Broken Promises, Broken Iraq

A secure, stable and free Iraq, it's what the United States promised after its tanks and armored vehicles rumbled into the center of Baghdad and toppled former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.

Yet, as the U.S. troops are leaving "as promised and on schedule," for Maher Abbas, a Baghdad lawyer, the world is as broken and dangerous as these promises could be.

Abbas, 34, is a Sunni resident living in the capital's western neighborhood of Khadraa with his family. He said that the U.S. invasion and the following seven years were devastating to Iraqi society.

"It created deep cracks between the Iraqi factions who used to live together for hundreds and thousands of years," he said with an apparent anguish.

"After the invasion, many Sunnis in my neighborhood and even those who opposed Saddam's regime believe that resisting the occupation was a moral act, because like everywhere in the world, even in America, it is for the people's dignity to fight back the invaders," he said.

Slobbering over Iraq's rich oil reserves, the Bush administration was ambitious and assertive. Its military hardware was capable of wiping out what George W. Bush called a "danger to the civilized world." Yet he never anticipate the U.S. incursion would open the Pandora Box and release the evil of sectarian violence.

A U.S. intelligence assessment, the National Intelligence Estimate, said the conflicts between Iraqi Sunni and Shiite has "elements of civil war." Bush also admitted the violence had split Baghdad into sectarian enclaves.

The sectarian groups formed death squads and resorted to suicide bombings to create fear and hatred among all Iraqis. Some analysts suspected that their targets are mainly non-military and civilian, even places of worship, like the explosion at the al-Askari Mosque in the city of Samarra, one of the holiest sites for Shiites.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that by 2008 some 16 percent of Iraq's population, or 1.5 million, were internally displaced and about 2 million fled abroad.

According to the independent Iraq Body Count project, as of Aug. 18 2010, some 106,072 civilians were killed in Iraq, not to mention those wounded during the war.

"Bush has made a crime against us by invading my country," Abbas said, "I really want them to leave, but I feel with pain more than that when a court set free a criminal for lack of evidence. This time they Americans are set free despite their crimes."

Lives of the Iraqis had been turned from bad to worse since the war began in 2003. Politics was thrown into a total mess and security situations were so bad that everyone is haunted by fears of all kinds.

"I have never known fears like these of the past years after the invasion. It started from the bombing of Baghdad in 2003, then the raids of U.S. soldiers late at night to our houses with their guns pointing at our heads," said Abbas.

"Like many of the houses in my neighborhood, the American soldiers struck the outdoor and stormed my house before dawn twice in the past years to enter my bedroom and my children's," he said.

"Imagine you wake up on a loud sound in your house and open your eye to see a huge black soldier pointing with his gun at your head and your children's small ones," he added.

Abbas said most of the political and religious parties have militias and it only took them one bullet or a bomb to get a lawyer like him killed.

He said most of laws were roughly the same as those under the rule of Saddam Hussein, while the Iraqi parliament was sluggish in amending new laws.

"One of the major obstacles facing the judicial system nowadays is law could only be applied to some people instead of all. It depends on the power and influence of the party behind those people," he said.

"We used to have electricity shortage for two to four hours sometimes, but we used to have a very accurate power-off timetable so we can prepare ourselves in advance for the blackout hours," said Abbas.

"But seven years after the war and billions of dollars spent on the reconstruction by Americans and the successive Iraqi governments, the blackout hours have increased to 20 hours sometimes," he said.

Power shortage and failure to guarantee people's fundamental livelihood, such as the access to clean and safe drinking water, basic sanitation facilities and health care had disillusioned many Iraqis who used to long for standing on their own safe and secure.

Reconstruction in Iraq, under U.S. command, were plagued by poor management, mishandling of funds, and widespread attacks on construction sites and contractors.

Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, an unpublished official account of Iraqi rebuilding between 2003 and 2008 recorded by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), concluded that five years into the war, the United States has in place neither the police and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

As the reconstruction went rusty, lives for ordinary Iraqis became even more miserable.

The World Food Program (WFP) said in its Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis released in 2008 that some 930,000 people were still in need of food assistance and an additional 6.4 million extremely vulnerable would be food insecure were it not for WFP's Public Distribution System.

Oil revenue was traceless, even though it has been promised to be shared among all Iraqi provinces and the general public.

Even some Iraqi oil officials said they did not know the exact quantity and revenue of the country's oil export, or where the money had gone.

Seven years and five months ago, the Americans rushed to war. Now they are trying to leave the mess of their own making by convincing their victims that they could put things strait all by themselves.

When former U.S. President Richard Nixon pulled out American troops in Vietnam, saying the U.S. military forces earned a victory with honor, the divided nation went even deeper into civil war.

History sometimes tends to repeat itself. As Iraqis are taking over the baton, they are destined to face the consequence of similar broken promises. The only difference, if any, is the Iraqis may have to struggle much longer and with far greater efforts to put their broken homeland back to normal life.

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