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War on Terror – an atrocious pseudo-war

From Iraq to Israel, Afghanistan and now Somalia, Bush and Blair’s blunder is taking its toll, writes matthew carr

We are now in year six of the global War on Terror and there is no end in sight to the unfolding mayhem. On the contrary, the next 12 months look set to produce new tributaries of violence in a war whose bloody absurdity would challenge the satirical imagination of Jonathan Swift or Joseph Heller.

More than 650,000 Iraqis have died in the invasion and its aftermath, according to last year's Lancet report. Undeterred by the magnitude of the debacle, its architects have found themselves celebrating the execution of Saddam by a Texan/Shia lynch mob as another 'milestone' in Iraq's evolution to democracy.

Meanwhile the new 'listening' Bush administration looks certain to ignore the Iraq Study Group's recommendations and the



Bush is set to ignore the wishes of his electorate and increase the US military presence in Iraq

desires of the US electorate and this week announce an increase in the US military presence in Iraq. Even US military experts believe this 'surge' will have no impact on an insurgency which has already claimed the lives of 3,000 American troops and left more than one-in-four veterans claiming disability benefit.

Elsewhere, an Israeli/US strike on Iran in the near future is being increasingly talked up. A number of military experts have concluded that such an attack on Iran's uranium enrichment facilities would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and unleash an even greater conflagration across the Middle East.

In the Occupied Territories the US and Israel are currently arming and promoting Fatah, only recently regarded by Israel as an incorrigible 'terrorist organisation', in order to undermine the democratically-elected government of Hamas. In the 1980s Israel played an indirect role in the creation of Hamas by promoting the Muslim Brotherhood as a counterweight to Fatah. Now the

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