So apparently there is a crisis in Iraq. Really, who could have predicted this? Who among us could possibly have guessed a full-scale invasion and occupation of the country, destruction of its infrastructure and society leading directly to the deaths of at least 1 million people could have actually led to such problems?
No one. No one picked this. Not a soul. Absolutely not one person can honestly say they stuck their hand up before it all kicked off and said: “Now, hang on, are you sure this is wise?”
Well, no one except the millions of people who marched in February 2003 in nations all over the world in the largest coordinated global protests in history, to insist, demand, appeal to and fucking beg their governments not to invade Iraq in violation of international law, basic morality and plain common sense.
But rather than listen to their own people, our governments just fed us blatant lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction and invaded, ripping Iraq apart and earning the Dick Cheney-linked Halliburton US$39.5 billion from military contracts before being forced to withdraw, leaving 4500 dead US soldiers and costing trillions in US taxpayers' money.
Strangely enough, it appears if you take a society with few sectarian problems, and combine brutal military occupation with a deliberate policy of fomenting sectarian violence as part of a “divide and rule” strategy, then further down the track, you might find sectarian civil war is not something that simply disappears just because it no longer suits your interests in your neo-colonial bid to control an oil-rich country via proxies after direct military occupation has failed.
Now you might think that, after all that has happened, the absolute last thing the US would want to do is to militarily intervene in Iraq, but sure enough, amid widespread calls to do exactly that, the US government is preparing air strikes and announcing hundreds of soldiers and “advisers” will be sent in.
Talk about addicted to war. They're like an alcoholic who wakes up and thinks: “Christ, I drank a shitload of booze last night and I appear to have trashed everything in a drunken stupor, what the fuck do I do now? I know, I'll get started on this bottle of whiskey, that's bound to help.”
One argument in support of fresh US military intervention is that, seeing as the US made the mess in the first place, it really needs to go back and clean it up. This, however, is surely the only example of such logic being applied to the perpetrator of a great crime.
After all, if someone breaks into a house and stabs half a family to death, it is pretty rare a court sentences the killer to “go back and clean up your mess and don't you forget to take that knife with you!”
The idea that is up to the US to intervene again to “save” Iraq rests on the highly dubious assumption that it actually has the best interest of Iraqis at heart.
Presumably we are meant to believe they were just really incompetent last time and they actually really did go in to liberate the poor oppressed bastards, only they tripped and accidentally massacred and tortured them instead and, you'll never guess what, in the process just happened to stumble over huge reserves of oil.
The most bizarre aspect is the attitude by those most directly responsible for the whole bloody disaster. For instance, war criminal and former British prime minister Tony Blair — the man who blatantly lied to justify British involvement in the bloody debacle — saw fit to use this latest crisis to write a long essay to offer his advice on what to do about Iraq.
And you will never guess what he said. No really, not in a million years. He said attack Iraq again! Woah, I mean who saw that coming?
It is not clear exactly why Blair thought anyone's response to a fresh crisis in Iraq would be to go “Well this is a pickle, what can we do about it? I know, let's ask Tony Blair, he did so well last time.”
Because, surely, the only rational reaction to Blair's nearly 3000-word intervention into the matter is to say: “Hang on ... why the fuck aren't you in jail?”