Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

As the Iraq war entered its fifth year, with no end in sight, the World Health Organization estimated that about 150,000 civilians had been killed, in a study that covered only the first three years of the war. The true figure may therefore be twice as high. The total U.S. military deaths have just surpassed 4,000. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the overall cost of the war will reach $ trillion, nearly a quarter of the annual GDP of the United States.

Beneath the rhetoric of the U.S. Democratic contenders for the presidency, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, it is clear that both are committed to retaining a large military presence in Iraq for years to come. The U.S. has been enlarging and modernizing half a dozen permanent bases in Iraq, capable of holding 100,000 troops.

The war has also produced deep divisions inside the U.S. military. Admiral William J. Fallon, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, was forced to resign after making public comments opposing an attack on Iran. A recent survey by the journal Foreign Policy showed disturbingly authoritarian attitudes among the officer corps. Only 53% avowed that torture is “never acceptable,” while 43% explicitly disagreed with such a statement. Moreover, 42% of the officer corps denied that simulated drowning (often referred to by the euphemism “waterboarding”) constitutes torture.

Violence has decreased since late 2007 inside Iraq, not so much because of the “surge” in U.S. troop numbers as because of other factors. First, the Shia fundamentalist Moqtada al-Sadr has continued his truce with the U.S. military, although he has not disbanded his militia, the Mahdi Army. Second, a number of Sunni warlords have accepted U.S. money and arms in order to fight against Al Qaeda insurgents, although they recognize neither the Shia-led central government nor its army. But it is an illusion to think that any kind of real stability can emerge in a situation where Iraq has no less than five armies, each of them supposedly cooperating with the political system established under U.S. occupation -- the official army, the Sunni militias, the Mahdi Army, the Shia Badr Brigade, and the Kurdish Peshmerga.

Still, the decline of violence, however temporary it may be, carries the hope for a revival of political life, especially in urban areas. It could create more space for labor unions, or for the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq; more generally, it might lessen some of the pressure on women, who have been living under constant threat from both fundamentalists and criminal gangs and who have been forced back under the veil in almost all public spaces over the past several years.

It is the Kurds who have suffered the biggest setback in recent weeks, however. After years of tacit autonomy in their northern region, the recent incursion by the Turkish military into Iraqi Kurdistan has shown their utter vulnerability. As Turkey pounded Iraqi Kurdistan, ostensibly only to attack the Turkish Kurds of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), hardly a murmur of complaint was heard from either the U.S. or the central government in Baghdad over this gross violation of Kurdish (and Iraqi) sovereignty.