Only time and our willingness to alter inevitability stand in the way of where we are headed. Only humankind can put a stop to human wickedness. Only we can destroy that which is slowly, but surely, destroying us all.
Abandonment of Brotherhood
How does one even begin to examine the devastation that Iraq has become? How does one begin to contemplate what is now, thanks to America’s illegal and immoral invasion and occupation, an utter collapse of incomprehensible proportions?
What was once the nation, and the people, of Iraq has been transformed into an amalgam of carnage, blood, misery and decimation the likes of which the world has not seen since World War II, or Vietnam. Iraq has become a human catastrophe, a defeat for humanity itself, birthed not through tempests or tsunamis or earthquakes, but through the criminality, corruption and human wickedness of one nation. It has been humankind that has routed itself in self-debasement, our failure to act one more silver chalice in our trophy case of human wickedness.
It boggles the mind to even begin to fathom the suffering and misery of the Iraqi people, a collection of what was once 25 million human beings, the vast majority living in peace and apparent happiness, maintaining sectarian harmony, content with stability and security, living normal lives and cherished memories. The collapse of their society into chaos and anarchy has been one of the most spectacular crimes against humanity ever witnessed. Indeed, hell on Earth has been imported into Mesopotamia, creating, since the early 1990’s, a Holocaust that defies logic, reason and common sense, an evil so malevolent, so egregious, that its devastation will not cease until decades after Empire’s last throes have returned normalcy to the people of the planet. What is now seen as a debacle, as a failure, is nothing more than a malevolent crime of mass murder, rape and pillage, a crime against humanity itself.
The seeds of Holocaust were planted in the fertile soils of Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates flow, where humankind was nurtured, feeding off the bosom of rich land and life-giving water, at the beginning and after the end of the first Gulf War. It was at this time that the Iraqi people, and not the government, were chosen to feel the collective punishment of the rising Empire, a nation so consumed by hubris and arrogance that, using its vast powers of persuasion and control, instituted a regime of devastating sanctions, most targeting the infrastructure, food and medicine necessary for the general welfare of the populace.
The decision was made in the upper echelons of governance during the Clinton administration to enact and enforce sanctions that were always known to harm only average, ordinary citizens, those that depended on the state for health, food, shelter and education. This conscious decision was made even knowing that the Saddam Hussein regime would not suffer as a result of the sanctions. Indeed, the regime of sanctions was aimed specifically at the Iraqi people, 25 million innocent human beings whose only crime was being Iraqi, their homes located above the enormous fields of the devil’s excrement. The Iraqi people were about to feel the wrath of the American Empire, enabler and disseminator of a new Holocaust.
Compounded with the complete destruction by aerial bombing of Iraq’s electricity, sanitation, sewage, food production, medical industry and civil infrastructure during the war, all using radiation-saturated depleted uranium filled missiles, artillery and shells, a nation once among the healthiest on the planet began to feel the aftereffects of disease, cancers, stillbirths and deformities. With little food supplies trickling into the nation, hundreds of thousands of children and adults began to suffer malnutrition, hunger and starvation. Soon disease and malnutrition, easily remedied by adequate supplies of food and medicine, began to take their terrible and debilitating toll.
This medieval and barbaric blockade, sponsored, enacted, enforced, defended and maintained by the Empire, began to rob 25 million Iraqis of nutrition, healthcare, education and of the standard of living that was the envy of the Middle East. Iraq soon went from having some of the most nourished children and adults in the world to having one of the most malnourished populations on the planet. One of the best standards of living in the Middle East was transformed into a cesspool of backwardness, a rotting and eroding society robbed of strength and vitality. Without adequate medicines, supplies and machines, their importation into Iraq being prevented by America, children began to die by the thousands every month.
Children became weak and anemic, their bodies and bellies turning to symbols of malnutrition. Immune systems were weakened, collapsing the body’s ability to fight disease, toxins and viruses. Those once healthy and strong now succumbed to easily preventable diseases and viruses, losing once vibrant energy, losing the will to live. Those once bright and intelligent had their development halted, for food and the energy needed to sustain growth dwindled. Children began to die in an epidemic of economic genocide, enacted and enforced by the American Empire, as always tightening the noose on the sanctions regime, as always caring nothing for the plight of millions of Iraqis. An entire generation of Iraqi children had perished, vanished from the Earth, never more able to play and dream and grow up, never able to experience the life we all strive to have.
