This is a thoroughly criminal process involving international aggression, crimes against humanity, and plunder and theft of sovereign resources. Iraq’s estimated hydrocarbon reserves of 112-115 billion barrels of oil – the earth’s second-largest known reserves after Saudi Arabia’s – were the main prize, incredibly downplayed or overlooked by the Western mainstream media. Having previously enjoyed a high standard of living, the majority of Iraq’s people are now struggling in poverty with power and fuel shortages, while Western oil giants Exxon, Chevron, British Petroleum and Total are tapping the country’s vast natural wealth, paying off local elites for the privilege.
The same agenda of hegemony over energy resources applies to Afghanistan, Libya and Iran. Syria is not a leading oil producer, but it is a crucial staging post towards Western regime change in oil-abundant Iran. This dynamic for rolling conquest will not stop with these countries. Recall that former US General Wesley Clark disclosed a Pentagon war plan from 2001 that included the above and additional countries for conquest – Lebanon, Sudan and Somalia. In effect, this is a global war agenda that the US-led capitalist powers are inextricably pursuing in line with their deteriorating economic status. The desperate drive for control by the US and other Western powers over the oil and gas lifeblood of the waning capitalist world economy will inevitably bring these powers into confrontation with other countries, Russia and China in particular. The seeming insanity of this seemingly wanton global militarism is dictated by the cold logic of capitalism. Understanding this underlying driving force is key to understanding, and ultimately challenging, American-led global militarism.
Such naked imperialism cannot be conducted openly in the eyes of the world; it has to be covered up with a wall of lies, the particular lie or pretext to be emphasised at any given time depending on the target country in question.
Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction that could be launched within 45 seconds” we were told by American and British leaders George W Bush and Anthony Blair, who based their claims on concocted fantasy.
Indicted War Criminals George W. Bush and Tony Blair Iraq was also linked to Al Qaeda, the murky global terror network created by the CIA and MI6 that allegedly carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. When that lie wore thin, we were then told that Iraqis needed to be liberated from a Hitler-like dictator Saddam Hussein, who notwithstanding was formerly a favoured Western client until he blundered over the boundaries of Western oil geopolitics. Latterly, after these pretexts could no longer be sustained, Bush’s successor Barack Obama would assure the public that the American-led occupying forces were “consolidating democracy and sovereignty” – albeit in a country that was torn apart by US-induced sectarian fratricide and subordinated to foreign oil companies. All these baseless claims, pretexts and allegations have been faithfully parroted by the mainstream media. And so the Western war and lie machine trundles on, conjuring new pretexts for smashing its way into the next countries to commit yet more atrocities and crimes against humanity in its conquest of natural resources.
The significance of Iraq is the heinous precedent that it set. Here, Washington and its Western allies transgressed international law in the most blatant, criminal manner to commit genocide. Yet not only Western mainstream journalism, but also academia, the legal profession and other sectors of civic society gave cover to such crime, or at best failed to hold the perpetrators to account. And, as criminologists will testify, when a criminal gets away with crime, then there is nothing to hold him from committing further crime. The ongoing criminal US-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the murderous mass bombing of Libya by NATO, the clandestine Western-backed terrorism against Syria, America’s drone assassinations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa, and Washington’s swivel-eyed threats towards China and Russia are all proof that America’s global war of aggression has become the perverse new normal. Western mainstream media has indeed much to answer for in its complicity in global militarism and concomitant crimes.
The reality check of how criminally deranged the US-led Western powers have become is their ongoing aggression towards Iran. Less than a decade after launching genocide on Iraq based on an outrageous fabrication of weapons of mass destruction, the same criminal powers are repeating the same calumnies against Iran with “no options off the table” threats that allude to pre-emptive nuclear attack. And the Western mainstream media that aided and abetted the genocide in Iraq are once again giving credence to the calumny over Iran.
This is the descent into barbarism that happens when victors violate history and are not held to account. We are then condemned to repeat history, no matter how barbaric and crass that repetition is.
This Interactive Book from Global Research is an attempt to set the historical record straight with a truthful perspective. By arming people with the truth, we may then stop the criminal repetition of history because, armed with the truth, we hope that Western publics in particular will begin to hold their war-mongering governments to account in the most rigorous way.
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