Given our distractions with our own problems in Pakistan we are likely to forget an important date, 20th March, which marks the fifth anniversary of the start of the US invasion of Iraq. There were large demonstrations throughout the world, but not in Pakistan, on Saturday the 15th of March, to mark this sad anniversary.

Bush and his faithful poodle, Blair (Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara as Robert Fisk calls him), along with other US puppet states known as the “coalition of the willing”, attacked Iraq without provocation, ignoring the United Nations and the international community, on the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which could be used at any moment. The whole world knew that that was a lie. The IAEA had not found any evidence of an active WMD programme, which had actually been stopped some years earlier. Subsequent searches by US teams proved that Iraq did not have WMDs when the US attacked it.

After 5 years of US occupation Iraq as a unified country does not exist. Baghdad is now the most dangerous city in the world. Over a million Iraqis have died violent deaths. 4000 US soldiers have died. This is not counting the millions of injured Iraqis. We have all been witness to the tortures in Abu Ghraib and the destruction of the city of Fallujah. The infrastructure of the country has been destroyed and five years of US occupation have not resulted in the restoration of electricity and water supplies in Baghdad. Thousands of Iraqi families have fled the country to escape the living hell that it has become. There are estimates that there are two million Iraqi refugees. One does not know what is happening outside Baghdad, as journalists are afraid to go out of the protected zone in Baghdad. The puppet government is restricted in its movement to the heavily fortified Green Zone. Baghdad once a thriving, lively, open metropolis with mixed neighbourhoods has been divided into Shia and Sunni neighbourhoods surrounded by three-meter high concrete blast walls and patrolled by Shia and Sunni militias respectively.

The other excuse to attack Iraq was the alleged connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. There was no such connection and there were no Al-Qaeda elements in Iraq when the US attacked it. This was pure invention on the part of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to justify attacking Iraq. That arch-criminal and consummate liar, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed in September 2002 that the CIA had provided “bulletproof” evidence that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. The September 11 Commission debunked this connection in 2004. Later in 2007, the Pentagon’s acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble more or less said that Pentagon official and convinced neo-conservative, Douglas Feith, doctored the intelligence in providing a pre-Iraq war report on the instigation of the then Deputy Defense Secretary, the ultra neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz, claiming that there was such a connection. A report released on March 12 this year by the US Joint Forces Command, five years after the invasion of Iraq, finally laid to rest the neo-conservative’s claim that there was a link between Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi leadership. They reached this conclusion after examining about 600,000 documents and interviewing imprisoned Iraqi leaders. But in spite of these reports Bush continues to insist that there was such a link.

Now Iraq is subject to daily car bombs, sectarian killings, murders, kidnappings, apart from attacks on US forces. The US and the puppet Maliki government claim that civilian deaths have fallen since the “surge” of US troops announced over a year ago. But as Patrick Cockburn notes in his article of March 15 in Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org: How to destroy a country in five years) this is because Iraqi journalists are told not to report the continuing violence. Cockburn says: ”Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left.”

The net result of the Iraq war is the destruction of Iraq as a country and the growth of terrorism in the region. But this does not concern the US. The US plans to continue its occupation of Iraq for a long time to come. McCain, the Republican candidate for the US presidency is a supporter of Bush’s policies in Iraq and, if he wins, the occupation of Iraq will continue for an indefinite period. Amongst the Democrats, one of the candidates, Barak Obama, has called for US withdrawal while the other, Hillary Clinton, does not come out openly for this option. After all she supported the attack on Iraq. Even if Obama wins he is unlikely to withdraw US troops from Iraq any time soon because the Democratic Party has been cowardly and wishy-washy on the issue and it would not like to be accused of having “lost” Iraq. What happens to ordinary Iraqis does not at all concern the US. What it wants is strategic control of the oil rich region leading from the Middle East to Central Asia. This control is considered vital by the US to face challenges from Europe and specially China. The US already has bases in Afghanistan and several former Soviet Central Asian republics. It is pushing Pakistan to allow US bases on its soil. It has built 14 massive military bases in Iraq and is not likely to give them up anytime in the near future. As long as it can have control of these bases it does not care if anarchy reigns in the rest of the country.

