George W. Bush, and supporters (including Joe Leiberman) are fond of saying that he world is a safer place now that Saddam Hussein is in custody. But safer for whom? Not for U.S. troops in Iraq, whose deaths have increased since Saddam’s capture.
US combat deaths in Iraq have risen sharply during January despite a drop in the number of attacks and the capture of former dictator Saddam Hussein over a month ago.
As of Thursday, 33 American soldiers and one civilian had been killed by hostile fire during the month. That compares with 24 US combat deaths in December, and a total of 32 coalition combat deaths.
The figures appear to show that the security situation in Iraq is not improving, contrary to earlier claims from the US military and politicians.
And apparently it’s not making the world any safer for Bush, in terms of getting re-elected, as troops and their families begin go turn against Bush and his administration as casualties mount.
President Bush’s war in Iraq faces growing opposition from those who are on the front lines: soldiers, their families and veterans, including high-ranking officers.
A bipartisan poll published by Business Week in December showed approval for the president at a mere 36 percent among soldiers, their families and veterans.
And with civil war looming in Iraq, it’s hard to say that things are any safer, or bound to get much safer, for Iraqis anytime soon.
Reuters reports that as the US struggles to find a formula to return sovereignty to Iraq, officials are worried about the potential for civil war in a country marked by religious and ethnic tensions. Although US officials in Iraq say that a civil war would be unlikely with 123,000 US troops in the country, they are still wary because of the history of mutual grievances between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Kurds. Reuters says a “traumatic event” could trigger such an occurance, such as the assassination of a major religious political leader by another faction. Or, as Brookings Institution defense analyst Michael O’Hanlon points out, the chances of civil war may rise once US troops are gone.
“In the longer term, you have the very distinct possibility of the militias of the different ethnic groups being the most powerful military forces in Iraq. And if the national army doesn’t hold together or doesn’t turn out to be very powerful, you could have a situation where when we try to pull out in five years you see civil warfare at that point,” O’Hanlon said.
The WMD threat, if David Kay is to be believed, was likely never a reality to begin with. So with no threat from Sadam, how does Saddam’s capture make the world safer?
Saddam Hussein’s regime secretly destroyed biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s but then hid the evidence of the destruction, America’s former chief weapons inspector has said.
Dr David Kay, who resigned last Friday, has concluded that Saddam was playing a fatal game of bluff – allowing the world to believe he still had banned arsenals in order to maintain his grip on power.
“If the weapons programmes existed on the scale we anticipated we would have found something that leads to that conclusion. Instead we found evidence that points to something else,” Dr Kay told The Washington Post.
So, for whom is the world safer? Haliburton?