The United States’ war on Iraq remains the deadliest act of aggressive warfare in our century, and a strong candidate for the worst crime committed in the last 30 years. It was, as George W. Bush said in an unintentional slip of the tongue, “
wholly unjustified and brutal.” At
least 500,000 Iraqis died as a result of the U.S. war. At least 200,000 of those were violent deaths—people who were blown to pieces by coalition airstrikes, or shot at checkpoints, or killed by suicide bombers from the insurgency unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation. Others died as a result of the collapse of the medical system—doctors fled the country in droves, since their colleagues were being killed or abducted. Childhood mortality and infant mortality in the country rose, and so did malnutrition and starvation. Millions of people were displaced, and a “
generation of orphans” was created, hundreds of thousands of children having lost parents with many being left to wander the streets homeless. The country’s infrastructure collapsed, its libraries and museums were looted, and its university system was decimated, with
professors being assassinated. For years, residents of Baghdad had to deal with suicide bombings as a daily feature of life, and of course, for every violent death, scores more people were left injured or traumatized for life. In
2007 the Red Cross said that there were “mothers appealing for someone to pick up the bodies on the street so their children will be spared the horror of looking at them on their way to school.” Acute malnutrition doubled within 20 months of the occupation of Iraq, to the level of Burundi, well above Haiti or Uganda,
a figure that “translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from ‘wasting,’ a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.” The amount of death, misery, suffering, and trauma is almost inconceivable. In many places, the war created an almost literal hell on earth. (...)
Very few mainstream criticisms of the war call it what it was: a criminal act of aggression by a state seeking to exert regional control through the use of violence. A great deal of this criticism has focused on the costs of the war to the United States, with barely any attention paid to the cost to Iraq and the surrounding countries.
Those who critique the execution are not actually opposing the crime of the war itself. When we apply to ourselves the standards that we apply to others, we see just how little principled opposition to the Iraq War there has actually been, and how little acknowledgement that the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral from the outset.
by Nathan J. Robinson and Noam Chomsky, Current Affairs |
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Image: uncredited
[ed. It still makes my blood boil. But hey, at least Condi finally broke through the male-only membership at Augusta National (The Masters). So there's that.]
