A month from now, the US-led war on Iraq will enter its sixth year. On March 19, 2003, the United States and its willing allies invaded Iraq. It was the second time that Iraq, a sovereign nation, was invaded by the US. The first invasion lasted for half a year, from August 1990 to February 1991.

Done with no legal justification, the 2003 Iraq invasion sparked worldwide protests. In an unprecedented display of opposition, millions of people all over the world went into the streets on February 15, 2003 to prevent the war from happening. So historic was this global initiative that even the mainstream US newspaper, The New York Times, referred to it as the birth of the world's second superpower, global public opinion.

As the sixth anniversary approaches, antiwar coalitions in the U.S. are once again in an assessment mode, trying to make sense of where things are with regards to the Iraq War. For a comprehensive assessment of the Iraq war, it will be useful to use, for lack a better term, the 'sorrows of the empire' matrix.

In 2004, scholar and former CIA consultant, Chalmers Johnson, came out with his book, "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic." It was the second book in what became a trilogy on US imperial policy. Johnson's first book was the pre-September 11 "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire" which came out in 2000 and the third book is entitled "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" which came out in 2006. There is almost an uncanny Tolkienian ring to the trilogy, a 'mirror of Galadriel' of a sort, since this trilogy on the empire reflects in telling details the past, the present and, unless things change for the better, the future demise of the US empire.

In his second book, Johnson identified the four sorrows of the empire as follows:

"First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be; Second is a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress; Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions; Fourth: there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."

For the sake of simplification, Johnson's four 'sorrows of empire' can be paraphrased as the military, political, ideological and financial costs of the empire. It is truly appropriate to assess the current Iraq War in these terms as Johnson himself regarded March 19, 2003 as the day 'the Bush administration took the imperial step of invading Iraq, a sovereign nation one-twelfth the size of the U.S. in terms of population and virtually undefended in the face of the awesome array of weapons employed against it."

The cost of the war

Militarily speaking, US casualties in Iraq are approaching 4,000. As of Feb. 17, US deaths are at 3,963 with 30,000 wounded, according to Iraq Casualties.org. On the other hand, Iraqi death since the 2003 invasion is at 1,220,580 according to the Opinion Research Business (ORB). While both the military and mainstream media view the troop surge a success, with casualties drastically reduced by 55 - 60%, such quantification overlook the unconventional nature of the Iraq war. For instance, a lull in Baghdad translates unfortunately into an upsurge of attacks in Mosul and in other cities. From a regional perspective, the unconventionality of the situation becomes perceptible in the emerging pattern where a decline of US casualties in Iraq also means an increase in Afghanistan. This quirkiness of the Iraq (and Afghan) wars lend credence to Johnson's first sorrow of empire, a state of perpetual warfare, which could shift to everywhere in the world, even the US.

Since September 11, 2001, the political cost the empire has demanded of its citizens (as well as non-citizens) has been huge. The political cost to the trademarked "American Democracy" was further amplified by the second Iraq War. Notice the shift: the passage of the Patriot Act and the opening of Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray for "suspected terrorist" detainees in 2002, gave way to the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib in 2004, and the firming up of selective suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus with the passage the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Of the political cost, however, Johnson gave prominent attention to the expansion of the powers of the executive branch at the expense of other branches of government. Declaring that the US was "at war" against terrorism after September 11, 2001, the president effectively bypassed Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution which provide "The Congress shall have the power to declare war." This significant development was followed by what he referred to as Congressional "week of shame", when, on October 3 - 10, 2003, the House of Representative and the Senate voted to give the president open-ended authority to wage war against Iraq. The cost may even expand further as political precedence by these actions (and what it will exact from the American people) still has to unfold.

While the "weapons of mass destruction" and the "Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda linkage" arguments used to justify the invasion of Iraq are no longer debated as ideological 'propaganda' and 'disinformation,' regrettably, the national security doctrine of unilateral preemptive strike is still has traction. This surfaced rather ominously in the current presidential primary debates when the almost pristine Democratic Party contender, Barack Obama, admitted that if provided with "actionable intelligence reports" showing al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the U.S. troops as a last resort should enter and try to capture terrorists. Extending the war in Iraq even if it will take a hundred years was not as surprising since it was uttered by the Republican Party's most likely presidential frontrunner, John McCain.

