Monday, May 04, 2009 (18:37:46)
The British troops have finally left Iraq. This is an historic moment. The British involvement in the 18-year slaughter is finally over. Many political commentators are now congratulating the British involvement in Iraq, especially the surge of 2007, for its success in lifting the Iraqis out of their dreadful living conditions into something a little better. This is just wilful ignorance: these dreadful conditions were imposed on Iraqis by the British and American invasion.
Bush and Blair went into Iraq saying they were going to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. But how can anyone speak highly of the war now that the hearts and minds of over a million Iraqis have been splattered on the ground? Yes, over a million. The British research-polling agency, Opinion Research Business, estimates the figure of Iraqi deaths at 1.2 million. This would be the logical follow on from the highly commended study by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad in 2006, which calculated that 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the invasion. The scale of deaths caused by the invasion may well have significantly passed the scale of deaths in the Rwanda genocide.
Iraq currently has the highest cancer rate of any region in history. The cancer rate is higher than it was Vietnam after America sprayed about 12 million gallons of napalm over the entire country. It is even higher than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath of the atomic bombs! This cancer rate is a result of British and American troops firing depleted uranium shells – a weapon of mass destruction - in Iraq. Weren’t we informed that we had to overthrow Saddam Hussein because he was brutal enough to use weapons of mass destruction against the Iraqis?
Joseph Chamie, an Iraq specialist at the UN, says that in terms of poverty Iraq is now looking “more and more like a country in Sub-Saharan Africa,” the poorest region in the world.
The British and American involvement in Iraq did not start in 2003. Our governments have been torturing Iraqis since 1917 when the British invaded Mesopotamia and renamed it Iraq. Iraq was under British control from 1917 until 1932 when the Iraq was granted independence. In the 1960’s Iraq was not following a path that was acceptable to Britain so the British created the Ba’ath party that took power in a coup in 1968.
In 1979 Saddam Hussein took power of the Ba’ath party and became the ruler of Iraq. The British and American governments keenly supported him through all of his worst crimes: the invasion of Iran, which has horrific consequences for the citizens of both countries; the gassing of the Kurds – which Winston Churchill had also engaged in himself during the invasion of Mesopotamia – and the brutal tortures that Saddam inflicted on dissidents.
Then, in 1991, Saddam invaded Kuwait, an oil rich client state of America and Britain. This led to a 180-degree turn in British and American policy and they invaded in what became know as the first Gulf War. During the invasion depleted uranium shells were fired, water treatment plants were bombed and Iraqi civilians were targeted. About 200,000 Iraqis were killed.
At the end of the gulf war there was a general uprising against Saddam by the Shi’ite and Kurdish populations across Iraq. Britain and the United States not only wouldn’t supply weapons to the rebels but they actually gave assistance to Saddam to brutally crush the rebellion. The reasons for this were that the US and Britain weren’t sure whether the rebels would become allies with the US or not. An official from the US State department said that the best of all possible worlds would be an iron fisted military junta that ruled Iraq just as Saddam had done but didn’t have his name attached to it. Weren’t we told before the second gulf war that we had to invade Iraq to overthrow Saddam because he was such a monster?
After the first Gulf War the UN, under pressure from Britain and America, imposed 12 years of sanctions on Iraq that, according to the United Nations in 1999, killed 1,000,000 Iraqis. Ramsey Clark, a former US attorney general, estimated the figure to be 1,500,000. Over half of these deaths were children. This came as a result of starvation from the lack of food, cancer and other diseases from depleted uranium and the bombing during the late 1990’s. These sanctions were the final straw in the unraveling the fabric of Iraqi society.
And then came Bush and Blair.
After 18 years of Holocaust – by Holocaust I refer to the approximately 2 and a half million Iraqi deaths as a result of the first Gulf War, the sanctions and the second Gulf War– Britain has finally left Iraq. But what of the United States? President Obama has said that many of the US troops will leave by 2010 but after that as many as 70,000 troops will remain in Iraq “for the next 15 to 20 years.” In other words, the United States will not leave Iraq and the Holocaust will continue.
And it will continue elsewhere. Many British troops still remain in Afghanistan. The British and Americans in Afghanistan are applying the same policy as they applied in Iraq – when insurgents are found, destroy the area – and it is causing massive civilian casualties, just as it did in Iraq.
Noam Chomsky has said that there are 2 superpowers in the world today: The US government and world public opinion. I would add that on the side of the US government is the whole “New World Order” – the fourth Reich –, which includes Britain and all the governments that have supported American policies over the years.
World public opinion is rising to the fight. The pressure that has been put on the British government over Iraq has been enough to convince them to leave. Now we must let Obama know that we will not support a plan that leaves US soldiers in Iraq for 15 or 20 years and we must let Brown and Obama know that we do not support their plan to slaughter civilians in Afghanistan.
During the sanctions against Iraq the US secretary of State, Madeline Albright, was asked whether she thought 500,000 dead children was a price worth paying for the sanctions. She replied that she thought the price was worth it!
The price was not worth it then and it is not worth it now. Nothing is ever worth it if the price involves killing thousands or millions of civilians. We must let our governments know that if they continue to kill Iraqi and Afghan civilians then we will fight them every step of the way.
