Deliberate U.S. Destruction of Iraq

Comment by Larry Ross, May 22, 2006

The so-called "war on terrorism" is actually a war on the Iraq people and the destruction of their country. From the beginning of the war in 2003. the U.S. reasons to justify this war were known to be lies. There were no WMD, no nuclear weapons programme, no links to al-Qaeda and Osama bin laden, and  no Iraq plans to attack the U.S. or U.K. From the beginning, the war was the most colossal fraud any American administration has every foisted on their own people. After destroying most of the Iraqi infrastructure, the Bush Administration made a big show about rebuilding Iraq and restoring all facilities including, electricity, sewage, bridges, hospitals, water etc. Many billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury were made available for this work. In fact it was never effectively done. Most of the money was siphoned off by corruption, no-bid, cost-plus contracts, shoddy and incomplete work and so on.

The U.S. has increased it's bombing and destruction of cities and facilities and cancelled many so-called reconstruction projects.  Professor Michael Swartz gives a detailed study of what the U.S. has done and is doing to Iraq and the civilian population. These people are suffering extreme deprivation and utter devastation of their land. The U.S. has no legal, moral or valid security reasons for unleashing this invasion and extensive devastation of Iraq and murdering of it's people. Now it is systematically fomenting a so-called civil war in Iraq by employing Sunni and Shiite militias to allegedly to help make peace. In fact they are directed to murder each other, thus ensuring a growing civil war and a claimed need for continuing U.S. presence.  The largest U.S. embassy in the world - the size of Vatican city - is the physical evidence that the U.S. intends to stay in Iraq.

By not telling the people the truth about U.S. lies to justify the War on Iraq and the wanton destruction, torture and murdering of it's people; and by continuing to applaud and justify the U.S. war in Iraq and similar plans and lies to make war on Iran, the mass media in the U.S., UK, Australia and New Zealand must accept part of the responsibility for this outrage. The long-term consequences can be disastrous for all humanity. 

 

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Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Dismantling Iraqi Life

 

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=84463

After five months of confusion, bickering, dickering, dithering, and strong-arm tactics from Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to Iraq and various high American officials arriving on the fly, Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki has reportedly chosen his cabinet and a government will evidently be established in Baghdad's Green Zone. At the moment, its reach seems unlikely to extend much beyond the American-protected berms and fortifications of that citadel-mini-state. In the meantime, what governmental authority still existed in Iraq seems to be rapidly on the wane -- and not just in largely Sunni areas of the country either. (In parts of Sunni al-Anbar province, however, according to Mathieu Guidère and Peter Harling of Le Monde Diplomatique, control seems to be passing into other "governing" hands: "A formal procedure is in place for lorry drivers to pay an insurance fee [to insurgent groups] that allows them to cross the governorate, as long as they are not supplying the enemy.")

In the city of Basra, in the Shiite south, the reliable British journalist Patrick Cockburn reports that, according to an Iraqi defense ministry official, an average of one assassination an hour is taking place, and local police "no longer dare go to the site of a murder because they fear being attacked." Indeed, when a tribal leader was recently killed by men in police uniforms, a local police station was promptly sacked and 11 policemen killed. Reprisal murders of every sort seem to be sweeping the country as a complex, low-level civil war only grows more intense. In fact, Middle Eastern scholar Juan Cole now regularly begins his daily blog at his Informed Comment website with lines like: "The Iraqi Civil War took the lives of another 42 persons on Tuesday.")

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