THE IRAQ WAR: FIVE LIES, FIVE YEARS, AND THREE
TRILLION DOLARS
By
Nikolaos A. Stavrou
On March 14, 2003, a week before the first shot was fired in Iraq, this author published a piece titled “Illusions of World Order” that caught the attention of the Bush administration and its Washington- based cheering squad. In stark terms I warned, well ahead of things to come: “An invasion of Iraq would saddle [the United States] with its own version of West Bank”; and “a West Bank writ large would hardly enhance regional stability, but would transform America into a garrison state, pretty much like Israel, with freedoms incrementally traded for security.”
Five years later, with four thousand Americans and one hundred thousand Iraqis (minimum estimate) dead and at a projected cost of three trillion dollars, the Godfathers of pre-emptive wars still have no regrets about starting one in Iraq. On the contrary, the neo-conservative gang that produced the latest Middle East mess still insists that occupation of an Arab country was the “right decision” and would have no qualms about staging the second act in Iran if their man, John McCain, replaces George W. Bush. How did the United States march to the drumbeat of arrogant elites who made a mockery of sovereignty and international law, merits revisit.
The “theoretical” framework for the Iraq war was carefully worked out in the mid-1990s. With the Soviet Union reduced to a cleptocracy, ravaged by seven oligarchs now living safely in the west, several Washington think tanks got busy to produce “competing models” for a hierarchical “global world order” defined by regional fragmentation, arbitrary creation of local enforcers of order, and enthronement of a single superpower as the ultimate arbitrator of “international behavior”. A dozen books have been written in the past ten years proposing an “imperial system” without overt pitfalls of colonialism. But as Professor Amy Chua of Yale University notes in her book Day of Empire, things do not always work as planned. In the case of Iraq, we have apt evidence that policies based on lies are costly in both human life and treasure.
The Iraq war was sold to the public with effective “marketing” of five lies that were conceived by liars of high intelligence and low morality. But as history shows, when deception of a nation serves as the basis of policies, it is the nation that pays the price. War producers and usual and war profiteers always escape the consequences of their actions by engineering new diversions or moving their assets to venues like Dubai, Cayman Islands or the Emirates, leaving behind economic chaos. In our time, the Balkans and the Middle East have been interchangeable diversions in the imperial management of conflict and the pillaging national assets.
In the newest critique of the elective war in Iraq titled The Three Trillion Dollar War, Joseph E. Stiglitz (winner of 2001 Nobel in Economics) and Linda J. Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, point to five lies that served as the core rationale for invading and occupying Iraq, all articulated by the “bright” advisors to powerful people. Specifically, we were told with a straight face that: a) Saddam had links to the perpetrators or the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center; b) he had weapons of mass destruction, c) the Iraqis would welcome the U.S troops with flowers, d) the war will be over in a few weeks, and e) it will cost very little and reconstruction will be paid with Iraqi oil. Official inquiries, intelligence reports, and facts on the ground, have disproved all pre-war assertions. Plainly speaking, our government lied to us and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
According to these two authors and official documents, a “realistic estimate “of the cost of this war would be 3.5 trillion dollars. It includes not only the cost of fighting in this unending quagmire, but also the cost of life-long care for thousands of wounded veterans. Like all was, the Iraq war, too, has produced added, unintended consequences. It has imposed upon consumers obscene oil prices and produced obscene profits for big oil companies, which in turn have devastated the economies of many nations and play havoc with the value of currencies. The ingenious but deliberate devaluations of the dollar made oil the determinant of economic life because oil is traded only in dollars.
Dr. Nikolaos A. Stavrou is Professor of International Affairs (Emeritus), Howard University
