Iraq is suffering for the hubris of Western liberal interventionism, says alexander cockburn |
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Pick almost any date on the calendar and it'll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN ambassador into the Security Council to issue an ultimatum. It's like driving across the American West. "Historic marker, one mile", the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing on dead Indians. "On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US cavalry beat off..."
Last Sunday I was in a used-paperback store in a mall in Olympia, Washington, flicking through Tina Turner's side of the story on life with Ike. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, March 18, one day short of the anniversary of US planes embarking on an aerial hunt of Pancho Villa in 1916; of the day the US Senate rejected (for the second time) the Treaty of Versailles in 1920; of the end of
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| Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died |
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the active phase of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002; of the 10pm broadcast on March 19, 2003, by President GW Bush announcing that aerial operations against Iraq had commenced.
My mobile phone rang. It was my brother Patrick, calling from Sulaimaniyah, three hours drive east through the mountains from the Kurdish capital of Arbil in northern Iraq. He gave me a brisk precis of the piece he'd file the next day: every road was lethally dangerous; every Iraqi he met had a ghastly tale to tell of murder, kidnappings, terror-stricken flights, searches for missing relatives. Life was measurably far, far worse for the vast majority of Iraqis than it had been before the 2003 onslaught.
Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Not hundreds of thousands but two million have fled the country, mostly to Syria and Jordan. It's the largest upheaval of a population in the Middle East since the Palestinian Naqba of 1948. Saddam dragged his country into ruin. Then the US took it 
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