President Obama has fulfilled his electoral promise and withdrawn his troops from the Iraq war, which he had once called a “dumb war”. This war has been compared to Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, which was directly responsible for the downfall of Nazism, and to the US's ill-famed adventure in Vietnam, as well as to the Japanese Navy's attack against the Pearl Harbor naval base, which drove the United States to respond with the cataclysmic nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who make such comparisons mean that George Bush's invasion of Mesopotamia was a reckless act that led to disaster for the United States. But let us not go too far in such unrealistic comparisons. Indeed, neither did US troops flee Baghdad from the rooftop of their embassy as they did in Saigon, nor is the US government on the verge of collapse and its President about to commit suicide, as Hitler did in his underground bunker. The Americans are leaving Baghdad according to a timetable they have chosen and by a decision from the President they elected. They are leaving after having moved Baghdad from one situation to another. They took it away from the grip of Saddam Hussein, his adventures and his dictatorship, and returned it to its people. And of course, Iraq will no longer be able to pose the kind of threat Saddam did to its neighbors and to the world. Moreover, the Iraqis will from now on have to prove that they deserve to have gotten their country back. There has then been no American defeat in Iraq that could be celebrated, if there was anyone waiting to celebrate. The Americans achieved in Iraq what they wanted to, as well as what the Iraqis asked them to, including those who hurl abuse at the occupation. The latter are the ones in power in Baghdad today, thanks to the price paid by the US occupation in terms of casualties from among its troops, reaching 4500 killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, and in terms of war spending, reaching beyond 750 billion dollars. The Americans gave Iraq a democratic system that allows Iraqis to have a say in how their country is run, something no Iraqi could have dreamt of under the former regime. At the height of the sectarian and confessional conflict that had spread, as a result of the absence of national cohesion and of the interference of foreign forces, the Americans sought to play the role of a safety valve over the past few years. They have thus encouraged unifying trends at the expense of those that tended towards secession. And when the Al-Qaeda organization was wreaking terrorist havoc in Iraq, they drove the central government to establish “awakening” movements to confront this spread of terrorist extremism, most of which had come to Iraq through its Western border. Similarly, when Muqtada Al-Sadr and his militias tried to confront Maliki's government, the Americans encouraged the Prime Minister to confront the Sadrists in order to ensure the authority of the state in the face of the “Mahdi Army”, funded by and following orders from Tehran. If there is anything to hold against the Americans today, it is that they are leaving Iraq in the hands of a political party subjected to Iran's influence. Indeed, the real blame here does not lie with the Obama Administration, which is not required to be more patriotic than the Iraqis themselves. Rather, the blame lies with those who accept for their sectarian or in-group loyalty to supersede their national loyalty. Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, for example, was asked in a recent interview how he describes himself. His answer was that he considers himself to be a Shiite first, an Iraqi second, an Arab third and a member of the Islamic Dawa Party fourth. If this is what the democracy America brought to Iraq after removing Saddam Hussein's dictatorship has produced, should Bush and Obama be held responsible for it? With Iraq regaining complete sovereignty over its soil, another Arab country would have reaped the fruits of the Arab Spring. There is no shame in Baghdad's spring having come early, thanks to the American tanks that gave Iraqis the opportunity to achieve the democratic dream that had seemed impossible nine years ago. Indeed, what is certain is that few Iraqis regret the fall of the former regime. It is also certain that if Saddam Hussein had remained in power until the year 2011, the Iraqis would have done what their brethren in neighboring countries have done. Indeed, Saddam, like his counterparts who have fallen or are on the verge of falling, was one of the symbolic figures of the era against which the Arab youth are rebelling today, demanding their right to freedom and dignity like all other peoples. And Iraq's dignity is made no lesser by the fact that Saddam left as a result of an American invasion. What matters now is how Iraqis will handle what was achieved for them as a result of this invasion.
