The big story today as elected by the major and not so major world media is that there had been a series of bombings in Iraq leaving quite a few corpses (BBC reports it as about 170 or thereabouts) on the streets of Baghdad. Much in line with what we had been witnessing in Iraq since Bush’s extension of his declared Crusade against ‘terrorism’ (read ‘his definition of evil’) from the rugged terrain of Afghanistan to Iraq.

170 dead in a single day due to terror bombings is hardly any news given the fact that according to UN reports, over 100 people are being killed every day in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled. This becomes even more insignificant when credible estimates (The Lancet) say that more than 655,000 civilians died in the Bush Campaign II.

On January 1, 2004, when the Iraq war didn’t even turn one, the capture of Saddam Hussein less than a month before from his spider hole hideout made George Bush appear not only sanguine about his ‘process’ towards democratization of Iraq, but confident enough to be at his humourous best with a little bit of his past romantic spice thrown in. In his speech at Lawrence C. Phipps Memorial Conference Center that day, he had to say the following:

My opponent admits that Saddam was a threat. He just didn’t support my decision to remove him from power. Maybe he was hoping Saddam would lose the next election. (Laughter.) We showed the dictator and a watching world that America means what it says. Because we acted, because our coalition acted, Saddam’s torture chambers are closed. Because we acted, Iraq’s weapons programs are ended forever.

Well, Saddam was a threat, but after the First Gulf War, he was more of a threat to his own regime and his countrymen than anyone else. Let’s not get into that now. Saddam wouldn’t have lost the next elections because just a few weeks before the Second Gulf War started, he won with a modest 100% of the electoral mandate. The question here is when George Bush was pointing the ‘watching world’ how noble his deed was to put on line the lives of his very own countrymen for the good of the whole world, would he now be able to ask the ‘watching world’ to look the other way round?

Saddam’s torture chambers are now open again, this time run by his enemies. The dictator and his three henchmen were executed in the same infamous torture and execution building that was once run by Saddam’s intelligence agencies. Scores are being executed every month in Iraq officially in the same buildings that were used to torture and execute criminals and political dissidents. Only this time, the executioners have changed. If it were Sunnis then, it is the Shias now; and it is just the official detentions and executions. The number of Iraqis killed in military-style executions by the militias of the opposing religious factions are simply beyond any measurable estimation.

As far as the Iraqi weapons programme is concerned, the new weapons programme by the Iraqi insurgents, the terrorists operating from there and other splinter groups are killing more people everyday resulting in a toll now that would have been labeled as ‘genocide’ had Saddam’s unconventional weapons been used.

With close to a million dead now, who is going to be accountable for all these meaningless murders?

We might be inclined to jump to the conclusion and sing in unison that it is George W Bush. But wait! In the same speech on Jan 1, 2004, George Bush had to say the following as well:

I bring greetings from First Lady Laura Bush. (Applause.) She is a fabulous First Lady, and she is a wonderful wife. I was a lucky guy when she said, yes. There I was on bended knee in Midland, Texas. I said, “Would you marry me?” She said, “Just so long as you don’t get into politics.” (Laughter.)

Only if Laura had stuck to her convictions, things might have, just might have been different. Who knows?

However, ceaseless human deaths cannot be a subject matter of humour. The Iraq campaign was America’s biggest gift to the terrorists. George Bush’s romance with democracy, freedom and other American values that he tried to forcibly make a country with a completely different culture to adopt backfired severely.

Saddam Hussein might have been a dictator, but Iraq was always secular under his rule. Religious fanatics were hunted and put down and the influence of Iran’s mullahcracy was kept abay. People enjoyed more freedom in Iraq than other mid-eastern country like Saudi Arabia. They would have been as prosperous and peaceful as say the subjects of UAE or Qatar if not better off had not the noose-like sanctions were imposed on Iraq after its Kuwait misadventure.

The question to be asked today is given a chance, would the Iraqis like to go back to the old Saddam days of the eighties or even in the nineties (when the sanctions were in place) or they are enjoying their democratic freedom now at the cost of the scores of lives snuffed by the daily violence. Were they better off with having a mixed Sunni-Shia family with common kids or is it better now when crossing a Shia ghetto by a Sunni man or vice-versa may mean death?

Sometimes, blind romance may cause irreparable heartbreaks. George Bush might just be realizing that. As far as the solution for Iraq is concerned, only the Iraqis themselves can sort this out should they desire to find a way out of this abyss and labyrinth of bloodshed.

Image: BBCNews