Finally, on the financial cost of the war, nothing can be more grounding than the Quaker peace and justice organization American Friends Service Committee's (AFSC) "Cost of War Project". AFSC estimates that one day in Iraq costs the American people $720 million. If redirected to human needs at home, one day of the war could have funded 95,364 Head Start Places for Children,  84 new elementary schools , 1,153,846 children with free school lunches. 12,478 Elementary School Teachers , 163,525 People with Health Care,  34,904 Four Year College Scholarships, or 6,482 Families with Homes. Since the second Iraq War started, the US military budget has expanded exponentially. In the proposed 2009 budget, The Pentagon is requesting for $515.4 billion for national defense, dwarfing budget requests from other departments.

AFSC based its estimates on the cost to the US of the Iraq war on a paper by Joseph Stiglitz. A professor of economics at Columbia University and winner of the Nobel for Economics in 2001, Stiglitz estimated the likely cost to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion (£1.1 trillion), up to 10 times more than previously thought. His study, which was released in 2006, expanded on traditional estimates by including such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the conflict, as well as the impact on the American economy.

A disunited movement

With the continuing ravages of the Iraq War, the question is: where is the US social movement to oppose these atrocities? On February 15, 2003, more than a million people were mobilized in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and other major cities, but how did it consolidate into a sustainable movement for change?

From the perspective of one who experienced the movement for change in the Philippines during the 1970s and the 1980s, a movement that was both anti-imperialist and democratic, I am still amazed at what I see in the US: the peace/antiwar and justice movements stand distinct from one another. While the former tends to be white and middle class people, the latter are poor and predominantly people of color. February 15 was a rare exception where both movements merged as one crowd in the streets all over the US. This only affirmed how urgent it was for the American people -- just like the rest of the world, to stop the war from happening. New coalitions came out of the struggle to stop the war in Iraq and to bring the troops home. I associated myself with United for Peace and Justice, for very obvious reasons. While there have been efforts to be comprehensive and inclusive within this coalition, much need to be done

A careful study of the history of the social movements in the US will reveal that in the 1970s, Martin Luther King, the great American civil rights leader, saw these separations as well. At his historic Riverside Church speech in April 1967, Martin Luther King identified the three evils of economic injustice, racism and militarism. It was his way of calling both peace and justice movements to surge forward as a unified movement. He died exactly a year after that historic speech leading an emerging unified movement that somehow ended prematurely with him. The struggle to end the Vietnam War and the struggle for Civil Rights, the external and internal manifestations of the empire at the time had their successes, but the distinction of the peace and justice movements, sadly, prevailed. Had the movements succeeded in achieving unity, the empire could have been a history. But unfortunately, it is not.

While the peace and anti-Iraq war mobilizations had its ups and downs during the period of the Iraq war, other movements experienced their upsurge. Most notable was the immigration reform movement of 2006 and 2007 that mobilized a new constituency, the undocumented workers. The people of color, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and recently Jena 6 mobilizations, had an upsurge in the antiracism struggle, too. But very few from the peace and antiwar movements joined their ranks.

In Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, it took a fellowship, a veritable united front of men, elves, dwarves and hobbits to stop the expansion of Mordor "where the Shadows lie." Given their different backgrounds, members of the fellowship had its own shares of internal struggles. In order to forge unity against the empire and forge an inside-outside with the rest of the peace and justice movements in the world, the US peace/antiwar and justice movements have to undergo, that struggle too. To that emerging 'fellowship against the empire,' all over the world, the books in Chalmers Johnson's trilogy are must-read pieces.


- Baltazar Pinguel, a Filipino, is based in the USA, where he coordinates various programs related to peace-building, demilitarization and conflict prevention, in the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), of Philadelphia.

This article was written for ALAI's Spanish language magazine América Latina en Movimiento, No. 429, "Altermundialismo: nuevos tiempos", Quito, February 21 2008.  PDF version:  http://alainet.org/publica/429.html.