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bemildred

(90,061 posts)
Thu Jun 19, 2014, 12:19 PM Jun 2014

Iraq: a tale of beasts and whirlwinds

"For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads; it shall yield no flour; if it were to yield strangers would devour it." Hosea 8 : 7, The Bible

With the rapid advance of the insurgent army of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) -- a Sunni fundamentalist movement in Iraq, formerly linked to Al Qaeda -- the strategies and plans of Western leaders lie in tatters.

In 2003, to justify war, U.S. and British "intelligence agencies" offered the United Nations "irrefutable" evidence that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed chemical weapons. The U.S.-led invasion conquered the country in six weeks. The crushing technical superiority of the U.S. military generated an immense disparity between U.S. and Iraqi deaths. Since 2003, the U.S. forces lost 4489 lives but over 1.4 million extra Iraqi deaths are attributable to the war and its consequences. Inflicting military defeat on Iraq was relatively easy but anchoring and sustaining support for a new elite and establishing a durable system of governance, requires popular support and the acquiescence of minorities -- particularly the Sunnis and the Kurds. This objective proved elusive.

The CIA identified Nuri al-Maliki as the best candidate for the job of Iraqi Prime Minister but national unity collapsed under his Shia dominated regime. Maliki's government exacerbated sectarian tension, plundered state assets, left the health and education system to rot, and drew Iraq ever closer to its neighbour, the Shia led Islamic Republic of Iran. For 11 years the Iraqi army was financed; equipped and trained by the United States and Britain to fight insurgency. However, Maliki's regime proved so incompetent and unpopular that its 800,000 strong army disintegrated in the face of only 6,000 ISIS insurgents!

The former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently published an essay defending the Iraq war. He claims that the present crisis is due to Western inaction in Syria, as the forces of ISIS were steeled in the civil war against Bashar al-Assad's government there. Blair concocted the following argument: Although Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, if threatened by mass opposition, he would have made them; if "we" had not invaded there would have been an Iraqi revolution, so the country would be unstable anyway; and then a war would have broken out between Iraq and Syria. He goes on to argue that the crisis in the region is local and historical in origin: at root, he blames bad religion and bad politics. In this way, Blair whitewashes the history of British and U.S. imperialism.

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2014-06/19/content_32714364.htm
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