President Barack Obama announced on Dec. 14 the war in Iraq his predecessor George W. Bush began nine years ago is over. All American troops will be withdrawn from the war-torn Arab country by the end of this year, albeit with a military assistance advisory group without combat missions staying behind. So far as the United States is concerned, the war is ended.
The sectarian war began almost as soon as Obama had declared the end of the American war in Iraq. A series of bombings hit Baghdad on Dec. 22, killing at least 63 people in the first big attack on the Iraqi capital since a sectarian crisis erupted within Shiite Premier Nouri al Maliki's government just a week and a day after the U.S. president had said the war is over. To be more exact, the war in Iraq, the sectarian one, resumed with vengeance four years after the height of slaughter in 2006-2007.
When President Bush began his war on Iraq, which was turned into the war in Iraq after the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein, a prediction of the sectarian and tribal strife was made in this column: Unlike the Vietnam War, in which a jungle and guerrilla war was fought, it would be easy for highly mobile American forces crossed the desert to overpower Hussein's army, but the Americans would be bogged down in tribal and sectarian Iraq just as in Vietnam before their hasty, ignominious withdrawal in 1975.
The Americans have fought four major wars, five if the war in Afghanistan is counted, since the end of World War II.
The first one, the Korean War, broke out in 1950 after Washington defined the defense perimeter in Asia of the United States, leaving out South Korea and Taiwan. Kim Il Sung considered it an invitation to take over the southern half of the Korean Peninsula and unleashed his army across Parallel 38 on June 25. It was the worst mistake President Franklin D. Roosevelt had made to agree with Joseph Stalin to divide Korea Japan annexed in 1910. But for that blunder, there would have been no Korean War, which, technically, is still going on.
President Lyndon B. Johnson began the Vietnam War to build his Great Society. The war was ended by President Richard M. Nixon, who had to resign in disgrace at the end of the Watergate scandal. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on Jan. 27, 1973, and followed by the withdrawal of the American troops. South Vietnam was left to fend for itself, of course with an elected government the Americans had installed and helped. In a little more than two years, the North Vietnamese People's Army marched into Saigon and Vietnam was unified, touching off an exodus of boat people refugees.
President George W. Bush (Senior) started a brief war against Iraq in 1991. His Gulf War from Jan. 17 to Feb. 28 was highly successful. He saved Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, who was spared to continue ruling Iraq lest it should be fractured into armed tribal and sectarian strife. That war could have been prevented, if Bush followed President Nixon's example by bluffing Hafez Assad of Syria into withholding an all-out attack on King Hussein's Jordan to save Yassar Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization that was building up a state within the state of the Hashemite kingdom in 1973. The mighty American Mediterranean Fleet was sent off Syria, with Nixon's warning that Damascus would be attacked and destroyed if Assad unleashed his army staged on the border with Jordan.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on New York, the war on Afghanistan was launched to catch Osama bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaida.
Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, but his terrorist organization has yet to be destroyed, while the war in Afghanistan is going on.
As a matter of fact, President Obama ended the Iraqi war to bring more forces to Afghanistan to end the war, one similar to that the Soviet Union fought in vain to prop up the Russian puppet regime.
Obama accomplished the mission he promised to undertake in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, but the situation in Iraq is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.
Iraq is fighting a stubborn, lower-grade insurgency with Sunni Islamists tied to al-Qaida and Shiite militias backed by Iran staging daily attacks. Only days after the American troop withdrawal, the fragile power- sharing Maliki regime is grappling with its worst turmoil since its formation a year ago.
Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish blocs share out government posts in an unwieldy system that has been impaired by political infighting since it began. Al-Maliki called for the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tarequ al-Hashemi on charges that he organized assassinations and bombings, while asking parliament to fire his Sunni deputy Saleh al-Mutlaq after he likened Maliki to Saddam Hussein. Al-Hashemi has taken refuge in Iraq's rebellious Kurdish region where he is unlikely to be handed over the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
So, when Obama claimed the U.S. forces are “leaving a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people” he sounded not just hollow but, well, comical.
The president also argued that “a successful, democratic Iraq can be model for the entire region” and might even rival India in economic development in the future. His offhand prediction is much, much more than overconfident. Nobody in his sane mind believes the prediction would ever be borne out.
There is one comfort, however. The withdrawal from Iraq isn't as bad as the ignominious one from South Vietnam in 1975.
〈本文僅供參考，不代表本會立場〉
（本文刊載於100.12.26 The China Post 4版 ）
王順民
(
11月22日 15:13
)
劉新圓
(
2007年10月4日 15:04
)
