How the US dream foundered in Iraq

By Michael Schwartz
Asia Times

On February 15, 2003, ordinary citizens around the world poured into the streets to protest President George W Bush's onrushing invasion of Iraq. Demonstrations took place in large cities and small towns globally, including a small but spirited protest at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Up to 30 million people, who sensed impending catastrophe, participated in what Rebecca Solnit, that apostle of popular hope, has called "the biggest and most widespread collective protest the world has ever seen".

The first glancing assessment of history branded this remarkable planetary protest a record-breaking failure, since the Bush administration, less than one month later, ordered US troops across the Kuwaiti border and on to Baghdad.

And it has since largely been forgotten, or perhaps better put, obliterated from official and media memory. Yet popular protest is more like a river than a storm; it keeps flowing into new areas, carrying pieces of its earlier life into other realms. We rarely know its consequences until many years afterward, when, if we're lucky, we finally sort out its meandering path. Speaking for the protesters back in May 2003, only a month after US troops entered the Iraqi capital, Solnit offered the following:

We will likely never know, but it seems that the Bush administration decided against the "shock and awe" saturation bombing of Baghdad because we made it clear that the cost in world opinion and civil unrest would be too high. We millions may have saved a few thousand or a few tens of thousand of lives. The global debate about the war delayed it for months, months that perhaps gave many Iraqis time to lay in stores, evacuate, brace for the onslaught.

Whatever history ultimately concludes about that unexpected moment of protest, once the war began, other forms of resistance arose - mainly in Iraq itself - that were equally unexpected. And their effects on the larger goals of Bush administration planners can be more easily traced. Think of it this way: in a land the size of California with but 26 million people, a ragtag collection of Ba'athists, fundamentalists, former military men, union organizers, democratic secularists, local tribal leaders and politically active clerics - often at each other's throats (quite literally) - nonetheless managed to thwart the plans of the self-proclaimed New Rome, the "hyperpower" and "global sheriff" of planet Earth. And that, even in the first glancing assessment of history, may indeed prove historic.

(Continued here.)