Most Cowardly War Ever Fought
After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, after making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, the "Coalition of the Willing" – better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought – sent in an invading army.
Then the corporate media gloated that the United States had won a just and astonishing victory!
TV watchers witnessed the joy that the US army brought to ordinary Iraqis. All those newly liberated people waving American flags, which they must have somehow hoarded during the years of sanctions.
Never mind that the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square (shown over and over on TV) turned out to be a carefully choreographed charade played out by a handful of hired extras coordinated by the US marines. Robert Fisk called it the "most staged photo-op since Iwo Jima."
Never mind that in the days that followed American soldiers fired into a crowd of peaceful, unarmed Iraqi demonstrators who were demanding that US troops leave their country. Fifteen people were shot dead.
Never mind that a few days later US soldiers killed two more and injured several people who were protesting the fact that peaceful demonstrators were being killed. Never mind that they murdered 17 more people in Mosul. Never mind that in the days to come the killing will continue. (But it won't be on TV.)
Never mind that a secular country is being driven to religious sectarianism. Never mind that the US government helped Saddam Hussein's rise to power and supported him through his worst excesses, including the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify going to war against Iraq.
Never mind that, after the first Gulf War, the Allies fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal.
After the invasion of Iraq, Western TV channels' ghoulish interest in the mass graves they discovered evaporated quickly when they realized that the bodies were of Iraqis who had been killed in the war against Iran and the Shia uprising. The search for an appropriate mass grave continues.
Never mind that US and British troops had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business.
The security of whatever little remained of Iraq's infrastructure was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq's oil fields was. The oil fields were "secured" almost before the invasion began.
It's worth noting that the reconstruction of Afghanistan, which is in far worse condition than Iraq, hasn't merited the same evangelical enthusiasm in reconstruction that Iraq has. Even the money that was so publicly promised to Afghanistan has not for the most part been handed over. Could it be because Afghanistan has no oil? It has a route for a pipeline, true, but no oil. So there isn't much money to be extracted from that vanquished country.
On the other hand, we were told that contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq could jump-start the world economy. It's funny how the interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully, and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy.
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