Iraq: Blame the humanitarian situation on the West

The United Nations Security Council refused to rubber-stamp the Anglo-American attack on Iraq in 2003 because there was no casus belli and as such the attack was illegal, being an intrusion into a sovereign State occasioning murder and destruction of property using military hardware. What is the situation in Iraq today?

Incredibly, or not in today's corporatist-run world, Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Blair and a handful of NATO political and military leaders are today not sitting behind bars, but then again neither are most Albanian war criminals, organs traffickers, murderers, rapists and torturers who perpetrated terrorist attacks against the Serbian security forces in Kosovo. Neither will most of the perpetrators of horror in Libya, nor the western-backed torturers and murderers in Syria, for the same reasons.

In 2003, Iraq was a stable country with a stable government, despite an inhumane United Nations blockade and constant sabotage attacks, for instance strafing Iraqi cereals fields with military aircraft to destroy the (civilian) cereals crop. But hey, the NATO and its masters, this time curiously without the F (France) of the F-UK-US Axis, all in a day's work, eh what? And anyway, since the images are no longer available on the Net, such things couldn't have happened, could they?

Iraq was not supporting al-Qaeda, despite the idiotic claims by George Bush that it was and the majority of the Iraqi population exercised religious freedom, had jobs or were sustained by the State, women had full rights, intolerance was not an issue. The opposite is the case today where a man can beat the daylights out of his wife if she misbehaves, and where a woman can be beheaded for not "dressing properly".

Today, women's rights have all but disappeared in large swathes of the country, women are forced to wear the veil, at least, if not a burqah, most of the country's youth is unemployed, the country is unstable, chaotic, unsafe, has figures registering victims of terrorist attacks worse than some civil wars and Iraq is crawling with al-Qaeda terrorists and other militant groups.

The situation in Anbar Province is described by the UNO as "critical", as al-Qaeda has taken the city of Fallujah, where stocks of food, water and medicines are running out. The years ago, before the Anglo-American-led invasion of Iraq, the citizens of Fallujah lived peacefully, went about their daily lives, had food and water, went to school and enjoyed religious tolerance. In a word, they were free.

Thanks to George Bush's (and that of his poodles) "Freedom and Democracy", the people of Fallujah who have any chance of survival today are the ones who have been lucky enough to flee - some 16,000 to 18,000 families because the others are trapped inside a living hell-hole.

The al-Qaeda militants who have taken the city are just as likely to slice the breasts off women there as they are doing in Syria, where the "Opposition" is backed by the West, they are just as likely to decapitate boys, old men, old ladies, before raping the decapitated bodies or playing soccer with their heads, roasting people alive in ovens or impaling babies on metal rods.

But Saddam Hussein was not supporting this scourge, he was preventing it from entering Iraq. So what is that which George Bush and his cronies were saying about freedom and democracy, terrorism and al-Qaeda? If Iraq today is crawling with terrorists, nearly eleven years after the invasion, then it was not because of Saddam Hussein but rather, the Anglo-American invasion.

Someone has a lot of explaining to do, preferably in a court, if today's world was indeed civilized and not a lawless playground run by corporate elitists. Conclusion, Iraq was far better off under Saddam Hussein, as indeed I said at the time.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru