Three years after the invasion of Iraq

Three years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Washington and its allies insist that Operation Iraqi Freedom will end in victory, despite ever-increasing bloodshed in the country. Tajudeen Abdul Raheem hones in on the architects of the invasion, George Bush and Tony Blair.

This week is the anniversary of the illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. President Bush and his British poodle, Tory Blair, have both been trying to put a spin on their continuing destruction of the country and its people to their very sceptical compatriots and a world that has stopped believing anything said by these global con men who cannot be relied on to even declare their names without inviting suspicions!

The war was never sanctioned by the rest of the world and despite many diabolical attempts in the past three years to give it some kind of moral and diplomatic seal of approval Washington and London remain isolated.

Blair never had a united country, party, parliament or government behind his militarism. That was why he had to lie about the 'imminent and immediate danger ' that Iraq allegedly constituted. The Weapons of Mass Deception (WMD) and 45-minute strike capacity of Saddam Hussein have been exposed for what they were: fantasies of a duplicitous war monger determined to please his American bosses at any cost. He has been crashing down the hill of public trust since the invasion. His handler, George Bush, initially manufactured a national coalition behind him but knowing what they now know millions of Americans have discovered that their dumb President used 9/11 to falsely lure them into an unjust war without end. The easy victory he promised has become a nightmare, forcing parallels with Vietnam.

Worse for Bush, his loony right intellectual and political gurus who provided specious ideological justification for the invasion are recanting in their droves. He has become a disciple whose prophet has been exposed as a phony.

Listen to two of the most hawkish war mongers. The first, Francis Fukuyama, the apostle of End of History and the ever rising advance of Western liberalism recently said: "By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for Jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.”

The second is fellow Republican hawk and a senior official before conflict of interest forced him out, Richard Perle. He said: "The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong. We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners."

Others who supported the war have become publicly disillusioned. Despite their confessions though there is one thing common to all of them. They are recanting for American reasons without any concern for the Iraqis. When they talk of 'Casualties in Iraq' they do not mean the innocent Iraqi children, women and men murdered en masse at weddings, naming ceremonies or in detention centres – the so-called 'collateral damage' of Bush' s adventurism. They are only concerned about the couple of thousand of American and British killed in the war. While they are still counting their casualties in the lower denomination of four digits the Iraqi casualties are in the hundreds of thousands. In their minds it's only American and British lives that matter. The rest are just statistics. Even in death a Westerner's life is still worth more than that of other people. That's why Bush could falsely claim that 30,000 Iraqis 'more or less' have been killed in this war. Could he have said 'more or less' about American life?

As the late Bob Marley said: "You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time."

The Hausa also say: "Mara gaskiya ko cikin ruwa sai ya yi gumi" (a dishonest person will sweat even if he is in water!). Bush and Blair are liars and murderers, who if only the world is fairer, should have been hauled before the International Criminal Court as war criminals who have continued to kill innocent civilians in another country that posed no threat to their countries.

The only other alternative now is to wait for their exits. In the case of Bush, there is a date which cannot come sooner. But Blair is the weaker of the two monsters. The Labour Party should do the world a big favour and begin a long process of atonement for the needless death of innocent Iraqis by changing the locks to 10 Downing Street. Blair’s latest exposure of offering peerages and other national honours for undeclared 'donations' or 'loans' to the Labour Party just shows how cynical and amoral a politician this man, (B-Liar) is.

If he had been an African leader the British government would have been one of the first big mouths to be condemning his corruption and lack of transparency. Blair helped Bush to undermine international law and he has now domesticated the same skills by finding loopholes in laws passed by his own government on party financing. The British people have enough very British reasons to be rid of this fraudster whom Nigerians would have easily recognise as a '419' Premier.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

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