What does the U.S. want in Iraq?

Manuel E. Yepe

24/08/2014

Opinión

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“We have been at war with Iraq for 24 years, starting with Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990. Shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait that year, the propaganda machine began agitating for a U.S. attack on Iraq. We all remember the appearance before Congress of a young Kuwaiti woman claiming that the Iraqis were ripping Kuwaiti babies from incubators. The woman turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and the story was false, but it was enough to turn the U.S. public's opposition into support for an attack.”

“What Has US Accomplished in Iraq?” asks controversial politician Ron Paul, a physician, writer, former Republican congressman from Texas, nominated by the unusual Libertarian party in the 1988 elections, and twice a candidate in the Republican presidential primaries in 2008 and 2012. Paul reminds us that the second Iraq war in 2003 cost the U.S. some $2 trillion, and more than one million deaths have occurred as a result of that war.

The U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein and put into place a puppet, Nouri al-Maliki. But after eight years, last week the U.S. engineered a coup against Maliki accusing him of misrule and divisiveness. But what really irritated the U.S. government –according to Ron Paul– was his 2011 refusal to grant immunity to the thousands of U.S. troops Obama wanted to maintain in the country.

Paul recalls that early this year, a radical Islamist group, ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) –also named by others EEIL, ISIL, the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda, or simply The Caliphate–occupied a broad area in Iraq with a striking offensive.

The organization had been operating in Syria, seeking the overthrow of the Syrian government. It had already obtained a broad array of sophisticated U.S. weapons in Syria, very often capturing them from other Washington-approved opposition groups, and abundantly supplied by the US government in its effort to violently overthrow the government of President Bashar al Assad, but lacking capable allies.

According to Paul, it has been widely claimed that fighters from the Islamic fundamentalist organization participated in secret CIA training camps in Jordan and Turkey.

Recently, ISIS became the target of a new U.S. bombing campaign in Iraq. The pretext for the latest U.S. attack was the plight of a religious minority in the Kurdish region currently under ISIS attack. The U.S. government and media warned that up to 100,000 people from this group, including some 40,000 stranded on a mountain, could be slaughtered if the US did not intervene at once. Americans unfortunately, once again, fell for this propaganda and U.S. bombs began to fall on Iraq.

Later, however, it was determined that only about 2,000 were on the mountain and many of them had been living there for years! They didn't want to be rescued!

Paul asks, “Why is it that the U.S. government did not say a word when three out of four Christians were forced out of Iraq during the 10-year U.S. occupation? Why has the U.S. said nothing about the Christians who were slaughtered by its allies in Syria? What about all the Palestinians killed in Gaza, or the ethnic Russians killed in eastern Ukraine?

The humanitarian situation was cynically manipulated by the Obama administration –and echoed by the U.S. media– to provide an excuse for the president to attack Iraq again. President Obama has started another war in Iraq and Congress has been completely silent.

Ron Paul concludes his comments, pointing out that “After 24 years, we are back where we started. Isn't it about time to re-think this failed interventionist policy? Isn't it time to stop trusting the government and its war propaganda? Isn't it time to leave Iraq alone?”

Ron Paul has been described as a conservative and a libertarian. He believes that "the role of government should be to foster national defense, a system of courts for civil disputes, a criminal court for acts of force and fraud, and almost nothing else." He has been characterized as “intellectual godfather of the Tea Party Movement”.

Rand Paul, one of Ron’s four children, has been a senator from the state of Kentucky since 2010 and is considered a strong candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2015.

August 23, 2014.

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs4162.html

https://www.alainet.org/es/node/102696