A DISASTER OF HISTORIC PROPORTIONS
by Harry Bruce
The Chronicle Herald




GEORGE W. BUSH steps into 2007 not just as the worst president in American history, but as one whose monstrous bungles in Iraq have made the entire world hugely more dangerous than it was before he came to office. The disasters that he and his bull-headed henchmen allowed to unfold in Iraq, and the hatred of America that these aroused among millions of Muslims, are a godsend for the recruiters of terrorists everywhere.

As the English journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently told readers of the New York Times, one of the two "great victors of the Iraq enterprise" has been Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying president of Iran, who wants Israel "wiped off the map." And the other great victor? Osama bin Laden.

Just before Christmas, Mark Danner, an American expert on the war in Iraq, said in the New York Review of Books that the Bush gang’s fears that Iraq was collaborating with groups of terrorists, fears that were once "largely conjectural," have now "attained a terrible reality."

A few days ago, the killing of six more U.S. soldiers pushed the American military death toll in Iraq to 2,978, five more than those who died during the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. The carnage among Iraqi civilians has been far greater. One Web site, Iraq Body Count, puts it at 52,000, but Iraq’s minister of health believes it’s more like 150,000, and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health figures it’s well over 600,000.

The United Nations claims 6,599 Iraqis were murdered in July and August alone. Before killing many of their victims, the death squads abuse them with nails, power drills and other tools that Saddam Hussein’s torture teams favoured. One UN expert on torture said last September, "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than . . . in the times of Saddam."

Describing the "apocalyptic" situation in Iraq in the New York Times, Max Boot, a senior fellow at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, said, "What’s happening is far messier than the American or English or Russian civil wars. This is not a war of two well-defined sides but a war of all against all. Sunnis and Shiites are not only fighting each other but various gangs of Sunnis and Shiites are fighting among themselves. Some of these disputes are ethnic or religious. Others are simply criminals squabbling over how to divide the spoils."

This hideous mess stems directly from what Mark Danner calls the Bush gang’s "almost unbelievable failures in planning and execution."

These included the monumentally stupid decision to wreck Iraq’s civil service just when the country needed it most. No one could work for the Iraqi government without having joined the Baath Party but, since it was Saddam Hussein’s party, the Bush meatheads fired some 50,000 teachers, policemen, technicians, tradesmen, and others. Many of the suddenly unemployed were powerful, influential, and well-connected.

The defeated Iraqi military hoped to help stabilize and rebuild their war-torn nation but the Bushies — having destroyed the education and justice systems, and driven underground tens of thousands of Baathists — ordered the disbanding of the entire Iraqi army. Thus, the U.S., virtually overnight, cleverly created for itself 350,000 enemies.

"It is the absence of a functioning judiciary or police force that accounts for the sinister condition of Iraq today," Max Boot continued. "New York or London probably would look only marginally better than Baghdad if, four years ago, their police forces had been disbanded, their government dissolved, their electricity turned off, two thirds of their workers laid off, and their prison doors opened to release thousands of criminals."

"The situation is so awful, the prospects so irredeemably bleak," Geoffrey Wheatcroft said. "It’s tempting to say there are no good options whatever for America," he continued, "only a choice between the truly dreadful and the even worse."

While discussing America’s future relations with other countries during the presidential election campaign of 2000, one of the candidates said, "If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation but strong, they’ll welcome us."

The man who uttered those wise words six years ago was none other than George W. Bush, who went on to prove himself the most arrogant fool ever to "serve" as commander-in-chief of the world’s only superpower.

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