Apparently most of the "insurgents" the US claims to be killing are civilians (albeit anti-US civilians). These kinds of atrocities virtually guarantee future terror attacks far worse than 9/11 IMHO.
The Flame-Throwers
Is Bush the new Saddam? Has the US completely lost the plot in West Asia?
Prem Shankar Jha
09/21/04 "Outlook India" -- On September 9, almost three years after 9/11, George W. Bush was claiming that everything he had done in Iraq was right and, given the need, he would do it all over again. The war on 'terror' was being won; the world had become a safer place; three quarters of the senior cadres of Al Qaeda who were at large three years ago were now either dead or behind bars. Iraq had been liberated from the clutches of a monster, and its people were well on the way to democracy. America, he said, was at war, and America was winning. What should we make of this incredible string of brazen assertions? Are they the desperate claims of a beleaguered president who feels the ground slipping from under his feet? Or does Bush really believe what he is saying? Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more evident that Bush has so completely lost touch with reality that he actually believes what he is saying.
And that makes one fear for the future of the world.
For the incontrovertible, damning truth is the exact opposite. The war on terror is not being won. It is being lost. And the longer the US takes the world down the destructive path it blazed on March 19, '03, the more dangerous it will become.
Let us see where we stand today. Saddam Hussein is gone (he's now developed a passion for gardening). But with each passing day, it is becoming clearer that despite all he did to consolidate and maintain his hold on power, he was a force for peace and stability in the Middle East and not the opposite. Contrary to what Messrs Bush and his demented V-P, Dick Cheney, still keep insisting, he had no wmds and had not been attempting to build any after the early '90s. So he was no longer a threat to his neighbours. On the contrary, he had not merely contained Iran during the most explosive period of its revolutionary fervour, but also shut out the Sunni fundamentalism that the Wahabi religious establishment in Saudi Arabia has exported to virtually every other Islamic country in the world (ironically, the only other exception is that other enemy of the US, Syria). He had therefore kept Iraq completely secular. This was reflected in the full representation of women in the workforce, the near-complete absence of the veil and the burqa, in secular laws and a secular education.
Today, that secularism has been replaced by a nationalist rage fusing both Sunni and, more dangerously, Shia fundamentalism to turn Iraq into a hellish cauldron of violence. As ever obedient to their masters, the major Anglo-Saxon media have turned an elaborate blind eye. Each day they report, almost in passing, the number of people killed by Iraqi suicide and other terrorist attacks. American deaths simply are not reported. When US choppers bomb and rocket Iraqi houses, they are invariably militant hideouts. When they fire on crowds, they are invariably insurgents.
But European and Arab media tell a different story. It is one of American soldiers never risking their lives going out on the ground, where it is easier to distinguish friend from foe, but staying safely in tanks, armoured car and helicopters and blowing away anything that moves. Nine out of ten people they kill are, as a result, innocents and, as happened at Tel Afar, a small town halfway to the Syrian border early last week, many are women and children. Reports are sketchy, but international news agencies have suggested that civilian deaths now cross a thousand a month!
This lack of concern for Iraqi lives now pervades all American thinking. John Kerry did not even consider it worth his while to raise the issue during his campaign. Only the Iraqis killed by Saddam matter to the US and its allies. After the war, every mass grave that the occupation forces came across was exhumed, and we were told (never later confirmed) that there might be up to 15,000 bodies buried there.All in all, Saddam was supposed to have killed 300,000 of his own people during his 35-year reign.
But what about the American record? According to John Pilger, as early as this March the number of Iraqis killed during and after the war was in the neighbourhood of 55,000. By that estimate, it has now risen over 60,000. From the Iraqi point of view, even without the bursting prison at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and the ubiquitous officially sanctioned torture practised in them, Bush is beginning to resemble Saddam more and more every day.
Finally, what about peace and democracy? As Larry Diamond, by no means a Saddam lover or peacenik, writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, by consistently refusing to give Iraq any kind of election, even to form a constituent assembly, and by putting in one puppet government of quislings after another, the US has finally managed to convince Iraqis that it did not come to liberate but to conquer them. As a result, three separate anti-American streams of sentiment have developed—among the Sunnis, the Shias and the Kurds. Two are beginning to merge and the third might do the same in order to first get rid of a common enemy and prevent its puppets from entrenching themselves. After that, it is becoming more and more likely that Iraq will collapse into civil war and disintegrate.
Iraq has gone out of the Americans' control and will most probably emerge as a failed state and the new home of Al Qaeda. But instead of learning something from this truly epic debacle, the US is plunging on down the path to destruction. Today, it and its faithful henchman, Israel, are training their guns on Iran. All that they are waiting for is some kind of censure of Iran's nuclear programme by the UN, to give them the cloak of justification for attacking that country. If they do that, the entire Middle East will go up in flames and Al Qaeda will start receiving tens of thousands of Shia recruits as well. That is the President and regime the American people are on the verge of re-electing.
©Outlook Publishing (India) Private Limited 2004
AI
