{"id":14684,"date":"2010-09-23T14:10:21","date_gmt":"2010-09-23T20:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=14684"},"modified":"2010-09-23T14:10:21","modified_gmt":"2010-09-23T20:10:21","slug":"dirk-adriaensens-iraq-the-age-of-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=14684","title":{"rendered":"DIRK ADRIAENSENS: IRAQ: THE AGE OF DARKNESS"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Brussels Tribunal – newsletter 6<\/p>\n

IRAQ: THE AGE OF DARKNESS<\/p>\n

DIRK ADRIAENSENS<\/p>\n

Part I : \u201cSuccess\u201d, a devastating balance sheet<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the triumphalist verdict of the mainstream media was that the war had been won; Iraq was assured of a benevolent, democratic future. The Times’s writer William Rees-Mogg hymned the victory: “April 9 2003 was Liberty Day for Iraq. (\u2026) It was\tachieved by “the engine of global liberation”, the United States. “After 24 years of oppression, three wars and three weeks of relentless bombing, Baghdad has emerged from an age of darkness. Yesterday was an historic day of liberation.”[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

“The problem with this war for, I think, many Americans is that the \tpremise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid, that is Saddam having weapons of mass destruction,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters while visiting Iraq.<\/p>\n

“So when you start from that standpoint, then figuring out in retrospect\thow you deal with the war \u2014 even if the outcome is a good one from the standpoint of the United States \u2014 it will always be clouded by how it began.” [2]<\/a><\/p>\n

So here Robert Gates acknowledges that this war was illegal according to international law, because there was no \u201ccasus belli\u201d. But in the same sentence he says that the outcome has been good for the United States. What does he mean exactly? How can all the killing and destruction be a good outcome for the USA? And what about responsibilities? If you know that Iraq is still paying reparations for the invasion in Kuwait in 1990, how about the payment of reparations by the USA for the destruction it inflicted upon Iraq?<\/p>\n

“We fought together,\twe laughed together, and sometimes cried together. We stood side by side and shed blood together,” Gen. Ray Odierno told Iraqi military leaders and hundreds of American soldiers and officers during the ceremony that officially closed combat operations.”It was for the shared ideals of \t\tfreedom, liberty, and justice.”[3]<\/a> Yes, they laughed together, like in the infamous, by Wikileaks released video of the \u201cCollateral Murder\u201d helicopter gunship attack on Baghdad civilians in July 2007, that killed more than a dozen Iraqis, two of them journalists of Reuters. And blood they surely have shed together! A lot of blood of over a million mothers, fathers, children and elderly Iraqi people. All that for\t\u201cshared ideals of freedom, liberty and justice\u201d, Mr. Odierno? Well, most Iraqis don\u2019t share that view. For them, the country has slided into the age of darkness.<\/p>\n

The facts [continue<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Brussels Tribunal – newsletter 6 IRAQ: THE AGE OF DARKNESS DIRK ADRIAENSENS Part I : \u201cSuccess\u201d, a devastating balance sheet In the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the triumphalist verdict of the mainstream media was that the war … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-3OQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14684"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14689,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14684\/revisions\/14689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}