How U.S. imperialism destroyed Iraq

July 17, 2014

Dahr Jamail's devastating indictment of U.S. policy in the Middle East from Reagan to Obama. --PG


A Nation on the Brink: How America’s Policies Sealed Iraq’s Fate

Thursday, 17 July 2014 00:00
By Dahr Jamail, Truthout/TomDispatch | News Analysis

In a Truthout and TomDispatch collaboration, Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail has written a searing analysis covering the ongoing disaster in Iraq. Jamail has covered the story extensively for both Truthout and TomDispatch since 2005, and now provides this current perspective on how the legacy of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq continues to destroy lives.

For Americans, it was like the news from nowhere. Years had passed since reporters bothered to head for the country we invaded and blew a hole through back in 2003, the country once known as Iraq that our occupation drove into a never-ending sectarian nightmare. In 2011, the last US combat troops slipped out of the country, their heads "held high," as President Obama proclaimed at the time, and Iraq ceased to be news for Americans.

So the headlines of recent weeks - Iraq army collapses! Iraq's second largest city falls to insurgents! Terrorist caliphate established in Middle East! - couldn't have seemed more shockingly out of the blue. Suddenly, reporters flooded back in, the Bush-era neocons who had planned and supported the invasion and occupation were writing op-eds as if it were yesterday, and Iraq was again the story of the moment as the post-post-mortems began to appear and commentators began asking: How in the world could this be happening?


An Iraqi friend I've known since 2003, living in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, emailed me recently. He had made it through the sectarian bloodletting of 2006 to 2007 in which many of his Sunni compatriots were killed or driven from the capital, and this is the picture he painted of what life is now like for him, his wife and their small children:

All the dangers faced by Iraqis from the occupation - arrests, torture, car bombs, and sectarian violence - those killings have become like a toy in comparison to what we are facing these days. Fighting has spread in all directions from the north, east, and west of Baghdad. Much of the fighting is between the government and Sunni insurgents who have suffered a lot from the injustice of Maliki's sectarian government.

As for his daily life, he described it this way:




He concluded his email on a stark note, reminiscent of the sorts of things I regularly heard when I was in Iraq covering the brutal results of the US occupation. "Horror, fear, arbitrary arrests, indiscriminate bombing, killing, an uncertain future - this is the new democratic Iraq."



Recent articles

Friday, July 13th

Thursday, July 12th

Wednesday, July 11th

Wednesday, July 4th

Tuesday, July 3rd

Monday, July 2nd

E-mail alerts

Latest Stories

From the archives