Étiquettes
Friday, August 2, marked the 29th anniversary of Operation Desert Shield, the military action that heralded the onset of the Gulf War in Iraq. That conflict, shifting from one iteration to the next, never ended.
Desert Shield became Desert Storm, which then became a long, violent police action under the Clinton administration. During that period, sanctions against Iraq were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. Smaller punitive attacks augmented the body count during this time. When confronted with these figures, then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright said, “The price was worth it.”
After the “election” of George W. Bush and the subsequent terrorist attacks of September 11, the Iraq War entered a new and far more violent stage. The 2003 re-invasion of Iraq, undertaken with a much smaller international coalition and buoyed by brazen lies from U.S. and British intelligence, killed, maimed and displaced millions of civilians.
At almost the same time as active combat was reinitiated in Iraq, the U.S. opened a parallel front in what became known as the war on terror, this time in Afghanistan. In the 17 years since our conflict in that country began, hundreds of thousands of civilians have also been killed or displaced, and thousands of U.S. and coalition troops have been killed or wounded.
The dying has not ended in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“At least two Iraqi people were killed and 20 others injured in a suicide bombing near a Shiite mosque in southwestern Baghdad,” Iraqi News reported on July 15. “Violence in the country has surged further with the emergence of Islamic State extremist militants who proclaimed an ‘Islamic Caliphate’ in Iraq and Syria in 2014.”
Groupe Gaulliste Sceaux 