THE SHAME AND SHOCK OF IRAQ

America's shame and shock is called Iraq and yet the mainstream media continue to down play the blatant hubris and criminal arrogance of the Cheney/Bush administration and outright avoidance of the human cost ~ one million Iraqi dead, five million displaced and hundreds of thousand Iraqi widows and orphans as well the disgraceful after effects of the illegal use of  depleted uranium munitions: Allen L Roland

"God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands." - George W. Bush justifying Iraq war

"If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the lord God will always help us:" Adolf Hitler, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg held on 3 Oct. 1937

On July 7, 2010 I wrote Iraq is America's Gaza and almost three years later it remains the same if not worse  ~ Iraq is America's Gaza and, like Gaza, it cries for justice to a world which would rather ignore its plight as well as America's and Great Britain's role in this murderous error of judgement . Our karmic debt, like Israel's with Gaza, is immeasurable. See article ~

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/iraq-is-americas-gaza.html

Let's make this crystal clear ~ The Bush/Blair illegal war against Iraq was the willful planned destruction of a civilization and the same consciousness is obviously at work in the current Obama dismemberment of Afghanistan.

American/British war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan ~ RT News, must see 9 minute video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoK-HpkVKT4

As James Petras points out in his August, 2009 article THE DESTRUCTION OF A CIVILIZATION ~ " The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first seven years after Bush invaded in March 2003 ...The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation of Iraq was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war ( by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country ) as the first ' domino' in a series of wars to ' re-colonize' the MIddle East .. Conflagrating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests , the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic party first backed President bush and later President Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan." See article:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article233342.htm

Here's the current state of Iraq according to SFGate.com but note these figures are very similar to occupied Gaza.

Health: Iraq's child mortality rate has increased by 150% since 1990, when U.N. sanctions were first imposed.

Education: By 2008, only 50% of primary school-age children were attending class, down from 80% in 2005, and approximately 1,500 children were known to be held in detention facilities.

Children: In 2007, there were 5 million Iraqi orphans~ according to government officials.

Refugees: More than two million Iraqis are refugees and almost three million internally displaced : 33% percent ( 500,000 people ) live as squatters in slum areas.

Water: 70% of Iraqis do not have access to potable water.

Jobs: Unemployment is as high as 50% officially, 70% unofficially.

Poverty: 43% of Iraqis live in abject poverty.

Sanitation: 80% of Iraqis do not have access to effective sanitation.

As Frank Rich wrote recently in the New York Times ~ "It's too early to say what the war's lasting impact on America (or Iraq or the Middle East) will be, but as for the current impact at home, any accounting must begin with the human cost. As David Rieff, a war opponent, wrote this week: "Could anyone who supported this war today encounter a relative, spouse, or friend of one of the American soldiers who was killed or grievously injured in Iraq and tell them with a straight face that this war was worth their sacrifice?" See article ~ http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/265-34/16617-how-iraq-wounded-america

Bush, Cheney and Obama; Two unindicted war criminals and their presidential enabler and protector.

Iraq cries out for justice but our war crimes still remain unpunished and unacknowledged. Nicolas J.S. Davies makes the same point recently in AlterNet ~ " The reality of the "accumulated evil" unleashed on the people of Iraq by the "supreme international crime" of aggression has been painstakingly obscured behind a tapestry of lies.  Our military leaders may be chronically unable to win a war in another country, but they sure know how to wage a propaganda war in America:

- Fantastical notions of the accuracy of "precision" weapons obscured the widespread slaughter and destruction of the invasion, which unleashed  29,200 bombs and missiles in the first month of the war and  killed tens of thousands of civilians.

- Reports by the Iraqi Health Ministry in 2004 that occupation forces were killing far more civilians than were killed by "insurgents"  were efficiently suppressed.

- Epidemiologists who estimated that  650,000 Iraqis had died by 2006 were ignored or dismissed.  As the war went on, the number of dead  probably reached a million by 2008."

Davies correctly asserts the most disturbing face regarding this illegal and uneccessary occupation of a foreign country ~  "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the transition from Bush to Obama was that the new President not only failed to hold U.S. officials criminally accountable for their crimes but in fact embraced the doctrines and policy developed under Bush and expanded their application to U.S. policy around the world.  Obama's  ever-expanding drone strikes and doubling of Special Forces operations  from 60 to 120 countries are spreading the violence, lawlessness and instability of Bush's "war on terror" to the four corners of the Earth … The United States has a legal and moral duty to pay war reparations to Iraq to help its people recover from the results of aggression, genocide and war crimes - this is a central demand of one very special group of Americans whose experiences and sacrifices make them uniquely qualified to press such a demand:  Iraq Veterans Against the War."

See article ~

http://www.alternet.org/world/10-years-after-invasion-america-destroyed-iraq-our-war-crimes-

And who made money on the Iraq war ? Dick Cheney's Halliburton cashed in for $39 billion on the shame and shock of Iraq.

" I believe very deeply in the proposition that what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do. It was hard to do. It took a long time. There were significant costs involved." Dick Cheney

"freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." George W. Bush

"Iraq is sort of a situation where you've got a guy who drove the bus into the ditch. You obviously have to get the bus out of the ditch, and that's not easy to do, although you probably should fire the driver." Barack Obama, The Daily Show, Nov. 7, 2005

"Never in these long years have we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe!" : Adolf Hitler - Nuremberg Sept. 13, 1936.

