Iraq: 10 Years of Shame and Impunity

Even today, 10 years after the beginning of the Iraq war, there is more than enough fresh evidence to disgrace it. The hangover of the invasion that George W. Bush Jr. initiated against Iraq on March 19, 2003 shows that the fratricidal war goes on. Just last Tuesday, on the eve of the anniversary, 56 people died and more than 200 were injured in a wave of car bomb attacks and explosions in Baghdad, Iskandariya and Mosul.

The names of these victims are unknown, a “normal” fact of life ever since the U.S. initiated a genocidal war under the pretext that this Mesopotamian country possessed weapons of mass destruction dangerous to the U.S. and Great Britain and their allies.

Casualties of daily violence now include workers, students, housewives and those who wrap themselves in explosives. There are mortar attacks and shootings — smaller versions of the attacks carried out 10 years ago as land and aviation forces launched the most deadly U.S. missiles to weaken a defense that could prevent a ground invasion, which ultimately happened. As in the case of Fallujah, the martyr city known as the Iraqi Guernica, combat and the fierce repression of any resistance have left behind an immense trail of blood.

And still today, governments are spreading lies from the Blair-Bush era. The BBC’s program “Panorama” revealed fresh evidence that the CIA and Britain’s MI6 knew months before the invasion that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. However, the British prime minister told Parliament that he had intelligence proving that Iraq’s nuclear arms and chemical and biological weapons programs were “active, “growing” and “up and running.”

The motives for the invasion were completely fabricated, turning young people into killing machines and letting them die in a slaughter that decimated a people and a nation — a nation that also lost stability, internal harmony, sovereignty and independence.

According to the Iraq Body Count project and British medical journal The Lancet, at least 112,000 civilians have died in Iraq.

While the U.S. says it is withdrawing its troops, its ominous presence continues under the same pretext of ushering and preserving democracy when in reality it has only brought death and destruction and caused severe division among Iraqis.

An entire decade in this country can be measured in extended suffering, towns in ruins and mutilated and tortured adults who also suffer from high unemployment and its consequences, as well as in children suffering mutations because of the uranium in weaponry carried by Americans and white phosphorus from napalm bombings. They join the thousands of U.S. soldiers suffering from everything from post-traumatic stress and unknown diseases that are a product of the toxins used in Iraq.

To this human cost, we can add the exploitation of Iraq’s oil wealth — a profitable sector in which earnings have not reached any of its country’s needy people.

And after 10 years, cynicism and hypocrisy have multiplied. Yesterday, Victoria Nuland, the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, stated: “The United States strongly condemns the terrorist attacks today that targeted innocent men, women, and children throughout Iraq…senseless violence such as this tears at the fabric of Iraqi unity.”

What is done remains for war historians to judge. History will condemn them, but for now they enjoy total impunity.