Iran is the one country in the region that still resists US domination and this is a thorn in Bush’s side. As happened earlier, with the lies about WMDs in Iraq, we are now again being fed with lies about the Iranian nuclear weapons programme although the IAEA has said that it has no evidence that Iran has such a programme. But the intention is clear. Bush wants to attack Iran before the end of his term. That is why Admiral Fallon, head of US Central Command, resigned last week as he was and is against attacking Iran. We live in dangerous times. Although the IAEA and the US intelligence services have said that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons programme some time ago, nevertheless Bush and Condoleezza Rice, continue to insist that Iran has a covert programme or could set up such a programme in a short time. Iran is a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has signed extra protocols with the IAEA and has allowed inspections under these protocols. Iran, under the NPT, is allowed to enrich uranium for its reactors for peaceful purposes and that is what it is doing in a legal manner. But the US continues to threaten sanctions and war against Iran and unfortunately European countries have joined the US in these threats. Distinguished amongst these hawks is Bernard Kouchner, the ex-socialist, Foreign Minister of France in the right wing Sarkozy government. He is infamous for his views on “humanitarian imperialism”. He has threatened Iran with war if it does not stop its enrichment programme.

It seems that the US appetite for death and destruction, with on going wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is not yet sated. An attack on Iran will be disastrous for the region (and for the US). It will lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths and to further instability in the region. The only country that will benefit is Israel and that is why it is egging on the US to attack Iran. Another war in the region will further contribute to what the US calls terrorism. It will be like “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet”. Already the war on Iraq has had a tremendous economic effect on the US economy. Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has calculated that the true cost of the Iraqi war to the US is more than three trillion dollars! The US dollar is now in free fall. If there is another war in the region oil prices will go through the roof. These have already touched $110 per barrel but this is nothing to what they could reach if there is another war. The present incumbent of the White House is so blinded by his own hubris that he does not see that attacking Iran will be a further nail in the coffin of the US empire. Surely self-interest would council him against such a disastrous act.

The US thought that it would have a cakewalk in occupying Iraq but it did not reckon with the history and the people of Iraq. It’s not surprising as Americans are notoriously ignorant of history. They and particularly Bush should have been aware of the difficulties faced by the British Army (mostly Indian troops) and its losses when it attacked Iraq in 1915 and finally captured Baghdad on March 11, 1917 at the time that the Ottoman Empire was collapsing. British historians refer to the 1915-1917 campaign as the disasters of the Mesopotamian Campaign. One of the reasons why the Pakistani and Indian Armies demurred when asked to join the “coalition of the willing” in 2003 was that there generals knew their history and knew about the huge losses suffered by Indian troops in 1915-17. The cemeteries in Basra and Baghdad are full of thousands of Indian Army soldiers who lost their lives in that campaign. General Maude’s infamous Proclamation of Baghdad was issued on March 19, 1917 exactly 91 years ago in which one finds the infamous sentence: “our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” Does this not sound familiar?

The British then ruled Iraq under a League of Nations Mandate from 1920 to 1932 but the Iraqis never voluntarily accepted British rule. Resistance to British rule started already in 1918 and the Iraqis revolted against the British in 1920, right at the start of the mandate. This revolt was brutally suppressed finally in 1922 with the use of punitive aerial bombardment and poison gas by the Royal Air Force against Iraqi villages on the orders of that idol of Bush, Winston Churchill. Iraq obtained formal independence from Britain in 1932 but it was years before it became fully independent. My point in relating this is to show that no people are willing to be colonised ever. However long it takes the invader has to leave. It is an irony of history that exactly 86 years after the British captured Baghdad another Western power attacked Iraq with the same pretext of bringing liberty and democracy to the people of Iraq when the sole purpose then and now was imperialist, colonial occupation. If Bush had known a little more of history perhaps he would have been wary of too quickly proclaiming “Mission Accomplished”.

I would like to end this article by paying tribute to the thousands of Iraqi freedom fighters who have laid down their lives in the last five years to throw out the invader. Without the heroic resistance put up by these lightly armed urban guerrilla fighters the US would have been emboldened to attack Iran and Syria immediately following its occupation of Iraq. It is the supreme sacrifice of these brave souls that has brought the most modern army in the history of the world to a full stop if not to its knees. My hats off to them. Sooner or later the Iraqi people will win and the US Army will have to withdraw as it had to from Vietnam, another lesson forgotten.

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