The shame and shock of Iraq must begin with accountability and end with justice. Humanity demands it !

Allen L Roland

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-shame-and-shock-of-iraq.html

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private Skype consultations (allen@allenroland.com )

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

SHOEING OF BUSH WAS THE PEOPLE'S VERDICT OF IRAQ OCCUPATION

In this image from APTN video an Iraqi journalist throws his shoes at US President George W. Bush, while screaming “This is your farewell, you dog” during a news conference with Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2008, in Baghdad, Iraq.

It was just three years ago that Iraq journalist Muntadhar Al-Zaidi rightfully threw his shoes at George W Bush as a gesture of utter contempt for trying to justify an illegal attack and occupation of his country at the expense of millions of lives ~ and electrified the world in the process. There are no heads held high, as Obama claims, pursuant to our misadventure in Iraq but instead constant denial of the deep guilt and shame regarding the unnecessary, cruel and murderous havoc we have wrought on this sovereign country: Allen L Roland

FALLUJAH, Iraq ~ Hundreds of Iraqis set alight U.S. and Israeli flags on Wednesday as they celebrated the impending pullout of American forces from the country in the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah. Shouting slogans in support of the “resistance,” the demonstrators held up banners and placards inscribed with phrases like, “Now we are free” and “Fallujah is the flame of the resistance.”

In Iraq, they are rightfully considered freedom fighters against the American occupying force of 9 years as the Obama administration attempts to spin an obvious defeat of historic proportions into peace with honor ~ think Vietnam.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/14/hundreds-in-fallujah-burn-u-s-flag-to-celebrate-troops-pulling-out-of-iraq/

As an online commentator and columnist and in the spirit of Iraqi shoe thrower Muntadhar Al-Zaidi, I am throwing both my shoes today at President Barack Obama for continuing to rationalize the Bush/Cheney lie regarding our illegal attack and occupation of Iraq ~ and attempting to airbrush an obvious defeat of our imperialistic Neocon agenda in Iraq with words like “honor “ and “Sacrifice “.

Last Thursday in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Mr. Obama said the US military was leaving Iraq with "heads held high", and thanked military families for sharing in the troops' sacrifice. In essence, President Barack Obama used his speech to US troops to embrace the nine-year occupation of Iraq, that he had originally opposed and declared dumb, and to declare the blatant destruction of the country a “success. Nearly 1.5 million Americans served in Iraq, with 30,000 wounded and nearly 4,500 dead, Mr. Obama said, but "those numbers don't tell the whole story of Iraq".

So here’s the whole story, along with both of my shoes, Mr. Obama ~

1. Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered In US War And Occupation Of Iraq 1,455,590

2. Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In America's War On Iraq: 4,801 www.icasualties.org/oif/

3. Number of U.S. Military Personnel wounded in Iraq : 54,834

4. Number of Iraq war widows 750,000

5. Number of orphaned Iraqi children: One million

6. Number of Iraqis displaced from their country: 4.5 Million

7. Number of Iraqi prisoners in American jails in Iraq: 50,000

8. Number of war handicapped persons in Iraq : 60,000

9. Number of unemployed in Iraq : 30% +

10. Iraq is rated the fourth most-corrupt country in the world according to the watchdog group Transparency International.

See the Human Cost of Iraq : http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/

It is obvious that the illegal war and occupation of Iraq was intended to show the extent of America’s power (remember Shock and Awe) but instead it only succeeded in showing the limits of American Imperialism as well as its self defeating role as a hated global bully.

And now we have fresh evidence of U.S. Iraqi atrocities, revealed yesterday by the New York Times, in transcripts of military interviews from the investigation into the Haditha massacre of 2005 ~ which were found at a trailer in a junkyard in Baghdad, which specializes in selling trailers and office supplies left over from American military base closings. http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/308-12/8918-documents-reveal-us-massacre-in-haditha-iraq

Excerpt: "The documents ~ many marked secret ~ form part of the military's internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers."

A Iraqi Girl Tells of U.S. Attack in Haditha

2 minute Video: Ten-year-old Iman Walid witnessed the killing of seven members of her family in an attack by American marine in Haditha and exclaims “ I hate Americans”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13452.htm

So who made money on the Iraq war and occupation?

A rhetorical question for which you already know the answer ~ the Military Industrial Complex and the military contractors (mercenaries) who made and are still making millions if not billions of dollars on this illegal war and occupation and they will most certainly remain in Iraq to protect their blood stained interests. They are the vultures who feed on the victims of our rapacious greed and imperialistic adventures ~ as well as financially line the pockets of our elected political leaders and President.

So, on the third anniversary of Muntadhar Al-Zaidi’s shoeing of George W Bush ~ which I consider the inspirational start of the worldwide Occupy Protest movement ~ let’s review with Paul Jay, senior editor of the Real News Network, the events of that day as experienced by Al-Zaidi himself in a 7 minute video interview from Beirut. Al-Zaidi fully explains why he did it and how “I expected to be killed the day I threw my shoes at Bush.”

TRNN Exclusive: The man that "shoed" Bush

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5131

“Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.” Vaclav Havel~ ( who died today at 75 tears old )

Allen L Roland

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/shoeing-of-bush-was-peoples-verdict-of.html

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net