Hasn’t Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) been a success? I hear on the news five, six, seven times a day how wonderful life is for the Iraqi people and how much better off they are now that Australia has led the charge to change the Middle East. Well maybe not led, but certainly been in the middle of it all. What a great nation we are. What strong and decisive leadership we have. What great moral and philosophical fortitude we have displayed. Not! Lets just refresh our memories as to what has led to this great disaster that our so called leaders are intent on spinning up as some sort of success.
It was all about "the war on terror" and Saddam’s "weapons of mass destruction". Remember them? In April of last year, one month after the illegal invasion began Blair, Bush and Howard all got up in front of their house's of representatives and / or the media and told us it was early days and that the WMDs would be found. That was long after Colin Powell made is entertainment debut (forget the funny shirts and song and dance of ASEAN) in the UN and told the world that the vial he was holding was about as dangerous as it was going to get (turns out he was right after all).
By January of this year Blair, Bush and Howard told us that, well, maybe, Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction programs" and that it was really these that the coalition of the silly was finding and destroying. With straight faces they told us that although there were no weapons uncovered so far, they "felt" they were there and would be found. Talk about Nancy Reagan and channeling. I mean, what are these men taking?
Even though the CIA has finally come out and said that their intelligence was deeply flawed and that high level officers ignored the warnings of junior officers and went and put on the public record the claims of WMD’s, something repeated by the British intelligence and our own Andrew Wilkie, Howard still refuses to acknowledge the lies he told. But as we all know he has no credibility and, so it seems, no sense of moral outrage or Christian compassion, Howard still trumpets the WMD line. But, wait there;s more!
As I understand it, the media coverage we get is limited. The focus on the resistance hides the fact that in some areas there is good work being done. Although billions have been poured into the country, very little humanitarian aid is reaching the Iraqi people and most of what does is funded and delivered by NGO’s. At least their Christian heritage is being maintained as they demonstrate the parable of the Good Samaritan. On the topic of the resistance, we must remember that it cant be "insurgency" as it is usually described. Insurgents can only work against a government and Iraq has no government, only a US, hand picked, puppet regime made up of a bunch of thugs that in no way represent the people in word or deed.
In summary, we have a situation in which Blair has finally come out and said that the likelihood of ever finding WMD’s is about zilch. We have the fact that the intelligence supporting the WMD argument was and is flawed. "We have installed a "new" Iraqi power base. Perhaps The Shrub will hire a boat and a plane and touch down again to tell the world, "we won". I doubt it. However, given that the WMD argument was shot full of holes before the war began is it acceptable to claim that Iraq is now free and liberated as our so-called leaders do?
Just a couple of days ago Iraq’s newly installed, un-elected dictator, Iyad Allawi, proclaimed a state of marshal law. This law, among other things allows detention without charge (must of got that one from Australia’s new anti-terrorism legislation). It allows the Iraqi security forces (backed by American soldiers who have been "invited" to stay – surprise, surprise) to mount anti-terrorist, pre-emptive strikes against whoever they feel like and allows the new dictator to impose curfews (complete with shoot on sight provisions). Of course the new ‘leadership’ says these laws are not "draconian" and will assist in the "rebuilding" of the country. And lets not forget, as Alex the Down One keeps reminding us, Saddam was a brutal dictator and he oppressed his people (all of which are true) and that we (I guess he means you and I together with him) have brought the start of a new way of life to the Iraqi people and it will take them some time to adjust to their new freedoms (?). I wonder which freedoms he’s talking about? The freedom to be ruled by another dictator with just as brutal and unpredictable behavior as the last one?
Its been widely quoted that Theodore Roosevelt or his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, once muttered after some conflagration in the Caribbean had been brought to their attention that the leader of the nation in question, "might be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch." Whether it was said about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia or Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo is not clear. What is clear is that this legendary saying has become standard operating procedure. Nixon used it, Reagan certainly enthusiastically embraced it, Clinton didn’t mind it either and now Bush, Blair and Howard have all declared it "worlds best practice".
In other words, "we" have now given to a small group of hand picked men (with a couple of token women to add some colour) the power to do exactly what we invaded their country to get rid of. A commander of US forces in Iraq, Mike Murray, said on the hand over day last week that "little would change" for the Iraqi people. How true his statement is.
I return to my original question, "has Operation Iraqi Liberation been a success"? Well, it depends on whom you ask. If you ask the so-called leaders of the free world, they got rid of Saddam (the son of a bitch) and replaced him with their own, hand picked sons of bitches. From a US business perspective its been a resounding success. New fortunes are being made as new ‘markets’ are opened up. The hand over of power and the implementation of marshal law allows the coalition of the stupid to say, ‘its not us that are "keeping the peace", it’s the liberated Iraqis"! So all future deaths occurring as a direct result of the illegal invasion and immoral "pre-emptive" cluster bombings and random killing of civilians by coalition troops can now be blamed on the ‘interim’ dictatorship. Oops, I mean government. However, from the perspective of the ‘average’ Iraqi, nothing has changed. I guess if liberation includes the right to be oppressed by your invader’s puppet regime, I suppose OIL has been a success.
We know OIL was not the reason for going to war. Our ‘leaders’ tell us this every day. The reason for the invasion was to free the oppressed and liberate the imprisoned. I guess Australians can be proud in the knowledge that we have exported to the newly free and liberated Iraqi people the same rules that apply to us. Among these rules are the ability for our government to detain us without charge on the suspicion of ‘terrorist’ ties How proud we can be that now they, like we, can go about our business safe in the knowledge that the sons of bitches who rule us, like them, have been hand picked to rule as required. But rule as required by whom? Think about it.