Getting back to fundamentals in Iraq

The Iraq war was motivated by the US’ desire to continue to establish pro-Western nations in the Middle East, to continue its trade relations with Middle Eastern countries, to continue to undermine Russia’s power and to keep a check on India’s interests. Discuss.

This is the kind of theory that ex-federal department employees, senators and even a few from the political elite would not deny in 20 or 50 years time, maybe in a moment of charismatic confession à la Robert McNamara’s narrative on the destruction of Vietnam in the documentary, The Fog of War.

This historical narrative is also beautifully sterile and non-personal. It avoids the occurrence of uranium-laced weapons bombarding the Iraqi landscape, it ignores the haphazard killing of Iraqi civilians, it ignores the torture and murder of Iraqis through interrogation and imprisonment, and it ignores the curfews, the starvation and disease, the violence between Iraqi and Iraqi, the hopelessness of it all.

To touch on the personal, the detritus, the history books might say:

The extended campaign of US coalition forces endeavoured to control sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi’a religious groups vying to gain control in a post-Saddam environment. Do you think they succeeded? Discuss.

Here we have a statement that is now a tragic cliché among news reports and commentaries, and might evolve into an authoritarian summary of why the US continue to reside in Iraq.

It is a virtuous and moral justification, completely ignoring another theory - that the Iraq war might be motivated by the US’ desire to destabilise the Organisation of the Petroleum Producing Countries’ (OPEC) monopoly over 70 per cent of Iraq’s untapped oil reserves (which is anywhere between 120 and 300 billion barrels of oil).

But it is a virtuous and moral justification that has two assumptions. First, there are two religious groups attacking each other in a geographically based struggle across Iraq. Second, the US coalition forces are neutral, they may be primarily Christians or atheists, but the question of religion does not undermine their ability to contain violence and weed-out insurgents.

However as various “ordinary Iraqis” keep pointing out in the Western media, how can Iraq have such widespread “sectarian violence” when the vast majority of Sunni’s and Shi’as are intersected via marriages, within a vast family networks and who have lived as neighbours in peace?

And if a minority of Iraqis, motivated by their sectarian beliefs, resorted to such violence as retaliation killings or the bombing and shooting of US or US-affiliated targets, how can this be independent to the US’ presence in Iraq?

Though most Iraqi insurgents have a religious motivation to their endeavours, can we say the “coalition of the willing's" war in Iraq is implemented by the secularised democratic ideals we in the West are supposed to cherish?

I pity the student who reaches the inevitable conclusion. The answer, which dare not speak its name in pluralist democracies lest it is uttered in Bush’s or Blair’s ear, is that it is the word of God and He has said: “go forth and conquer.”