Of a tense present and grim future

At the formal end of the 1990-1991 Gulf War, journalists who covered it were invited to a background briefing by an US official. The war had ended but the person who had triggered this war was still in power.
An official said that the US wanted to dethrone then president Saddam Hussein. The rebel army was moving towards Baghdad and reached the doors of Basra.The US was giving it the necessary support. At that moment the Gulf monarchs who had financed the war intervened and said that they do not want Saddam Hussein to be overthrown.
The logic behind their disapproval of easing out the incumbent was that if he goes, Iraq would plunge into chaos and could also break up. The losers of this catastrophe would be the Arab Gulf states and the main beneficiary, Iran.
“We had no choice but to delink ourselves from the rebels and also ensure that Saddam Hussein stayed in power,” the official contended. Nearly 13 years later Washington sent its forces to hunt down Saddam Hussein, the man who was allegedly behind the 9/11 terrorist attack on American pride and sitting on a pile of weapons of mass destruction.
Both allegations turned out to be untrue, nevertheless, Saddam Hussein was captured and hanged.
But that was not the end of story. Iraq, perhaps, is the most wretched country in the Middle East in the recent times. With the beginning of 1970 decade there were indications that Iraq will be emerging as one of the modern, economically sound and militarily strong state. But the devilish eccentricities of Saddam Hussein pushed Iraq into a no-win war with Iran.
Beginning in 1979 the war continued till 1988. The cost of this war in terms of human casualties and economic parameters was huge. Some one million casualties were suffered by Iran and nearly half of it by Iraq. Both the countries spent about $600 billion each. While Iran is still recovering from that war, Iraq managed to come out of its effects with massive financial assistance from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE.
In less than three years of the war with Iran, the madness of Saddam Hussein came to the fore once again. He invaded the tiny but prosperous Kuwait on August 2 1990 claiming it to be part of his country. The US stitched together and led an Allied Force and kicked out Iraqi troops from Kuwait in February 1991. This was a small war that cost only $70 billion or so.
And, by 2003 Iraq was in the firing range of the US once again. In March that year following a blitzkrieg of propaganda the US launched the war which soon became unpopular globally as well as at home.
According to American official sources the cost of war is said to be over $1 trillion. The US troop casualty was 4,486 dead and over 32,000 wounded. The military personnel dead from other allied forces, mostly from UK, were 316. Iraqi casualties are staggering.
The country lost 1,10,00 people of which military and para-military personnel were only about 10,000, the others being civilians. And these figures, some analysts believe, are grossly under reported. Some say that civilian deaths could be at least five times higher.
At the same time the number of Iraqi displaced by the eight year war is also enormous. While about two million of them have to leave their homes and find some other place to live within country about the same numbers have fled to Syria and Jordan. The economy is in shambles and the peace continues to be a mirage. So, what has the US achieved by invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and returning home, though not completely, by leaving it in the hands of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki?
Asked to comment on the US troop withdrawal, Ahmed Aied, a grocer, told an international news agency, "Now they are walking out, leaving behind killings, ruin and mess." Aied, a common man with little understanding of the political intricacies is right.
On December 22, four days after the last American combatant left Iraqi soil, the country was struck by a wave of apparently coordinated bombings which claimed over 60 lives. The targets were the areas where Shias lives.
The Shia-Sunni conflict is a major problem. The Kurds continue to feel insecure. The security situation could be get worse with one province after the other declaring autonomy and Nuri al-Maliki trying to fix his Sunni opponents and they retaliating by boycotting the nascent parliament. Though the US continues to protect its interests through declared and undeclared means in Iraq, the present in that country is tense and the future grim.