POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE TELEGRAPH
The principle of the schoolyard bully - might makes right – has been reinforced and given ugly new life. It is the only real winner in Iraq.
Saddam, for all his faults, killed only a fraction of the people America killed in Iraq.
Iraq was the most prosperous and advanced country in the Arab world in many social aspects. Its growing middle class virtually guaranteed the day would come when democratic values took hold.
Today, it is in ruins, set back for at least a generation. No jobs, no electricity in many areas, and no clean water. Depleted uranium dust blankets many parts of the country. One of the world’s greatest archeological collections was pillaged and half wrecked.
And since the main purpose of the illegal war was to benefit Israel’s position - something still not widely understood or acknowledged - we see Israel, swaggering as perhaps never before, acting the role of bully in its part of the world. It has adopted precisely the part of miniature geo-political replica of the United States.
It is a very dismal outlook we have now: mass murder and terrible abuse by the United States, and the same on a smaller scale by Israel, promise no reason and decency and human values in world affairs for years to come.
Obama has proved himself the captive of America's establishment, his full-of-hopes election now faded to meaninglessness.
Fifty thousand troops left in Iraq, new air bases, and a fortress-like new American embassy - a regional headquarters for the thugs in the CIA - plus a new level of 150,000 in Afghanistan show clearly that elections in America just do not matter anymore to change the ugly direction of American policy.
And anyone who says that the godawful waste in Iraq had nothing to do with our financial and economic disaster just does not know what he or she is talking about.
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian had it absolutely right, more so than any other mainline journalist, Iraq was "a trillion dollar catastrophe."