After a decade of sanctions, up to one million Iraqi children had died, with 500,000 adults buried in graves as well, the products of easily preventable disease, the products of a nation not being allowed to have medicine, supplies and the necessary machines that can save lives. Close to 5,000 children were dying every month, to say nothing of those whose brain and body development became stagnant due to malnutrition. By the beginning of the 21st century, the American Empire had caused the death of 1.5 million Iraqis, spirits like you and I, never to take a breath of air or a gulp of water, never having the opportunity to grow old and enjoy the wonders of life, perishing in a war upon the Iraqi people they were impotent to wage war against.
The seeds of Empire had been planted, cast upon soils of genocide, watered with the blood of dead Iraqi children, winds of devastating silence spreading disease and viruses and cancer and mutations to all corners of Mesopotamia, affecting rich and poor, Shiite and Sunni, its invisible wickedness scattering itself into young and old, indiscriminately securing new victims through the inhalation of oxygen.
By the time new Pearl Harbors had been concocted by the Empire, by the time towers were demolished and the American people became the obedient warmongers of those cheerleaders pretending to be leaders, by the time Iraq had been chosen for destruction, invasion and occupation, up to two million Iraqis had died at the hand of the Evil Empire, victims of sanctions, a genocide in itself, a Holocaust by any definition, though only a precursor to what was yet to come.
The devastation of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has brought unfathomable levels of misery and suffering to the Iraqi people. The utter debacle that is Iraq, many would say the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy, has become a monument to human wickedness, yet at the same time it represents one of the most egregious criminal enterprises in the history of humankind.
For what transpires today, and what has transpired for the last four years, cannot be labeled as a mistake, or a lie, or a quagmire. What it is, indeed, what it has always been, is a crime against humanity, war crimes of the highest order, a conspiracy that has led to the collapse of Iraq as a state and to a creation of a Holocaust that will in the end, years from today – when combined with the economic genocide of the 1990’s, endemic disease and the radiation poisoning that will kill for decades to come – have cost the lives of anywhere from four to six million human beings, to say nothing of the refugee crisis, the mass displacement of people, ethnic cleansing, the loss of property, collapse of society, of lives altered, nation shattered and child development damaged.
The Iraq War represents humanity at its worst, with the elite of the Empire destroying a nation as an excuse to rebuild it, caring nothing for dark skinned Arabs, yet claiming contracts in the billions of dollars, as always designed to pillage the American treasury and rob the people. Meanwhile, the American masses have and continue to sit silently in lazy obedience and acquiescence while war crimes and crimes against humanity are committed in our name. Like the Good Germans of World War II, millions of Americans will one day claim they had no idea what was being done in Iraq, all the while knowing that comfort and gluttony helped maintain silence and willful ignorance to one of the worst cases of human wickedness ever to rise from the violent nature of humankind. To millions of Americans, the latest gossip from tele-trash and infotainment has more value than a Holocaust presently being waged by our government.
Abandonment of Brotherhood
How does one even begin to examine the devastation that Iraq has become? How does one begin to contemplate what is now, thanks to America’s illegal and immoral invasion and occupation, an utter collapse of incomprehensible proportions?
What was once the nation, and the people, of Iraq has been transformed into an amalgam of carnage, blood, misery and decimation the likes of which the world has not seen since World War II, or Vietnam. Iraq has become a human catastrophe, a defeat for humanity itself, birthed not through tempests or tsunamis or earthquakes, but through the criminality, corruption and human wickedness of one nation. It has been humankind that has routed itself in self-debasement, our failure to act one more silver chalice in our trophy case of human wickedness.
The seeds of Holocaust were planted in the fertile soils of Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates flow, where humankind was nurtured, feeding off the bosom of rich land and life-giving water, at the beginning and after the end of the first Gulf War. It was at this time that the Iraqi people, and not the government, were chosen to feel the collective punishment of the rising Empire, a nation so consumed by hubris and arrogance that, using its vast powers of persuasion and control, instituted a regime of devastating sanctions, most targeting the infrastructure, food and medicine necessary for the general welfare of the populace.
The decision was made in the upper echelons of governance during the Clinton administration to enact and enforce sanctions that were always known to harm only average, ordinary citizens, those that depended on the state for health, food, shelter and education. This conscious decision was made even knowing that the Saddam Hussein regime would not suffer as a result of the sanctions. Indeed, the regime of sanctions was aimed specifically at the Iraqi people, 25 million innocent human beings whose only crime was being Iraqi, their homes located above the enormous fields of the devil’s excrement. The Iraqi people were about to feel the wrath of the American Empire, enabler and disseminator of a new Holocaust.
