Of war and cancer

Five years after Bush invaded Iraq, anti-Americanism has metastasized. But we can still beat it.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: George W. Bush, Democracy, Terrorism, Israel, Cancer, Middle East, America, Mark Twain, Lebanon, Arab, Gary Kamiya, Osama Bin Laden, Opinion, Muslim, September 11th , Iraq War

Reuters/Suhaib Salem

Palestinians burn a U.S flag during a Hamas protest against President Bush's visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, in Gaza Jan. 9, 2008.

March 18, 2008 | The Iraq war has been going on for five years now. Five years happens to be the length of time after which many cancers, if they have not recurred, are considered to be in permanent remission. As a cancer survivor, I remember those five years quite well. When they were over, I threw myself a little party -- kind of my "Mission Accomplished" moment.

I wish my country, and Iraq, and the Middle East, and the world, were in as good health as I am today.

Five years after George W. Bush decided to use America's "surgically precise" weaponry to operate on the entire Arab/Muslim world, the cancer of terrorism and anti-American hatred has metastasized. What was a Stage 1 disease, or 2 at worst, has turned into Stage 3 -- or maybe even Stage 4.

Bush's fatally flawed approach to "terror," treating it as a military problem that has nothing to do with U.S. policies, has led to more instability and violence, not less. As a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes, Bush's attempt to create a "new Middle East" by using force or the threat of force has backfired everywhere. Jihadist groups have multiplied. America's standing in the Arab/Muslim world is at an all-time low. Terror attacks are up everywhere -- in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Europe, in Pakistan, in Indonesia. The Middle East is more volatile, divided and dangerous than ever. The crucial Israeli-Palestinian conflict, still the greatest cause of anti-Americanism in the region and one that Bush's neoconservative brain trust thought it could resolve in Israel's favor by smashing Iraq and putting a gun to the head of Iran and Syria, is at one of its most intractable points. Iran is in a vastly stronger strategic position. American allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt remain stifled by corrupt and repressive regimes that are torn between their desire to placate Washington and their increasingly angry people. Lebanon is a powder keg. In Afghanistan, a resurgent Taliban threatens the Karzai regime's tenuous grasp on power, and America's NATO allies, scared off by the Iraq quagmire, refuse to commit troops. Pakistan's people have turned against Musharraf, the heavy-handed leader whom Bush has uncritically supported, leaving the U.S. no good options there.

Everywhere in the Arab/Muslim world, the truly good values America has to impart -- democracy, freedom, secularism, tolerance -- have been tainted by their association with Bush. It has become glaringly clear to people in the region that Bush's commitment to democracy depends on whether it results in the outcome he wants. For example, Bush and his supporters cheered loudly for Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution," when hundreds of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets to demand that Syria get out of Lebanon. But when the militant Shiite group Hezbollah turned out just as many Lebanese to denounce U.S. and Israeli meddling, the Bush administration's admiration for "people power" suddenly dried up. When the militant group Hamas won free and fair elections in the occupied territories, Bush's response was to connive with Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority to try to destroy it. When Bush realized that opening up Egypt's corrupt electoral system would empower the Muslim Brotherhood, he decided that the autocratic Hosni Mubarak wasn't so bad after all.

Unfortunately, this hypocrisy has weakened the most progressive players in the region, the Arab secularists and democrats who could lead the way to the internal reform their countries so desperately need. A despairing refrain among these embattled figures is, "Bush has given democracy a bad name."

And then there is Iraq. Forget the propaganda about the great success of the "surge." Bush's war turned it into a failed state, and although violence has subsided somewhat, it remains a horror show beyond belief. The brutal tyrant Saddam Hussein is gone, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, perhaps as many as a million, have died as a result of the war. More than 2 million people, of a population of 25 million, have fled the country. Basic services are abysmal: Iraqis, who must endure summer temperatures that are among the highest in the world, can expect only 10 hours of electricity a day. As the intrepid Patrick Cockburn reported for the Independent, Prime Minister Maliki cannot even venture half a mile outside the Green Zone to his Dawa Party headquarters without clearing the streets and flooding a neighborhood with heavily armed security personnel. A sectarian civil war of incredible brutality, one that misguided U.S. policies were largely responsible for, has scarred Iraqis' psyches to such a degree that no one can say whether reconciliation is still possible.

And just in case anyone has forgotten, Osama bin Laden is still at large.

If my surgeon had done his job the way Bush did his, he would have removed part of my liver -- a procedure justified, in the higher neocon quackdom, as "sending a message" to my other recalcitrant organs -- but left the Stage 3 tumor in my colon. And I would now be as dead as the almost 4,000 American troops whom Bush frivolously sent off to fight an unprovoked war.

Next page: But America can still change course