As I mentioned earlier, many people are now considering the latest positive evelopments in the Middle East as proof that our heavy-handed approach to foreign policy might not be pretty, but that it "gets results." (Didn't I hear Jon Stewart with a variation of this meme on the Daily Show a while ago?) Wars, when placed in a historical context, will often seem to serve a larger purpose against which the casualties of that war can be measured as worthy sacrifices. We want our wars to be just, we want the lives lost to mean something.

In light of the overthrow of the Ba'athist dictatorship and the recent elections in Iraq, there are those who say that although Iraq may have sustained "collateral damage," in the end our actions were worth it to the Iraqi people. We often gloss over the gritty details when it comes to war; we can't help but try to ignore the lasting damage it inflicts. Sure some Iraqis were killed, but aren't their deaths acceptable losses in the service of their country's ultimate freedom? As Republicans often remind us, "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet," according to President Reagan. In Iraq, it seems, we're just breaking eggs.

Because we are committed to staying in Iraq, we feel compelled to justify our presence there; but to justify the war in Iraq, we must be prepared to declare the damage we inflicted on Iraq to be just. No matter the initial advertisements for war (WMDs, links with Al-Qaeda, and so forth), the White House wants us to believe that our invasion of Iraq was intended for the benefit of the Iraqi people. This is almost as egregious a claim as saying the war was wage for the benefit of the American people, and I'll explain why.

Some of you may recall the
article in the Lancet last year which estimated 100,000 civilian deaths. Sample excerpt:
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The experts from the United States and Iraq said most of those who died were women and children and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths.
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But those deaths are to be expected, say the war camp. They're an unavoidable part of forcible regime change. The Pentagon won't even release the numbers of civilian casualties because they're so historically insignificant.

What <b>is</b> historically significant is the toll that our advanced weaponry has taken on Iraq (not just in the current war, but in the previous wars as well): take, for instance, this article from the Deutsche Welle entitled
after the war comes cancer:
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After two wars where oil wells were torched, chemical factories bombed and radioactive ammunition fired, the first thing Iraqi women ask when giving birth is not if it is a boy or a girl, but if it is normal or deformed. The number of cancer cases and children born with deformities has skyrocketed after the two Gulf Wars.

"Since 1991 the number of children born with birth deformities has quadrupled," said Dr. Janan Hassan, who runs a children's clinic at a hospital in Basra in southern Iraq. "The same is the case for the number of children under 15 who are diagnosed with cancer. Mostly, it is leukemia. Almost 80 percent of the children die because we neither have medicine nor the possibility to give them chemotherapy."

Doctors have also recorded an extreme rise in cancer cases among adults. "In 2004 we diagnosed 25 percent more cancer cases than the year before and the mortality rate increased eight-fold between 1988 and 1991," said Dr. Jawad al-Ali of the Sadr Hospital in Basra.
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We have quite a track record with this kind of thing; in fact, some Vietnamese families just lost a lawsuit which attempted to hold the manufacturers of Agent Orange responsible for the destruction it caused (and is still causing) there, and we dropped that on the country some twenty years ago.

Now we're doing it again with depleted uranium (our soldiers are being affected too, I guess for the sake of parity). As unbelievable as it sounds, the U.S. army essentially invented a venereal disease you can catch by touching one of their tanks or munitions. If we had any human decency, we'd be sending in cleanup crews to safely dispose of the radioactive waste we've strewn about the country; but that would mean admitting that DU is dangerous, so we won't do it.

While we (eventually) hoisted the standard of democracy in Iraq, we've stolen their oil, we've crippled their institutions, and basically condemned a country with the world's second largest oil reserves to poverty. Iraq could've had a standard of living comparable to our own, but now the likelihood of that happening is essentially nil.
But as long as the elections make the news, everyone assumes we're helping them towards Western-style democracy.

The economic and environmental aspects of the occupation are one thing, but to really understand the depth to which we've screwed this up, you have to look at the psychological warfare we've been waging.

America, it seems, would rather fight for its values than live up to them.

The louder we trumpet the importance of "bringing democracy" to the Middle East, the more we poison its chances. Everybody hates us whether we're right or not; but making our stated policy goal democratization only makes people more resistant to it. They are not going to drink their cod liver oil just because it's good for them.

It's precisely this kind of thinking that led neo-conservatives to imagine Iraqis showering U.S. troops with rose petals instead of mortar shells.

Just because we think we're right and we have bigger guns does not make it a good idea to try and enforce our supposed political ideals at tankpoint. Imagine if the French had invented the satellite-mounted death-ray and showed up one day demanding that we cease using the Imperial system of weights and measures? Because trust me, the metric system is a better idea than ours. All the same, what we would get in such a situation would be brave American patriots bombing measuring-tape factories and so forth. It's the same in the Middle East; the fact that it's <b>America</b> who's shooting people in the name of democracy automatically raises people's ire. How far would a spiteful people go to deny Bush the PR victory he so desperately seeks? I suppose we'll find out.