RADIO BAGHDAD

Twenty years after the invasion and beginning of the Anglo-American occupation, what did the manual of Western democracy leave the Iraqis?

By Ali Al Najafi

Thirteen years of a brutal embargo and intermittent aggression would be more than enough to break any country and render its people ungovernable. That was the period from 1990 to 2003 in which the US and Britain closed in on Iraq. The Iraqis knew this very well and despite the efforts of Washington and London to crush the will of the then nationalist government of President Saddam Hussein, constantly demonized by the Western media, all this was not enough and so they carried out a collective punishment that would cost a whopping more than a million and a half human beings dead. At that time, was there any interest from the Tribunal in The Hague for these crimes?

No one saw any prosecutor from that “high court” worry about prosecuting them. Were Iraqi Arabs not considered human beings as the conspirators of this aggression or the laureate employees of CNN and the BBC ruminated? The facts would demonstrate the underestimation that the invaders had for the life of the Iraqis.

Nor was the invasion based on false arguments and evidence (such as the alleged “Anthrax” exposed by a liar Colin Powell) a reason for a prosecutor to prosecute the case. What happened to international law at that time? The hypocrisy of Western governments shone with all its power and today they try to stand as actors with some degree of morality.

But the Iraqis never considered themselves victims of this injustice and that is why they did not sit back and wait for international organizations (including the United Nations) to come to their aid, nor did they hesitate for a minute to put all their efforts into fighting the Anglo-American invaders. Blood more than 4,000 years old runs through the veins of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the cradle of humanity. Do they think that barely 300 years of political literature and intellectual rinses of European origin were going to inhibit them or teach Iraqis how to defend their right to resist? And despite the fact that the Iraqis did not count on external aid, much less the generous help of NATO like the one they are deploying today with the pro-American regime in Kiev, the Iraqi resistance (not insurgency) was crucial and heroic in avoiding the total dissolution of the state.

The occupation was a separate and sinister chapter of the aggression and invasion that began in March 2003. It was a very dark process in which they literally tried to cleanse the local intelligentsia and with it the idea of ​​national unity to replace it with an ochlocracy. led by mere criminals dressed as politicians. The result of this was the regime of butchers led by representatives like Yalad Alawi and Nouri Al Maliki, handpicked by Washington, who have perpetuated to the present a reality of misery and lack of future.

Since then we have not seen characters from the neoconservative-Zionist sect such as Robert Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney or George W. Bush himself have been called to account for their felony and for countless war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not even the great military leaders have sat on a bench of accused. So what authority does the Anglo-American political elite and their European lackeys have to condemn or demand legal proceedings against the Russian authorities?

The appearance of ISIS in 2014 was just another stepping stone in these crimes, deliberately installed and arising from the deceptions elaborated by its intelligence agencies and which they have tried to recreate unsuccessfully in Ukraine.

No need to try to convince anyone about this. The Iraqis themselves knew it from the first moment and today they are living firsthand the consequences of all that. A devastated country, without an economy and with a failed state, run by criminal mafias that have subverted the entire society and have installed a culture of full corruption, kleptocracy and endless violence, is the legacy left by the “democratic” occupation.

From a regional powerhouse in oil production, Iraq has become an impoverished, bleak and stuck country where its inhabitants (and those lucky enough to have one) cannot fill the tank of their car because of the cost. According to Transparency International, Iraq is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, occupying position 157 out of 180. After the fall of Saddam, the secular and multicultural state built around the Arab nationalist party “Baath” collapsed, which it grouped in its basic institutions to Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds who made Iraq a modern republic amid Arab monarchies and Islamic theocracies.

Today, for example, the corruption of the army is as extensive or greater than that which existed when “Daesh” appeared and its officialdom is not even the shadow of the professionalism that existed during the days of Saddam Hussein. Who benefits from this Status Quo?

Destroying that political unity was one of the central objectives of the plans previously formatted by the neoconservatives and Zionists in the Project for the New American Century, who fomented and fed the sectarianism that would be promoted by the interference of the Turkish, Saudi and jordans intelligence agencies.

Under the banner of democracy and freedom, Washington and its associates chipped away at the foundations of the Iraqi state, and once they succeeded in fragmenting it, they simply trampled Iraqis like ants as a demonstration that they were no longer needed. At the end of those bloody days and in the distance, the big winners with all this were the US military-industrial complex, the oil companies, the miserable private companies that outsourced the dirty tasks of the military and the CIA, and the opportunistic state of Israel.

This same trick was tried to infuse the Syrian population during all the aggression deployed since 2011 by their then Turkish and Saudi partners, but it was precisely what happened to the Iraqis that made them aware and prevented them from falling into the same trap. Likewise, today the Americans keep the oil province of “Dier Ezzor” occupied, which they control with the collaboration of Syrian Kurdish groups and the Barzani Clan in Iraqi Kurdistan, where they hold the “Kirkuk” oil fields captive.