1921: Britain appoints Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia king of the new country of Iraq; rigged elections are held to give him a patina of legitimacy.
1939: Faisal's successor, his son Ghazi, dies in suspicious circumstances and is succeeded by a very pro-British regency.
1945: A U.S. State Department memo describes Iraqi oil reserves as "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the great material prizes in world history."
1963: Nationalist Iraqi President Qasim is overthrown in a coup backed heavily by the U.S. and U.K.; a TV camera records his execution.
1968: A CIA-sparked coup consolidates power for the Baath party which includes Saddam Hussein.
1975: U.S., Iranian and Israeli material support for a Kurdish rebellion is withdrawn suddenly; thousands of Kurds are killed by Iraqi troops, and Kurdish villages are destroyed.
1980-1988: The U.S. supports Iraq in its war with Iran, and also supports Iran through proxy Israel. Former U.S. secretary of state (and, ironically, Nobel Peace Prize winner) Kissinger wants both sides to "kill each other."
1988: Saddam kills thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons supplied to Iraq with U.S. approval.
1991: The U.S. encourages Iraqis to overthrow their government, but then refuses to help them as the ensuing uprising is brutally squashed; countless Kurds and Shiites are slaughtered as nearby U.S. troops refuse any support to them.
... And those are just "highlights" from the first 71 years following the creation of Iraq as a country.
Many items are omitted for brevity's sake, and the list stops before the U.S. and U.K. insisted on prolonging a UN embargo for many years at a cost of perhaps 500,000 -- and maybe more -- Iraqi lives.
Then there's the bullshit propagated by the U.S. and British governments to justify military actions that killed many more Iraqis and displaced millions.
Given the history of Western treachery in Iraq (and Iran, and indeed the entire Middle East), is it any wonder Iraqis might have had trouble believing the Dubya administration had their best interests at heart?
"It is the cumulative impact of each cynical episode of foreign intervention in Iraq, year after tawdry year, that I find so shocking," Barry Lando writes in his book's Introduction.
Cynical and tawdry are appropriate words, though perhaps a bit too kind.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
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2 comments:
Nice synopsis there Stimpy. And very sad. The world is tainted by 19th and 20th and now 21st Century similar events and senarios with the US/UK brand on them. Just look at So. America. The first thing the corpo-fascist tried to do when they took power in 2001 was upset the gov't of Peru. The CIA induced coup failed however and they continued on with Iraq.
The REALLY sad part of all this is that the citizenry of these over grown bully countries allows this to go on.
If Obama really wants to make his mark, he can come right out and denounce this way of operating on the world stage. I suspect he will wait for his second term to do so.
BTW: Do you think the Brits will try and one up the Yanks by electing someone as liberal as Obama when that moronmonkeyboy they have as "prime minister" is up for reelection?
Improvement in the U.K. gov't is rather unlikely, I would say. True, the governing party is way, way down in the polls right now. But they're trailing the Conservatives. The governing party is actually the most left-of-centre of the mainstream parties.
*sigh*
The Labour Party's only hope is to replace Brown with somebody Britons actually like, and the Conservatives don't seem very worried about that happening.
Blair *was*, BTW, as liberal as Obama. And that's a sad comment on Blair. As much as Obama is a huge improvement over Shrub, his politics are pretty much mainstream U.S. politics. At least that's how I see it.
Now where did I put that vodka ...
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