The military precision with which words crackled from the deposition of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the inquiry conducted by a Republican chairman of the Senate Committee can only leave the world to infer that the whole inquiry was nothing but a great whitewash. Their regret and sorrow did not show on their poker faces.
The whole exercise was meant to save the topmost culprits in the chain of command, who were not only responsible for the illegal invasion of a UN member country, but who had also worked up unwarranted hate propaganda against Iraq. This hate and derision became the hallmark of the invasion of Iraq.
The people of Iraq bore no grudge against the US, even though the US had been the prime culprit in imposing UN sanctions against the Iraqi people for over a decade, when hundreds of thousands of Iraqi babies died of malnutrition and disease.
The actual fight was almost mechanical, but the ground activities by US armed forces had been carried out while demonizing Iraqis as enemies from the Islamic world, who deserve to be wiped out or at least humiliated and debased. The arrogance and derision spewed forth by US President George W. Bush against former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and, by extension, the Iraqi people themselves, was the main motivation for the American and British soldiers to treat the civilians with contempt and disdain.
To expect that the soldiers would have behaved in any other way would be to fool the American people and the world at large. If accountability is to be followed with full respect for the demands of justice, the buck should stop with the impeachment of Bush and dismissal of Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the people who had unilaterally abused all the resources of the US as a nation without any reference to either the American people or the world at large.
This whole exercise is being staged to paint the US and Bush as the most humane and law-abiding entities in the world. The stark truth is that Bush and his country stand ruthlessly exposed as blatantly and recklessly thwarting the letter and spirit of international laws. Bush has turned the US into an outlaw country.
Ghulam Muhammed
Mumbai, India
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