Obama’s extraordinary achievement in Iraq

– By Latheef Farook | Ceylon Today | 27, December, 2011 

1,455,590 Iraqis killed
Two million widows, five million orphans
A quarter of the population lives in extreme poverty

US President Barack Obama described the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq as “extraordinary achievement” and “mission accomplished”. The reality however, is that the withdrawal is a shameful defeat for America.

Obama is leaving behind thousands of armed private US contractors and the potential for violence is real. According to some reports the withdrawal was to clear the Iraqi airspace for Israel to launch a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The question is what was America’s mission in Iraq and what did they accomplish? Iraq, a land where many great ancient civilisations such as Mesopotamia, Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria flourished between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers for more than 7,000 years, has been ruthlessly raped and ravaged for more than a century by the European colonial powers, especially Britain followed by the United States, to loot its oil wealth.

Following the US engineered Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraqis were subjected to untold misery and hardships with more than one-third of the population exposed to malnutrition, epidemics, and miscarriages and declining life expectancy. The UN sanctions killed more than 500,000 children.

False pretence

It was under this circumstance that President George Bush Jr invaded Iraq in March 2003 under the false pretext of eliminating the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. According to US media reports, Bush and his team of neo cons had planned a regime change in Iraq even before assuming office. Ex-UN weapons inspector Hans Blix described this as an ‘illegal’ war.

The American forces indiscriminately bombed Iraqi cities with unprecedented intensity and within days the war battered people were once again deprived of water, electricity, medicine, food and even shelter. Day in and day out, the skies over Iraq rained bombs which shook the earth and relegated once thriving cities into bloody human abattoirs. Child survivors, many of them maimed for life, remained haunted by the nightmare of the gruesome catastrophe. Screaming in fear and panic, they simply could not comprehend why they were being subjected to such horror and heartlessness.

Gang rape

Then there emerged shocking pictures of American troops’ gang-raping Iraqi women. These hapless women were forcibly dragged out of their homes, screaming in terror, stripped naked and gang-raped by the very people who had ostensibly been there to protect them. Nonetheless, such criminal depravity had been committed by so-called civilised uniformed personnel representing the most powerful military nation on earth.

Among the victims, were ordinary housewives, mothers and daughters – all brought up in a decently conservative society and whose religious traditions have always valued feminine purity as a prerequisite for a happily wedded life. Did the Americans who perpetrated these appalling crimes ever stop to wonder that their victims were the same kind of women as their mothers and sisters at home?

Arbitrary arrest and torture

Hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women were arbitrarily arrested and subjected to the most sadistic and savage forms of torture, which brought swift condemnation from all over the world.

The US forces used the most vicious interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep – in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

This heartless routine that included infliction of pain, discomfort and humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, electrocution, near drowning, and near asphyxiation. Several detainees had died under questionable circumstances while in incarceration.

Damning photos

Obviously, these bestial crimes were kept under wraps until Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a series of expose articles illustrated by damning photos of the torture by US military police of prisoners in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib near Baghdad.

It all started with a few disturbing pictures of naked prisoners piled on top of each other, others hooded and wired with electrodes. The photographs included images of a hooded prisoner with wires fixed to his body, nude inmates piled in a human pyramid – a lewd type of Karma Sutra circus where the performers were forced into simulating mass sexual techniques. The harrowing pictures also showed a dog savagely attacking a prisoner and other inmates being forced to masturbate or simulate sex with each other.

The destruction of Iraq had been so meticulously planned, embracing every aspect that one of their main aims was to physically eliminate academics, professionals and other intellectuals from the society for generations to come. Around May 2003, there were reports that Israel’s secret service Mossad arrived with a list of names and addresses of professionals such as university lecturers, professors, scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other intellectuals, and went from house to house, killing them in their sleep. In many cases, they used sharp weapons to cut the throats of husbands in the presence of wives who were killed later.

Mercilessly slaughtered

American forces looted museums and robbed more than 17,000 very valuable historic artefacts. They armed Shiites and Sunnis and provoked civil war. According to many reports, 2,000 doctors killed and 5,500 academics and intellectuals assassinated or imprisoned.

Besides massacring innocent civilians, the US troops mercilessly slaughtered Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered, but unfortunately, for the world, no one will know exactly how many Iraqis perished in this carnage. They even burnt birth, marriage, death, land, company, industrial and vehicle registration offices and all other such places to create chaos.

In Fallujah, a city of 300,000 people, the American forces dropped even cluster bombs and used phosphorous weapons that caused severe burns in the military’s most intense urban fighting since the days of Vietnam. Within ten days Fallujah had been laid waste, a hell on earth of shattered bodies and destroyed buildings while the city entered history as the place where US imperialism carried out a crime of immense proportions. The head of Turkey’s Parliamentary Human Rights Committee said this genocide surpassed those of Pharaoh, Hitler and Mussolini.

