By Shaik Zakeer Hussain,
It’s been 10 years since the U.S and its allies invaded Iraq, the dictator who ruled the country for 24 years is now gone, a new democratic government has replaced him and the Iraqi people are liberated and free at last.
For anyone following the mainstream news, this is pretty much the picture of Iraq in a nutshell, since its invasion through its destruction and now in its present. A picture carefully drawn with beautiful colors but hardly with any details.
When the U.S set out to invade and conquer Iraq, the justification given was that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which he intended to use against it and its allies, and that he was also involved in the attacks of September 11 2001.
This pre-text was proved to be a pack of lies. The U.S had skillfully knitted these fabrications against Iraq and injected them successfully in the public mind, with the sole intention of invading it. In fact, both the CIA and MI6 were told way before the invasion by the Iraqi foreign minister and the head of intelligence that Iraq had no WMD. Mohamed ElBaradei, the then director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told CNN, a year after the invasion that he had been “pretty convinced” that Iraq had not resumed its nuclear weapons program, which the IAEA dismantled in 1997. And Hans Blix, who was the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission said, “I think it’s clear that in March, when the invasion took place, the evidence that had been brought forward was rapidly falling apart … our inspectors had been there, and they had taken a lot of samples, and there was no trace of any chemicals or biological things … and the trucks that we had seen were water trucks.” And in 2004 a committee in the House of Representatives identified “237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq that were made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice. These statements were made in 125 separate appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26 press conferences and briefings, 53 interviews, 4 written statements, and 2 congressional testimonies,” knocking down all the fictional connections between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.
The real reason behind America’s invasion of Iraq was candidly presented in ‘STRATEGIC ENERGY POLICY CHALLENGES FOR THE 21STCENTURY’ – a 2001 report commissioned by then U.S vice-president Dick Cheney, which warned that Iraq posed a risk to the security of global energy supplies. Noam Chomsky summarized America’s agenda by stating: “Take the US invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a conspiracy theory.”
What followed in Iraq was, as Pepe Escobar rightly describes it, ‘the biggest, man-made humanitarian disaster of our times.’ An estimated 112,000 civilians were killed in a decade, five-million were made orphans, four to five million forced to flee their lands and the country devastated beyond recognition.
Massacres, bombings, rape, torture, these were the means through which the U.S brought ‘freedom’ to Iraq.
The U.S led invasion left a bloody mark which would take decades to fade. In a study published by the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, it was revealed that there was an unprecedented rise in birth defects in Iraqi children conceived after the U.S led invasion. The study explicitly held the U.S and UK ammunition responsible for “high rates of miscarriages, toxic levels of lead and mercury contamination and spiraling numbers of birth defects, which ranged from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs.”
Iraq is today divided on ethnic and sectarian lines, a division created by the U.S as a weapon to destabilize it forever. The U.S replaced Dictatorship with a corrupt system, and today political assassinations, sexual violence against women and bomb blasts has literally crippled the country.
The Iraq invasion was a chapter in the long history of U.S led invasions, against independent nation states. Invasions and bombings which continues to kill innocent lives in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and many more countries.
For the occupying nations this horrid human loss, is ‘collateral damage,’ justified for the sake of self-interests. For the occupied sufferers it has been calculated murder.
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(Shaik Zakeer Hussain is an independent writer and blogger.)