{"id":10785,"date":"2013-10-02T12:33:24","date_gmt":"2013-10-02T12:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=10785"},"modified":"2013-10-02T12:34:31","modified_gmt":"2013-10-02T12:34:31","slug":"the-great-non-story-of-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=10785","title":{"rendered":"The great ‘non-story’ of Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"iraq2\"<\/a>By Neil Clark<\/p>\n

Another day and yet more death and destruction in the Middle East country.<\/p>\n

The latest violence has killed at least 54 people and injured over 100 others. In July, over 1,000 people were killed and over 2,300 wounded.<\/p>\n

You probably think I\u2019m talking about Syria. But I\u2019m not. I\u2019m talking about Iraq. The country that George W. Bush and Tony Blair ‘liberated\u2019 in 2003. The western military intervention was, we were told, going to usher in a wonderful era of democracy, freedom and human rights. Instead, it has ushered in an appalling decade-long blood-fest, with ordinary Iraqis having to endure a living nightmare of life in what has become one of the most dangerous countries on earth.<\/p>\n

Rather like Sherlock Holmes\u2019 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the silence of pro-war commentators and politicians when it comes to the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq is most revealing.<\/p>\n

The same elite figures in the West who couldn’t stop writing or talking about Iraq in 2002 and early 2003, telling us what a terrible threat Saddam Hussein\u2019s \u2018weapons of mass destruction\u2019 were to us all, and how we needed to go to war with Iraq not only to disarm its evil dictator but to ‘liberate’ its people, are now silent in the light of the continuing bloodshed and havoc that the illegal invasion caused. In the run up to the invasion of March 2003, you couldn\u2019t switch on a television news program in Britain or America without seeing a neo-con or \u2018liberal interventionist\u2019 obsessing about Iraq. In the lead-up to war, these great \u2018humanitarians\u2019 feigned concern for the plight of Iraqis living under Saddam\u2019s dictatorship – but today show little or no concern for the plight of Iraqis being blown to pieces by bombs on a regular, almost daily basis. There are no calls from the \u2018usual suspects\u2019 for a Western \u2018humanitarian\u2019 intervention to stop the killing in Iraq. For these serial interventionists, Iraq, post-invasion, has become the greatest \u2018non-story\u2019 of the modern era. Instead, the same people who couldn\u2019t stop talking about Iraq in 2002-2003 now can\u2019t stop talking about Syria – feigning concern over the plight of Syrians in the same way they shed crocodile tears over Iraqis in early 2003.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that when it comes to casualty tolls, pro-war politicians can tell us exactly how many people have died in Syria since the violence started there in 2011, (and of course for them, all the deaths are the personal responsibility of President Assad), whereas when it comes to Iraq and the number of people who have been killed there since March 2003, there\u2019s a great deal more vagueness. \u201cWe don\u2019t do body counts on other people\u201d Donald Rumsfeld famously declared in November 2003. The Iraqis killed since March 2003 (and casualty figures vary from around 174,000 to well over one million) are, for our political elite, \u2018non-people.\u2019 In 2013, it\u2019s only dead Syrians (and Syrians whose deaths can be blamed on Syrian government forces) that matter – not dead Iraqis.<\/p>\n

Because Iraq is deemed a \u2019non-story\u2019 and our leaders never talk about the situation there, it\u2019s no surprise to see that public perceptions of the death toll are way below even the most conservative estimates. Sixty-six percent of Britons in a poll earlier this year estimated that 20,000 or fewer Iraqis had died since the invasion of 2003. Donald Rumsfeld would no doubt be delighted to hear that.<\/p>\n

If they had any sense of shame, the people who have destroyed Iraq would at least have had the grace to retire from public life. But neo-cons and liberal imperialists don\u2019t do shame or remorse. The same bunch of \u2019humanitarian\u2019 interventionists and hawks who urged the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have spent the last two years propagandizing for an attack on Syria. These manic warmongers would rather we \u2018move on\u2019 from Iraq to focus on the next Middle Eastern country on their hit list. But we must never \u2019move on\u2019 from Iraq until those who destroyed the country are put in the dock. The chaos and bloodshed we see in Iraq today is a direct consequence of the destabilizing and destructive neo-con policies of the US and Britain and those responsible for \u2018the supreme international crime\u2019 of waging a war of aggression against a sovereign state must be held to account for the enormous amount of human misery they have caused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Neil Clark Another day and yet more death and destruction in the Middle East country. The latest violence has killed at least 54 people and injured over 100 others. In July, over 1,000 people were killed and over 2,300 wounded. You probably think I\u2019m talking about Syria. But I\u2019m not. I\u2019m talking about Iraq. … Continue reading “The great ‘non-story’ of Iraq”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[492],"tags":[3387,2471,6632,6631,198,922],"class_list":["post-10785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-george-w-bush","tag-iraq","tag-neo-cons","tag-nwo","tag-syria","tag-tony-blair"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/iraq2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10785"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10788,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10785\/revisions\/10788"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}