It is now abundantly clear that the Iraq campaign has been an unmitigated disaster: Far from bringing democracy and freedom, it has plunged Iraq into violence, further destabilized the Middle East and spawned a new generation of anti-Western radicals. I never had a rosy picture of Saddam Hussein's regime. I lived in Baghdad in the early 1980s, during the ferocious Iraq-Iran war which he had launched, and I had a good opportunity to see the level of control his government exercised over the population.
But I don't think we have even begun to measure the long-term impact of the war launched on Iraq four years ago by the "coalition" troops. I'm not talking only about the political consequences; I am also thinking of individual lives, Iraqis and foreign, which have been shattered by the conflict.
The published casualty figures only scrape the surface:
- total official coalition deaths: 3,476
- numbers of coalition personnel medically evacuated: 32,544
- Iraqi civilian casualties: between 59,287 and 65,121 according to the Iraqi Body Count; more than 650,000, according to a US study published in November 2006 in the British journal Lancet.
No wonder Iraqis are feeling "increasingly pessimistic," according a new BBC poll, which found that 18 percent of Iraqis trust US and coalition troops. Remember how unsettled we all were in Istanbul after the four blasts in 2003 which killed some 60 people, and imagine experiencing fear and insecurity on a daily basis for months on end.
Aside from the obvious daily hardship it causes to millions of people, the conflict is also undermining a future generation. Many children don't go to school anymore, because leaving home means taking the risk of never returning. In recent weeks, universities have been targeted.
BBC correspondent John Simpson recently noted in one of his reports that when eight people were killed near his office, he did not bother to call London. Western audiences have become so accustomed to daily reports of violence in Iraq that it takes dozens of deaths for an attack to be newsworthy. This growing immunity to violence, this abnormal sense of normality, is also a side-effect of the war.
Photojournalist Nina Berman recently captured a rarely mentioned aspect of the war with an award-winning wedding portrait of a young American couple. The picture looked like an old-fashioned wedding photo: a bride in full regalia, with her proud husband standing next to her, looking stiff in his dress uniform. But there was nothing ordinary about the 24 year-old groom: he had no face. A roadside bomb had dissolved his chin, nose, lips and hair. The stricken look on the bride's face showed that she, too, would carry the burden of the Iraq war for the rest of her life, as would their future children. In fact, the entire community these two young people had grown up in was affected. Add to the wounded veterans the thousands of young people who return with invisible psychological traumas but never appear in any casualty count, and you begin to get a measure of the human damage caused.
The fact that the politicians who created this mess are still in power raises a fundamental question: Has democratic accountability also become a casualty of war?
