a sign of disarray. The United States is trapped in a situation created by its own policies and actions. The war reporter and freelance journalist Anne Nivat challenges the arguments that leave out of account past and present complexities of the current situation. The author of numerous books, including Baghdad Red Zone (Fayard, 2008), she has been covering the war in Iraq since 2003.
On Friday, the United States decided to re-engage in Iraq. These sudden air strikes make one thing clear – that the US has no idea what to do about the mess they made of Iraq. In no way do they represent a display of strength or resolve. Yet the muffled excitement of war is again being felt in Western governments as they march in step with American belligerence because no one has anything better to offer, or because bombs "for a good cause" eases their conscience.
Anyone who dares to question the merits of these new strikes will immediately hear the retort, "How else can we stop those mad men?"
First, "those mad men" did not appear overnight. They were already there in 2003, and have been there ever since. The Americans and their coalition fought them, spending millions of dollars on this "war against terror" in which they lost several thousand men, but the job was never finished.
Then the media pack left when the American military decamped. Silence settled in for a while, but the war was not over.
Silence greeted the massacres of Christians that actually began ten years ago, and their exodus as well. The implacable silence of Western Christians, unaware of or indifferent to their plight, stunned, disappointed and profoundly distressed these Eastern Christians. Why did it take the current desperate situation, with thousands of men and women on the road and the taking of the town of Qaraqosh, for the West to act? The minority Yazidi have been living in extremely poor conditions for years, its members treated as "Satanists" by Sunni Muslims, but until last Friday no American senior official seems to have been moved by them.
This silence has also nurtured many pro al-Qaeda jihadist militias, a mixture of Iraqi tribes abandoned by the Americans and disenfranchised Sunnis locked out of government by Al Maliki, angry and frustrated to no longer be in power, along with lawless renegades who sail from battle to battle, eager to fight infidels anywhere provided that it is dirty, provided they are in the center of the black hole, provided they are allowed to do whatever they want. Western converts have recently jumped into this boiling cauldron, having been recruited and reconverted into cannon fodder. “It's always easier with strangers,” the jihadists say.
All these « mad men » didn’t appear in Iraq recently, they actually never left Iraq. Over the past decade they never left the country, except to join the fight in neighboring Syria and indulge in their favorite activities, plunder and terror under the guise of a religion that they soil with their filthy words and actions.
These are the same « mad men » who, since the beginning of 2014, had retaken Fallujah and swept throughout Iraq's Anbar region which borders Syria, without causing any American strike. The world took notice for a moment, contemplated the horror, then lost interest and moved on. When the city of Mosul was taken in early June, there was no reaction. President Obama was not convinced by his advisers at the Pentagon who pushed him to re-engage at that time. So why has he decided to do it now?
Everything that had led the United States to retreat from Iraq two and a half years ago without really beeing able to claim that their « mission was accomplished », or that peace had been installed throughout the region, was still in place. Nothing had been solved in almost ten years of a military presence. And yet they were reengaging.
They were reengaging because their most reliable and safest ally in the region, the authorities of the independent region of Kurdistan, had asked them for their help. How many times in the years following the American intervention of 2003 have I heard those same Kurds complain of lack of real involvement on their side from across the Atlantic. According to them, concerning respect for borders and the sharing of resources between the various Iraqi ethnic groups, the United States only managed to support the status quo ante enacted by former dictator Saddam Hussein. How can the American head of state have the audacity to assert that he is intervening because "Americans" are geographically threatened?
What is this policy that is only interested in its own, that applies a different qualitative value to its citizens and others? Why is an American’s life worth more than an Iraqi, an Afghan, or a Syrian?
On the other hand, we hear that the Kurdish Peshmerga who rushed to take the oil city of Kirkuk in the early advances of ISIS, only did so to protect their region from the advance of the barbarians. But that doesn’t take into account the fact that they have an agreement with these barbarians on the backs of Karakosh Christians and all the Christians in northern Iraq to achieve their ends quietly -- to swallow the third largest city in the country without causing the slightest stir in the West, something the Kurds have wanted to do since 2003.
Kirkuk was taken without violence. The jihadists from ISIS did not fight, they let the Kurdish Peshmerga impose themselves, in exchange for the Kurds letting them take the complicated areas a little further north where large pockets of Christians still lived. It would thus seem that the Kurdish Peshmerga, who are mostly sunni Muslims, have « sacrificed » the ancient Christians to satisfy ancient and far from commendable ambitions : to expand their state and get hold of oil production in Kirkuk, which they had never been allowed during the American occupation.
Finally, the ultra-rapid advance of ISIS in Iraq must be measured against the disintegration of the Iraqi state, and that should not be surprising. This decay has been worsening for months and months, which all observers could not have failed to perceive. The fighters of ISIS do not need extremely sophisticated weapons to establish their hold. First, they recover military equipment abandoned by the rout of the Iraqi army, which is not really known for its courage or sense of organization. These weapons often are remnants the American army could not take when they moved out at the end of 2011, such as the mobile artillery unit which was bombed last Friday. Note also that after the looting of the Central Bank of Mosul, the jihadis found themselves a swag of several million dollars. But above all, to be feared and respected they wield the knife and the video, anticipating correctly on the terror caused by pictures of their bloody violence that people share frantically on their mobile phones. So all Iraqis are frightened, as evidenced by my contacts, that there is nothing to stop the jihadists.
Finally, Nuri Al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister set up by the Americans in 2006 when nobody knew him, is clinging to his post miserably causing a general political blockade that led the Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, although Shiite as is Maliki, to speak out in favor of his departure. This sets up a completely new situation in Iraq.
American air strikes will not stop the gruesome developments in the country of the two rivers, they can only slow them down. All these problems will remain.
