Facts About Iraq: Five Arguments For The Anti-War Movement

I f there’s anything opponents of the Iraq War can be sanguine about, it’s that a huge chunk of the electorate voted for Bush without knowing the facts. 

According to an October 2004 study from the University of Maryland: 

• 47 percent of Bush supporters believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction 
• 20 percent believed that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11 
• 55 percent believed that Iraq gave al-Qaeda “substantial support” 
• 68 percent of Bush supporters believed that world opinion either favored or was evenly divided on the Iraq War 

More good news: the study found that a majority of Bush supporters would have been against the war had they known the facts. So the goal of the opposition ought to be to confront the Administration’s onslaught of baseless assertions. Here are five points we should focus on: 

1. This is not a humanitarian mission. Rather, the war has become a veritable bloodbath. The website iraqbody count.org has counted at least 15,000 documented civilian deaths. A study by the New England Journal of Medicine found that 28 percent of the Marines and 14 percent of the Army soldiers it interviewed said that they had killed noncombatants. The war might even be far worse than these studies show. A Johns Hopkins University study estimated 100,000 Iraqi deaths as a result of the war.These studies exclude mass arrests and widespread destruction of homes and property. This is what Bush dubbed “freedom on the march” and Dick Cheney called “a success story.” 
2. There was no transfer of sovereignty. The press lifted this term wholesale from the Administration. Iyad Allawi, the current supposed leader of “sovereign” Iraq, reputedly a Baathist hit man, was a CIA asset for years. The highlight of his career was a botched coup attempt that led to over 100 executions. His government has no authority over the 160,000 strong occupation force (not even to try them for crimes committed in the sovereign Iraq). It had no authority to reverse the draconian economic “reforms” of the Coalition Provisional Authority or to reallocate the reconstruction contracts signed by the CPA, which heavily favor U.S. corporations in spite of immense Iraqi unemployment. 
      Yes, the Iraqi ministers can and occasionally do demur, but it has become patently obvious who the Administration envisions running the new Iraq. It has already diverted reconstruction funds to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world out of one of Saddam Hussein’s gargantuan palaces. The U.S. delegation to Iraq—headed by Iran-Contra notable John Negro- ponte—includes regional hubs throughout Iraq and retains significant authority over Iraq’s main ministries. Even if by some miracle the elections are a “success,” the newly elected leader will head an “interim” government dependent on the U.S. and lacking any prospects for long-term legitimacy. 
3. The only thing that is on the march is economic liberalization. Everything the Administration’s hard right ideologues would like in the U.S., they’re getting in Iraq. This includes: dropped tariffs; the potential for foreign ownership of nearly all of Iraq’s state owned industries, with no legal barriers to capital flight or requirements to reinvest profits in Iraq; and a flat tax. 
4. The situation is deteriorating. The human rights catastrophe described above ought to call into question the Administration’s apocryphal description of this “success story.” The reality of the situation is far different than the potemkin village we see on television. A study conducted in September by a private security company in Iraq found that insurgent attacks were far more pervasive than has been reported. Large swaths of territory remain under the control of insurgents or no government at all. At the time of this writing, Allawi has declared a national emergency, imposing curfews around the Sunni areas. After chaos rocked the once tranquil northern areas in and around Mosul, Kurdish authorities took matters into their own hands, calling in their own militias. 
5. We are not fighting the terrorists where they are. We’re ushering in an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism and the facts and figures show it. The most comprehensive study so far—taken earlier this year by the Pew Global Attitudes Project—showed a precipitous rise in anti-American attitudes in the Arab world. Another study by Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institute attributed this to U.S. foreign policy. A November report by the Pentagon’s own advisory board said that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedoms,’ but rather they hate our policies.”