Controlled chaos in Iraq six years on
Exactly six years ago the brilliant military operation called The Second Gulf War started. It’s now unwinding but is still claiming human lives and billions of dollars on a daily basis.
Defeating the Iraqi regular army and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a 43-day cakewalk that cost only 183 GI lives and took just 2% of the time the Americans have now cumulatively spent in the 6000-year-old country.
And it really doesn’t matter how many greenbacks were spent to grease Iraqi generals’ palms to make them bury military aircraft in the desert sand and give up without firing a shot – for gold is an extremely effective weapon that’s as old as Babylon’s walls.
The excuse of unfound “weapons of mass destruction” was airily waved off since the arrested Saddam had committed other crimes and was guilty enough to be hanged while being video recorded.
And so Iraq became an entity of an altogether new ‘controlled chaos’ type, previously unknown in world history.
What we see in Iraq today is a nation living in a state of shock and deprivation; half are unemployed and therefore living below the poverty line. All these people are desperately struggling to survive in a country with a collapsing economy and trying to feed their families while under constant threat of being killed by insurgent suicide bomb attacks if they get unluckily close to GIs at the wrong time; or choose a policeman’s job, since it is among the few to be paid.
The exact numbers of dead Iraqi civilians will remain unknown forever because, as Gen. Tommy Franks, who directed the Iraq invasion, cunningly put it, “We don't do body counts.” No wonder today the civilian body count varies from cautious official 100,000 to as high as 1,000,000 civilians. The truth is out there – but does anyone really care?
GIs are being killed every other day too. 4259 bodies have already been sent back home. 54% of dead Americans were under 25 years old. It appears many did not have families of their own and now never will. A lot of servicemen were wounded, severely or otherwise. Some of them became disfigured, some not. Over 31,000 disabled veterans still have to live their lives. There is an estimated 100,000 wounded American servicemen in Iraq. Others will never make it to the homecoming parade – a suicide epidemic among Iraq veterans is already an unquestionable fact.
Warfare is a huge, costly undertaking; and modern hi-tech warfare is outstandingly expensive. Yet, there is a beast called Modern American Warfare and this creature devours money beyond imagination.
$390,000 is spent annually on each American soldier in Iraq. How many people do you know personally who EARN this kind of money per year? There are a whole 142,000 American troops costing that much each out there in Iraq.
$657 billion is spent by the US military in Iraq over the last six years could have done… almost anything. All sorts of innovations that create new jobs, unprecedented scientific research that would make the Large Hadron Collider look more like Enrico Fermi’s first nuclear reactor from the 1940s. It could have been flights to the Moon or Mars within the next few years or thermonuclear energy technology – you name it. It’s enough to buy over 100 Nimitz-class supercarriers similar to the one named ‘George H. W. Bush’ that was commissioned in January 2009 which can sail the world for more than 20 years without refueling.
All these “could-bes” were fed into the bloodbath vortex which was initiated without anyone even knowing how long it would last.
There are people who omnisciently call this ‘a war for resources’ instead of the publicly-recognised “war on terror”. It is neither this nor that. This war is by far more global than history remembers.
“There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries.” said George Bush on September 20, 2001 in his speech to Congress and added, “We will direct every resource at our command, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence and every necessary weapon of war to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network.”
60 countries = global terrorist network, a vast field for military action worldwide.
Since Barack Obama announced plans to gradually withdraw troops from Iraq in exchange for increasing the military contingent in Afghanistan and aiming towards terrorist-torn Pakistan at the same time, the future of the Middle East is taking shape right before our eyes.
If the Iraq scenario is repeated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Asian continent will witness the disintegration of three Muslim states that would become a territory of controlled chaos.
This would be a zone with formal governments, civil wars and collapsed economies. It would be controlled by private contractors of the US military (to protect global energy interests), weapons corporations and secure hydrocarbons shipping.
American diplomats will be overseeing it from the new $700 million US fortress embassy in Baghdad which is six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York, and completely autonomous.
Everyone knows what would happen to the skyrocketing heroin production in Afghanistan and in which direction the river of drugs will flow.
And to make sure that every Sunni and Shi’ite who, for some unknown reason, have not acquired a reliable AK-47 for the future slaughter of their brothers, the US has issued 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets to Iraqi forces for which they “cannot fully account for.”
Ivan Fursov, RT
Sources:
http://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/iraq/casualties.html
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/
http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0508/050608bb1.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/engelhardt
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf
http://www.nn.northropgrumman.com/bush/facts.html
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/gw-bush-9-11.htm
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/27/obama.troops/index.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/17/obama.troops/
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/13/asia/policy.php
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,476464,00.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/AR2006120101654.html
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/01/1994397.htm?section=world
