‘Blair toppled Saddam, brought 1,000 Saddams to Iraq’

Rumsfeld meets Saddam Hussein

The Iraq war of Tony Blair, George W Bush and his ‘Defence’ Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was based on lies.

They said the war was because of ‘Iraqi weapons of mass destruction‘. Oops … a lie.

They said the war was because the Iraqi regime was guilty in the 9/11 attacks in the USA. Oops … another lie.

As the two other lies were exposed, the Bushist-Blairite apologists for the Iraq war changed their propaganda to a third issue: Saddam Hussein, they said, was a dictator, and they wanted to replace him by war with democracy.

That Saddam Hussein was a dictator had not been the slightest problem for Donald Rumsfeld when he had gone to Iraq as US government special envoy to shake hands with Saddam and to try to sell him more United States poison gas to kill more Iraqi Kurds.

Pretty soon, it became so obvious, in the torture cells of Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, in the disastrous fate of Iraqi women under Bush’s, Rumsfeld’s and Blair’s occupation, in the over a million people killed, in the over four million refugees etc. etc. that the Bushist-Blairite talk of democracy in Iraq was such a lie as well that the propagandists became fairly silent on it.

In 2015, Tony Blair went a step further. He said that he did not want democracy. Though that sounds, and is, pro-dictatorship, at least it was unusually honest for Blair, compared to his earlier lies.

Also in 2015, Donald Rumsfeld followed Blair’s example, saying he did not want democracy in Iraq.

Ali Abbas, who as a 12-year-old lost both arms and 16 family members in a United States airstrike on his country Iraq, recently said about George W Bush and Tony Blair’s war on Iraq:

They took away one Saddam Hussein and gave us many, many Saddam Husseins: killers, and also the corruption, because Iraq is so corrupt now.

What does another Iraqi say about this? From daily The Independent in Britain, 6 July 2016:

‘Saddam is gone, but in his place there are 1,000 Saddams’

Max Bearak

…

It is an image seared in the minds of war-ready and war-weary Americans alike. Just weeks after the invasion of Iraq, American armored vehicles bore down on Firdos Square in downtown Baghdad, where an emboldened man had already taken a sledgehammer to the base of a statue of Saddam Hussein.

That man, Kadhim Sharif al-Jabouri, had once repaired the Hussein family’s motorcycles, but was also imprisoned by Hussein after falling out of favor. He says that 14 or 15 members of his family were executed by Hussein’s regime.

In an interview aired Tuesday by the BBC, more than 13 years after the invasion, Jabouri speaks of his longing for the relative peace of the years before it.

“Now, when I go by that statue, I feel pain and shame. I ask myself, why did I topple that statue?” said Jabouri. The toppling of the statue became the iconic image of the beginning of the invasion. It conveyed hope — although many have since alleged that the whole scene was more or less staged. …

Iraq is yet to fully emerge from the bloodbath the invasion precipitated. …

Jabouri has long since left Baghdad, which he found to be too unsafe for his family. He now lives in Beirut, along with more than 1 million refugees from Iraq, Syria and Palestine, who have added incredible stress to Lebanon’s public infrastructure and services. Once a weightlifter and wrestler, he now continues with the hobby that brought him into contact with the Hussein family in the first place: motorcycle repair.

He, like many interviewed in my colleague Loveday Morris’s reporting, blames the current situation squarely on the Iraqi government. After the American invasion, he says, things got worse every year. “There was corruption, infighting, killing, looting. Saddam killed people, but it was nothing like this current government,” he said. “Saddam is gone, but in his place there are 1,000 Saddams.”

And that government was instituted by the invading coalition. For them, Jabouri had these words: “Bush and Blair are liars. They destroyed Iraq and took us back to zero, and took us back to the Middle Ages or earlier. If I was a criminal, I would kill them with my bare hands.”