The treachery of the century

Also published in Daily Trust

The British government’s decision to participate in the United States-led military invasion of Iraq in 2003 was obviously unpopular with the British public who adamantly kicked against it despite the passionate insistence of the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the war was necessary in order to disarm the then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. Besides, when, after the invasion, it turned out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and that the so-called intelligence on the bases of which the US-led military coalition invaded it was a hoax, the criticism grew further raising serious questions about the credibility of the then UK government.

It became clear that the invasion was basically orchestrated by a notoriously megalomaniac clique in the White House, the Pentagon, US Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which included, but not limited to, the then President George W. Bush, his deputy Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Bremer and George J. Tenet who as the then Director of the CIA oversaw the fabrication of an elaborate concoction of layers of lies to justify the impending US-led military invasion of Iraq.

Meanwhile, many countries expressed opposition to the looming invasion as people around the world continued to stage protests against it also, which culminated in staging coordinated protests in more than six hundred cities across the world including London, on February 15, 2003. Nevertheless, the then Tony Blair-led British government remained adamantly hell-bent on joining the invading US-led military coalition. Also, like the CIA, the British Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, maintained equally misleading intelligence on which Prime Minister Blair and other warmongers in London capitalized in their futile efforts to justify the involvement of the British military in the invasion.

With the eventual invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of its leadership and also the abolition of its entire state institutions including its military, other security agencies and civil service system, the whole country plunged into uncontrollable chaos, which has ever since then persisted resulting in the death, disability and/or displacement of millions of people in the country. Meanwhile, as the post-Saddam security situation in the country continued to deteriorate, calls for probe into British involvement in the invasion persisted until 2009 when Blair’s successor, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown succumbed to public pressure and commissioned the Iraq Inquiry under the chairmanship of Sir John Chilcot from whose name it got the name Chilcot Inquiry, to, among other things, consider the circumstances of the British involvement in the invasion.

Yet, knowing beforehand how the outcome of the inquiry would certainly vindicate the opponents of Britain’s participation in the invasion, the powerful individuals and vested interests who had tried to scuttle the inquiry were all along hell-bent on suppressing its findings, which explains why it took seven years to publish. 

However, now that the findings have been published anyway, and though they vindicated the opponents of British involvement and indeed billions of people around the world who opposed it, they (findings) hardly surprised anybody anyway, for it was all along absolutely obvious that the so-called intelligence fabricated by the CIA and the MI6 in collaboration with their respective warmongering political leaders in Washington DC and London, was simply flawed, to say the least.

Yet, not even the falsification of that bogus intelligence was particularly immoral in the whole saga after all; for it was equally obvious all along that the coalition member-countries were actually solely motivated by their self-centered individual and collective economic, political and strategic interests. Instead, therefore, the most immoral aspects of the saga were the treacherous roles played by most of the Iraqi opposition politicians and even religious clerics as well.

Starting with the clerics, as the US-led invaders began their military operations overpowering the Iraqi military, and while ordinary Iraqis irrespective of their sectarian affiliations were  organizing themselves to form resistance fronts, the first treacherous reaction came from the Iraq-based Iranian Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani himself who, as the spiritual leader of the Iraqi Shiites, issued a Fatwa prohibiting the Shiites from resisting the US-led invaders, and warning them against doing whatever could hamper the US-led coalition’s invasion of the country. The Fatwa, which sowed the seeds of sectarianism in Iraqi politics, was announced by Sayyid AbdulMajeed Al-Khoey.

Also, the Sistani’s Fatwa and the treacherous roles of the returning Iraqi Iran-sponsored sectarian opposition politicians who had been living in Iran and elsewhere gave rise to a credible suspicion of a prior coordination between the United States, on the one hand, and the Iraqi Shi’a religious establishment and such Iraqi politicians, on the other. After all, it turned out that the main single source of the CIA’s falsified intelligence on the alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was an Iraqi US-favored and pampered notorious Shiite traitor, Dr. Ahmed Chalabi who and his accomplices among the country’s political elite, and in collaboration with the US-installed Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq under the leadership of Paul Bremer continued to consolidate sectarianism in the country, and, in fact, altered the country’s political equation accordingly. Interestingly, though Saddam Hussein was Sunni, albeit secular, he was certainly never sectarian, neither was there sectarianism in Iraqi politics all through his era and before.

Anyway, consequently, though the Iraqis had been groaning under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and harsh economic condition due to the economic sanctions imposed on the country then, they never envisaged what they have been going through ever since the US-led invasion of their country. Obviously, instead of achieving democracy and economic prosperity as they had been repeatedly assured by the Americans, Iraqis have been wallowing in misery and have been struggling to achieve even some semblance of what they had been enjoying under Saddam Hussein. They are now missing Saddam’s dictatorship, and wish they reversed the circumstances. For instance, one Kadhim Sharif al-Jabouri; an Iraqi who was particularly excited on the day of the fall of Baghdad, and whose pictures and video clips of him destroying the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad were widely circulated in the media, was recently quoted in the media expressing his regret for destroying it and wishing that he got a chance to rebuild it.