Iraq: America's Fiasco Is Already 10 Years Old

We are at the end of one of the biggest hoaxes in history. The United States and its allies attacked the Iraq of the evil Saddam Hussein exactly 10 years ago today.

Hoax? Why, yes! All cynicism aside, the arsonists who served strategies to George W. Bush sold U.S. public opinion on a vision of Iraq from their imaginations: a country with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that was complicit with al-Qaida in the Sept. 11 attacks. All of it was false, deliberately false.

Of course, Saddam Hussein was a monster; even if the conditions of his trial and his execution leave a bitter taste, few Iraqis cried over the death of someone who was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands among them, in foreign (Iran) and civil (Kurdistan) wars or through general oppression.

It didn’t keep the adventurous American Bush, followed with a blind zeal by his British lapdog Tony Blair, from submerging themselves in a complete fiasco. The Yankees haven’t helped themselves to the oil of the shady Iraqi nationalists, and worse still, the otherwise dominant Shiite Iraq is now in the bosom of the very Islamic Republic of Iran, its sworn enemy.

For over 10 years, the country has undergone the agony of civil war and has never recovered beyond a relative calm regularly broken by extreme violence between Shiites and Sunnis … Just this Tuesday, 50 Shiites lost their lives in about 15 car bombings in Baghdad.

How many Iraqis have been victims of the bellicose neoconservatives who had sucked the blood out of the White House? No one knows. Sources range from between 117,000 to 650,000 dead … but those aren’t the figures that haunt the Americans.

Over 4,500 of their own are dead, with 30,000 wounded for life … the trillions of dollars gone in this foolish enterprise and political fiasco served as the push for an examination of conscience that started with the election of Barack Obama, who had been opposed to the war from the beginning, in 2008.

That’s the positive thing to take away from this ocean of pointless suffering: The United States has lost its arrogance, tempering its hegemonic aspirations in light of its failures. For now, anyway.