October 18,
2006
Iraq: Classic Co-Dependence
The United
States is a co-dependent nation. I wrote those words 14 years ago and
they remain painfully true today.
The no-win
mess in Iraq is our latest co-dependent episode.
Co-dependents have no internal source of self-esteem. They will do just
about anything in an ultimately fruitless search for outside validation.
This need leads the co-dependent to assume misplaced responsibility.
Just like the United States assumed misplaced responsibility for
“liberating” Iraq from Saddam Hussein and somehow “spreading democracy”
across the Middle East.
The road to
hell, it would seem, is not only paved with misplaced responsibility but
runs straight through Baghdad. More than six in 10 Iraqis polled in
August said they approve of attacks on US-led forces.
If any
American wonders why the Iraqis don’t seem to show much gratitude over
being freed from Hussein’s yoke, new death estimates should provide a
clue.
A survey by
a group of U.S. and Iraqi epidemiologists (physicians concerned with
death rates) estimates that 655,000 more Iraqis have died since
coalition troops entered the country in March 2003 than would have died
had the invasion not taken place.
With Iraq’s
population at 26 million, the American death-rate equivalent would
exceed six million people. Imagine how we would feel or would act if an
invasion had left more than six million fellow Americans dead. Would we
be showering the invaders with flowers? Or would we be out in the
streets fighting them in any way possible?
These
tragic findings were published on Oct. 11 in the online edition of
British medical journal The Lancet. It is the second such survey
of post-invasion deaths of Iraqis overseen by the Johns Hopkins
University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
With U.S.
troop deaths hurtling toward 3,000, the wounded and maimed in the tens
of thousands, and the billions spent in the hundreds and rising every
day, the numbing numbers lead to at least one conclusion: The price of
being a co-dependent nation is very, very steep.
We might
have seen it coming, had we not been in such a state of co-dependent
denial. Could we really expect the Iraqis to celebrate the humiliation
of having the U.S. rub their noses in their own helplessness? After all,
they suffered Hussein’s dictatorship for 34 years without managing to
overthrow him despite numerous aborted palace coups. The comparison with
a spouse who refuses to leave a violent marriage is only too tragically
apt. After so much time, so much abuse, so much suffering, the people of
Iraq could only cower and pray.
Nowhere is
this made clearer than in a news article documenting the arrival of Jay
Garner, the retired U.S. general initially charged with overseeing
Iraq’s reconstruction. Among the many not exactly overjoyed to greet him
was a physician who gave her name only as Iman. “Saddam Hussein was an
unjust ruler,” she told Reuters. “But maybe one day we could have got
rid of him, and not had these foreigners come in to our country.”
The Iraqis
craved the simple human dignity of having freed themselves. Looking back
at the founding of this nation, no one invaded the American colonies to
“rescue” them from a tyrant monarch. Our colonialist forbearers made the
decision themselves to separate from Great Britain. No one imposed it on
them.
Like a true
co-dependent, the United States put the Iraqis in a one-down position by
invading their country and toppling their government. That position of
dependency sticks in the Iraqis’ collective craw, even if they cannot
put their mortification into words.
There’s
another complication. Co-dependent individuals (and nations) never, ever
do their presumed good deeds for free. Co-dependents always have one or
more strings attached to their good works, no matter how vehemently they
deny it. In fact, their presumed rescuing actions are as much motivated
by their own needs as by other, less interested motives. Those unvoiced
hooks are what make the recipients of the co-dependent rescuer’s
largesse extremely suspicious and usually ungrateful.
Those who
want another clue - one about the unvoiced, true U.S. motivations for
invading Iraq -need only follow the money. It wasn’t just about oil, and
it certainly wasn’t about spreading freedom in the Middle East. It was
about a neo-con fantasy of an unfettered, unsupervised capitalist land
grab that, along with the inevitable violent resistance, has left Iraq a
failed state, unable to provide even basic services like potable water,
sewage treatment, electricity and security.
Anyone who
understands the nature of co-dependency could have foreseen as much.
© 2006
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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