Before launching their current military strike on Iraq, the Bush-Blair camp went to great lengths to reassure their public and the rest of the world that the war would be won within a very short period of time and with minimum losses in human life for both the allies soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Both Mr. Bush and his partner in the invasion plan, Mr. Blair, had predicted that as soon as the attack took place, Iraqi troops would surrender en masse and the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds would revolt in armed rebellion against the regime of Saddam Hussein. But with the American British assault on Iraq already in its second week, none of the above predictions have yet materialized. On the contrary, Iraqi troops have shown stiff resistance and made a dent in the American aura of invincibility. Iraqi civilian casualties have also been on the increase as confirmed by the gruesome images shown daily in Al-Jazeera. All of this poses a serious problem for Bush and Blair, thus the escalation in aerial bombardment of Iraq.
The US and Britain have also noticeably increased their propaganda efforts to pit Iraqis against one another along religious and ethnic lines. In the months that preceded the war, British and American officials openly talked of their intention to seek the support of Shiites and Kurds in their efforts to bring down Saddam’s regime. Hence the portrayal of Shiites and Kurds in the American and British news media as victims of a Sunni dominated regime. This tactic of encouraging ethnic and sectarian violence among Iraqis is clearly at odds with US-British claims about bringing democracy to Iraq.
There is no doubt that the war has already inflicted a lot of damage on US interests and image in many parts of the world. No matter which way the war goes, perhaps one way for lessening the effects of this damage will be for the US to exercise restraint and desist from actions that may jeopardize the emergence of a post-war Iraq that is free, peaceful and democratic. With their growing indifference to the high number of civilians getting killed in Bagdad and Basra in addition to their pursuit of clandestine as well as overt operations to divide the Iraqi society, the Americans are actually creating now the sort of things that may make postwar Iraq an ungovernable state.
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