North Star Writers Group

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.

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