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On the 20th anniversary of imperialism’s predatory invasion of Iraq

29Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Iraq

On the 20th anniversary of imperialism’s predatory invasion of Iraq

The 20th of March this year marked the 20th anniversary of the start of Anglo-American imperialism’s war against Iraq. Although there was mass opposition to this war, most of the print and electronic media, including the BBC, whipped up jingoistic hysteria against Iraq and in favour of the war. 20 years on there is hardly anyone who can be found to speak in favour of it. Respectable bourgeois newspapers have published articles, written by respectable bourgeois journalists, condemning this war. We just take one such article as an example. It appeared in the Sunday Times of 19 March 2023. Under the half misleading title ‘Ever noticed how much less stable the world is now than in 2003? Well, Blair’s to blame’, the author, Mr Rod Liddle, has,...

Fyodor Lukyanov: 20 years after Bush declared “mission accomplished”

21Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Iraq, USA

Fyodor Lukyanov: 20 years after Bush declared “mission accomplished”

Fyodor Lukyanov: 20 years after Bush declared ‘mission accomplished,’ it’s clear that Iraq was the graveyard of American ambition George W. Bush’s illegal invasion came at a time when the US was the only real global power, and high on its own self-confidence By Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club. FILE PHOTO: US Marines of Task Force Tarawa prepare their vehicles at Camp Shoup, near the Iraqi border, in Kuwait. © Joe Raedle / Getty Images Twenty years ago, in May 2003, then-US President George W. Bush landed on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf...

American Dream, Global Nightmare: On the Origins of the Iraq War

10Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Iraq, United Kingdom, USA

American Dream, Global Nightmare: On the Origins of the Iraq War

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Sergeant Ivan Frederick sitting on an Iraqi detainee between two stretchers at Abu Ghraib prison. Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity. – Judith Butler One of the problems with commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War is that the Iraq War didn’t start 20 years ago. It had been going on for more than a decade before Shock and Awe. First there was Pappy’s Bush’s invasion, followed by Bill Clinton bombing Iraq once every three days of his 8-year term and ratcheting down a sanctions regime that squeezed the life out of more than one m...

Still Spinning the Iraq War 20 Years Later

10Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Iraq, United Kingdom, USA

Still Spinning the Iraq War 20 Years Later

BY MELVIN GOODMAN Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain ‘Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk.” —CIA director George Tenet’s response to President Bush’s demand for intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to provide to the American people, December 21, 2002. “The President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it.” —Art Fleischer, White House press spokesman, December 4, 2002. “But for those who say that we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.” —President George W. Bush, May 30, 2003. The U.S. rush to war ...

20 Years of Iraq Denialism: The New York Times Continues to Get it Wrong on U.S. Empire

10Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Iraq, USA

20 Years of Iraq Denialism: The New York Times Continues to Get it Wrong on U.S. Empire

BY ANTHONY DIMAGGIO Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Marking the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, The New York Times ran a feature-length article titled, “20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?” The piece acknowledges some harsh realities about the war, while dodging questions about its legality and the imperial motivations that fueled it. This is par for the course for the paper of record, which has a decades-long history of sidestepping damning questions about the war. To provide some context, I should say that I’ve probably done more empirical research on the ways in which we think and talk about Iraq and the “War on Terror” than any other scholar studying media, public opinion, and war (see here, here, and&nbs...

Criminals at Large: The Iraq War Twenty Years On

10Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Iraq, United Kingdom, USA

Criminals at Large: The Iraq War Twenty Years On

BY BINOY KAMPMARK Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden. Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain a...

EU nation killed civilians in Iraq – media investigation

31Mar

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Europe, Iraq

EU nation killed civilians in Iraq – media investigation

The Netherlands has decided to declassify data on airstrikes in the Middle East after media exposé FILE PHOTO: A Dutch Air Force F-16 fighter jet. © C. Van Grinsven / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images The Dutch government agreed to release previously classified information about its air sorties in Iraq and Syria, after media exposed as false claims that no civilians were killed in a 2016 strike by the European nation on a building in Mosul, Iraq. A US military assessment had identified the target as a terrorist HQ. The database, released on Thursday, details Dutch F-16 missions between October 2014 and December 2018, which were part of Operation Inherent Resolve, a US-led military campaign against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). It disclosed over 2...

Andrey Sushentsov: The people who brought you the Iraq war loudly support arming Ukraine. Where will this lead?

30Mar

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Iraq, Ukraine, USA

Andrey Sushentsov: The people who brought you the Iraq war loudly support arming Ukraine. Where will this lead?

Despite the disastrous consequences of the US invasion of Iraq twenty years ago, many of those responsible for that war – and their media and academic cheerleaders are back for more By Andrey Sushentsov, Valdai Club program director FILE PHOTO. Members of the 118th Congress stand for the Pledge of Allegiance on the first day of the 118th Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 03, 2023 in Washington, DC. © Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images This year’s twentieth anniversary of the illegal Iraq invasion paradoxically coincided with major international events. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was in Moscow on the day, while a Russia-Africa Parliamentary Forum opened at the same ...

The Engineered Destruction and Political Fragmentation of Iraq. “America’s Third War against Iraq” initiated by Obama

30Mar

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Iraq, USA

The Engineered Destruction and Political Fragmentation of Iraq. “America’s Third War against Iraq” initiated by Obama

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham: An instrument of the Western Military Alliance By Prof Michel Chossudovsky Global Research, Author’s Introduction and Update Our thoughts are with the people of Iraq, who’s country has been literally destroyed by US-NATO. It’s a hegemonic agenda which consists in transforming countries into territories. March 2023 marks 20 years since the US-UK led war on Iraq in 2003. And that war is still ongoing. Historically however this war on Iraq did not start in 2003. It was preceded by the so-called “Gulf War” in 1991 (The First War against Iraq) And in 2014, a Third US led War against Iraq was launched under the banner of Obama’s 2014 “counter-terrorism bombing campaign”. ...

Ever noticed how much less stable the world is now than in 2003? Well, Blair’s to blame

24Mar

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Human Rights, Iraq, United Kingdom, USA

Ever noticed how much less stable the world is now than in 2003? Well, Blair’s to blame

Rod Liddle Sunday March 19 2023, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times Twenty years ago today the US and British tanks rolled into Iraq in an illegal invasion, which, contrary to the belief of one of its chief progenitors, Tony Blair, did not entirely suffuse the Iraqi people with joy. It was an illegal war launched on a false pretext that, I suspect, both Blair and George W Bush knew was a false pretext. The consequence was the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (some put the figure as high as one million), civil war and chaos — which later overspilt into Isis and the Syrian civil war, where a further half a million lost their lives. The fighting continues. I suppose there must be one or two people, besides Blair, who still believe that this was a wholly marvellous ...