Compounded with the complete destruction by aerial bombing of Iraq’s electricity, sanitation, sewage, food production, medical industry and civil infrastructure during the war, all using radiation-saturated depleted uranium filled missiles, artillery and shells, a nation once among the healthiest on the planet began to feel the aftereffects of disease, cancers, stillbirths and deformities. With little food supplies trickling into the nation, hundreds of thousands of children and adults began to suffer malnutrition, hunger and starvation. Soon disease and malnutrition, easily remedied by adequate supplies of food and medicine, began to take their terrible and debilitating toll.
This medieval and barbaric blockade, sponsored, enacted, enforced, defended and maintained by the Empire, began to rob 25 million Iraqis of nutrition, healthcare, education and of the standard of living that was the envy of the Middle East. Iraq soon went from having some of the most nourished children and adults in the world to having one of the most malnourished populations on the planet. One of the best standards of living in the Middle East was transformed into a cesspool of backwardness, a rotting and eroding society robbed of strength and vitality. Without adequate medicines, supplies and machines, their importation into Iraq being prevented by America, children began to die by the thousands every month.
Children became weak and anemic, their bodies and bellies turning to symbols of malnutrition. Immune systems were weakened, collapsing the body’s ability to fight disease, toxins and viruses. Those once healthy and strong now succumbed to easily preventable diseases and viruses, losing once vibrant energy, losing the will to live. Those once bright and intelligent had their development halted, for food and the energy needed to sustain growth dwindled. Children began to die in an epidemic of economic genocide, enacted and enforced by the American Empire, as always tightening the noose on the sanctions regime, as always caring nothing for the plight of millions of Iraqis. An entire generation of Iraqi children had perished, vanished from the Earth, never more able to play and dream and grow up, never able to experience the life we all strive to have.
After a decade of sanctions, up to one million Iraqi children had died, with 500,000 adults buried in graves as well, the products of easily preventable disease, the products of a nation not being allowed to have medicine, supplies and the necessary machines that can save lives. Close to 5,000 children were dying every month, to say nothing of those whose brain and body development became stagnant due to malnutrition. By the beginning of the 21st century, the American Empire had caused the death of 1.5 million Iraqis, spirits like you and I, never to take a breath of air or a gulp of water, never having the opportunity to grow old and enjoy the wonders of life, perishing in a war upon the Iraqi people they were impotent to wage war against.
The seeds of Empire had been planted, cast upon soils of genocide, watered with the blood of dead Iraqi children, winds of devastating silence spreading disease and viruses and cancer and mutations to all corners of Mesopotamia, affecting rich and poor, Shiite and Sunni, its invisible wickedness scattering itself into young and old, indiscriminately securing new victims through the inhalation of oxygen.
By the time new Pearl Harbors had been concocted by the Empire, by the time towers were demolished and the American people became the obedient warmongers of those cheerleaders pretending to be leaders, by the time Iraq had been chosen for destruction, invasion and occupation, up to two million Iraqis had died at the hand of the Evil Empire, victims of sanctions, a genocide in itself, a Holocaust by any definition, though only a precursor to what was yet to come.
The devastation of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has brought unfathomable levels of misery and suffering to the Iraqi people. The utter debacle that is Iraq, many would say the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy, has become a monument to human wickedness, yet at the same time it represents one of the most egregious criminal enterprises in the history of humankind.
For what transpires today, and what has transpired for the last four years, cannot be labeled as a mistake, or a lie, or a quagmire. What it is, indeed, what it has always been, is a crime against humanity, war crimes of the highest order, a conspiracy that has led to the collapse of Iraq as a state and to a creation of a Holocaust that will in the end, years from today – when combined with the economic genocide of the 1990’s, endemic disease and the radiation poisoning that will kill for decades to come – have cost the lives of anywhere from four to six million human beings, to say nothing of the refugee crisis, the mass displacement of people, ethnic cleansing, the loss of property, collapse of society, of lives altered, nation shattered and child development damaged.
The Iraq War represents humanity at its worst, with the elite of the Empire destroying a nation as an excuse to rebuild it, caring nothing for dark skinned Arabs, yet claiming contracts in the billions of dollars, as always designed to pillage the American treasury and rob the people. Meanwhile, the American masses have and continue to sit silently in lazy obedience and acquiescence while war crimes and crimes against humanity are committed in our name. Like the Good Germans of World War II, millions of Americans will one day claim they had no idea what was being done in Iraq, all the while knowing that comfort and gluttony helped maintain silence and willful ignorance to one of the worst cases of human wickedness ever to rise from the violent nature of humankind. To millions of Americans, the latest gossip from tele-trash and infotainment has more value than a Holocaust presently being waged by our government.
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