Banned substance

An eyewitness account stated that US forces used artillery barrages, air strikes with 2,000-pound bombs and air-to-surface missiles together with volleys of tank fire. Homes, apartment buildings and nearly half of the city’s 120 mosques have been destroyed or severely damaged. Human corpses, bloated and rotting, littering the streets where they fell were gnawed at by starving dogs while parents were forced to watch their wounded children die and then bury their bodies in their gardens. They not only shot women and old men in the streets but also shot anyone who tried to retrieve their bodies.

Later reports emerged of the US military using banned napalm, poison gas and other outlawed weapons to kill innocent civilians. Hundreds of “melted” bodies proved that the napalm gas had been used. Residents said “Americans used everything – tanks, artillery, infantry, poisonous gas and other non-conventional weapons to raze Fallujah to the ground. They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. Pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns. Phosphorous weapons as well as napalm are known to cause such effects and people suffered so much from these. There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent— the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940. All the talk about precision bombing in Iraq is dust thrown in the public’s eyes.

American deaths

Bush dispatched harmless young American soldiers, with their full lives ahead of them, to kill Iraqis and in the process, around 4,500 Americans, were killed and around 30,000 young American men, some married with families, returned home maimed, burnt, mentally crippled and destined to suffer for the rest of their lives.

Besides the pain of being physically disabled, the conscience of these young men, burning inside their minds, were also haunted by the ghosts of the innocent Iraqis they killed, tortured, maimed and raped. Haunted by the blood they spilled and all that they did and saw in Iraq – burnt out corpses of innocent Iraqis and their loved ones, screams of the suffering, cries of limbless children, weeping widows and fatherless daughters, they scream in sleepless nights in different corners of America.

While they will have to live with this agony for the rest of their lives, what about the pathetic plight of the mothers, wives and children and other loved ones who need to put up with the agony of these young American men for the rest of their Lives?

During this, darkest of dark hour the helpless Iraqis expected their Arab brothers to protect them. Instead, Egypt stood fully behind Bush and Blair while Saudi Arabia supplied the American troops with petrol and airport facilities to bomb the Iraqis.

 

Traumatised population

Today the entire Iraqi population remains traumatised and the obscene images of crimes cry out to the Heavens for vengeance. Iraq’s infrastructure is in ruins. There is lawlessness everywhere with sectarian thugs and gangs funded by America and its puppet regime virtually running the show, driving terror among people already subjected to unbearable sufferings.

Iraq today is a country of two million widows (10 percent of Iraq’s female population) and five million orphans many of whom are homeless and living in streets. Almost a third of Iraq’s children suffer from malnutrition. Some 70 per cent of Iraqi girls no longer go to school. Medical services, once the best in the region, do not meet minimum standards.
The poverty rate has risen from 15 percent before the war and occupation to 55 percent today, with a quarter of the population living in extreme poverty. More than two and half million Iraqis, 20,000 of them doctors, are in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, four million Iraqis are refugees in their own country while more than half the population suffer from starvation. Iraqi society and infrastructure have been destroyed, drinking water polluted, power supply disrupted while schools, hospitals and other places are all in shambles.

According to website Information Clearing House, the number of people killed up to Monday 19 December 2011 include 1,455,590 Iraqis, and 4,801 Americans. The latter is described as US Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) in America’s War On Iraq.

The wars cost US taxpayers an estimated $4 trillion, – $80 billion a year over a period of 50 years. This comes at a time when around 65 million Americans survive on food stamps.

Why no war crime charges?

The often-raised question is: why has the international community, which prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, and issued arrest warrant on Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir for war crimes, not brought war crime charges against George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others for their crimes against humanity in Iraq?

These are the great democracies and their elected leaders who preach human rights and blackmail smaller nations.

Is this what Obama described as “mission accomplished” and “extraordinary achievement”? George Bush invaded Iraq to fulfill the 2500 year old Jewish dream to destroy Iraq. Who benefitted by this medieval style barbarity? Certainly not the innocent American people but Jewish lobbies, weapons industry, oil companies, banking and finance sector and other corporate conglomerates who constitute what is now being described as the One Per Cent of American society.

The irony is that these crimes were committed with the shameful collaboration of Arab dictators in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. It is this very same America preaching human rights and accusing others of war crimes.

—
Latheef Farook is a senior journalist who, after working for almost ten years in the Ceylon Daily News and the Ceylon Observer, led a group of journalists to Dubai in 1979 to relaunch Gulf News. He returned home after a quarter century working in the Gulf and is now based in Colombo.