Endgame of the American 'crusade' in iraq

It must have been very painful, for the US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, to stand in front of his country's military commanders in Iraq to announce bluntly that their mission, in effect occupation, has reached its "endgame".

For five years, that "game" has left a trail of destruction and misery, bombing Iraq, a country that sits on the world's second largest proven oil reserves, into "stone age" poverty, according to former Secretary of State James Baker. Yet that game has failed to achieve the US strategic objectives of creating a country that can be a launching pad for the American vision of a larger Middle East, with an Israeli central role, that serves US interests of political, military and economic hegemony.

To minimise the adverse impact of that failure, due to Iraqi resistance, Gates called upon Arab countries, particularly Gulf Cooperation Council states, to come to Washington's rescue.

They want the Arabs to bear Washington's failures and finance them. Although that call is not new, it carries this time an urgency as the US administration watches its dream turn into a nightmare. The US withdrawal will also leave their allies, who currently rule Iraq, to an uncertain future.

The US Bush administration has been in constant denial claiming, according to a recent leaked congressional report, successes that had never existed. That denial cost them dearly in Iraq and all over the world where US credibility and ideals of freedom and democracy have been shattered. They ignored all the Arab warnings and arguments that invading Iraq would splinter the country into ethnic and sectarian fragments that would potentially be inflaming unrest and destabilising the Middle East and the Gulf regions.

It is the endgame of the "crusade", a label that Bush himself used to describe the March 2003 invasion.