The Wholesome Photo of the Month Thu May 09, 2024 11:01 | Anti-Empire
In 3 War Years Russia Will Have Spent $3... Thu May 09, 2024 02:17 | Anti-Empire
UK Sending Missiles to Be Fired Into Rus... Tue May 07, 2024 14:17 | Marko Marjanović
US Gives Weapons to Taiwan for Free, The... Fri May 03, 2024 03:55 | Anti-Empire
Russia Has 17 Percent More Defense Jobs ... Tue Apr 30, 2024 11:56 | Marko Marjanović Anti-Empire >>
Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
Julian Assange is finally free ! Tue Jun 25, 2024 21:11 | indy
Stand With Palestine: Workplace Day of Action on Naksa Day Thu May 30, 2024 21:55 | indy
It is Chemtrails Month and Time to Visit this Topic Thu May 30, 2024 00:01 | indy
Hamburg 14.05. "Rote" Flora Reoccupied By Internationalists Wed May 15, 2024 15:49 | Internationalist left
Eddie Hobbs Breaks the Silence Exposing the Hidden Agenda Behind the WHO Treaty Sat May 11, 2024 22:41 | indy Human Rights in Ireland >>
Debt-Funded GB Energy to Bet on the Costliest Electricity Generation Technologies Sat Jul 27, 2024 15:00 | David Turver So much for Labour's pledge to cut energy bills by £300, says David Turver. Under GB Energy, our bills can only go one way, and that is up.
The post Debt-Funded GB Energy to Bet on the Costliest Electricity Generation Technologies appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Christians Slam Paris Opening Ceremony for Woke Parody of ?Last Supper? Sat Jul 27, 2024 13:00 | Richard Eldred Awful audio, bizarre performances, embarrassing gaffes and a woke 'Last Supper' parody that has outraged Christians turned the Paris Olympics opening ceremony into a rain-soaked disaster.
The post Christians Slam Paris Opening Ceremony for Woke Parody of ?Last Supper? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Victorian Laws Against Priests Meddling in Politics Are Now Needed More Than Ever ? To Prevent Imams... Sat Jul 27, 2024 11:46 | Steven Tucker The Muslim Vote wants Labour to abolish Victorian ?spiritual influence? laws that prevent religious leaders from swaying voters, but Steven Tucker argues that in cities like Leicester these laws are more vital than ever.
The post Victorian Laws Against Priests Meddling in Politics Are Now Needed More Than Ever ? To Prevent Imams Doing the Same appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Live and Let D.E.I. Sat Jul 27, 2024 09:00 | Dr James Allan Law professor James Allan has had a bet on Donald Trump to win the Presidency for two years. He's even more confident of winning now that Kamala Harris has become the Democratic nominee.
The post Live and Let D.E.I. appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Three Generations of Waughfare: Alexander Waugh (1963-2024) Sat Jul 27, 2024 07:00 | James Alexander Politics professor James Alexander pays tribute to Alexander Waugh, the grandson of Evelyn Waugh and master of non-fiction prose who died aged 60 last week.
The post Three Generations of Waughfare: Alexander Waugh (1963-2024) appeared first on The Daily Sceptic. Lockdown Skeptics >>
Voltaire, international edition
Netanyahu soon to appear before the US Congress? It will be decisive for the suc... Thu Jul 04, 2024 04:44 | en
Voltaire, International Newsletter N°93 Fri Jun 28, 2024 14:49 | en
Will Israel succeed in attacking Lebanon and pushing the United States to nuke I... Fri Jun 28, 2024 14:40 | en
Will Netanyahu launch tactical nuclear bombs (sic) against Hezbollah, with US su... Thu Jun 27, 2024 12:09 | en
Will Israel provoke a cataclysm?, by Thierry Meyssan Tue Jun 25, 2024 06:59 | en Voltaire Network >>
|
The Iraq War ten years on: A turning point for US imperialism
Today 19th March is 10th Anniversary
Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Ten years ago, the world watched the “shock and awe” bombing campaign light up the nighttime sky of Baghdad with billowing clouds of flame and smoke.
This campaign and the bloody ten years of occupation that followed had a devastating impact on what was once among the most advanced societies in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions were made homeless.
The American military’s conduct of the war produced crimes of staggering dimensions. This included the turning of Fallujah, a city of 350,000 people, into a free-fire zone, the bombarding of its occupants with white phosphorus shells, banned by international law, and the summary execution of wounded prisoners. Ten years later, the rates of child cancer and birth defects in Fallujah are similar to those in Hiroshima following the US atomic bombing. Today is the 10th anniversary of the war of aggression by the United States and Britain in Iraq where over 1 million people were killed. The WSWS website has a special perspective article that underlines once again the complete criminality of this venture. The summary and text below are taken from the report and are a stark reminder of the underlying barbaric forces and contempt for life that the elite and powerful have in these countries. They are many orders of magnitude worse than psychopaths.
The leaking of stomach-turning photographs from Abu Ghraib lifted the veil on the barbaric character of the war, which included the systematic use of torture, death squads and sectarian massacres to terrorize the Iraqi population into submission.
People in Iraq continue to die from the sectarian violence unleashed by the war as well as from the destruction of infrastructure that has deprived them of clean water, health care and other essentials of life. One million children under the age of 18 have lost one or both parents, and hundreds of thousands suffer from grievous wounds.
In the US itself, in addition to the deaths of nearly 4,500 troops, 34,000 soldiers came home wounded and hundreds of thousands suffer from psychological trauma.
All of this killing and violence was carried out on the basis of lies, summed up in the claim that the Iraqi government was concealing “weapons of mass destruction.” These false pretexts for war were no less criminal than those used by Germany’s Third Reich to justify the invasion of Poland and other countries targeted at the outset of World War II.
If the Nuremberg precedents established in the trial of the surviving Nazi leaders at the end of that war had been followed, all of those responsible for the invasion of Iraq—in the first instance George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—would have been placed on trial and, at the very least, sent to prison for the rest of their lives.
In the United Kingdom, the same fate would have befallen former Prime Minister Tony Blair and others in his government.
While the Nazis were guilty of a war of aggression in Europe that produced genocide, Washington’s war of aggression against Iraq resulted in sociocide—the systematic decimation of an entire society. Following more than a decade of punishing economic sanctions, the full power of the American military was employed to tear what was left of the country’s economy, infrastructure and social fabric to shreds.
The entire establishment media was complicit in the launching of the war, repeating pretexts for aggression that it knew to be false. In particular, the New York Times played an indispensable role in legitimizing the actions of the Bush administration and manufacturing “evidence” of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Noted opinion makers like Thomas Friedman of the Times and Richard Cohen and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post deeply involved themselves in promoting war.
Once the invasion had begun, “embedded” journalists served as propagandists for the US military, while carefully concealing the war’s atrocities and its devastating impact.
This war, staggering in the criminality of both its planning and execution, marked a critical turning point in the history of American imperialism. Though it ended in chaos, with the lies used to justify it thoroughly exposed and, in operational terms, the war widely considered a total disaster, it nonetheless laid the basis for the intensification of the war in Afghanistan and the ever-expanding eruption of American militarism across the planet.
Iraq was a predatory imperialist war. It was carried out as part of a long-developing US strategy for reorganizing the Middle East to secure American interests and control over the region’s vast energy resources....
The full text can be read at the link below
|
View Full Comment Text
save preference
Comments (4 of 4)