I think that it may be more than a little naive to claim that the US introduced torture, corruption, and civil war to Iraq.

In fact, we simply replaced the Iraqi brand of those elements with our own.

q

The Israeli faction that completely controls American foreign policy decided it was time to encircle Iran creating massive bases and embassies in Afghanistan and Iraq to keep the nuclear monopoly of Israel intact in order to continue to terrorize the middle east again reminding us why the establishment of the fanatical state of Israel with its expansionist designs was a terrible mistake.

Every single American, whether you thumped away at your keyboard, attended the odd demonstration, persistently voiced your opposition, took part in the killing or just sat on your fat ass and did nothing, bares equal responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The majority of people on this planet will never forget what you did America.

The USA over the past 40 years has managed to become the plague of the earth.

Iraq: Torture. Corruption. Civil war. America has Certainly Left Its Mark

The mark the United States has left is upon itself. It is not the Mark of Zorro or the Mark of Cain but of arrogance, cruelty and stupidity beyond any human measure.

The connection between America's rapacious disregard for the well being of others and our own accelerating slide from world pre-eminance is too complicated for my poor brain, but I know it is there. By some mysterious internal mechanism plagues tend to erupt, do their damage, and then vanish.

By every measure, individual wealth, per capita income, quality of life, education, health care, infant mortality, life expectancy, crime and incarceration rates, America is on the decline compared to the rest of the industrial world. I'm told the Shining City on a Hill doesn't much register with folks outside the country any more. Sic transit gloria mundi and good freaking riddance.

We're busy now carving our own epitaph, as we turn our fangs from expensive raids on foreign resources back to our own immigrant population and ultimately ourselves. America, Beloved Fatherland. 1776-20??. Assholes to the bitter end.

Thank you George W. Bush, Don Rumsfeld, Carl Rove, and all of your evil team that lied and distorted the truth to take America into war.
American control of more middle east oil is not worth the terrible cost of death and distruction that you caused.
These people represent evil incarnate!

Anyway, they are busy re-writing the narrative now. Up to a million Iraqis are dead. Blair cares nothing about them - they do not feature, please note, in his royalties generosity.

I had the same thought, Blair = war criminal

Hedge Yo Money empirePie August 20th, 2010

Build a white picket fence around your yard;
or better yet...
make it a thorny razor wired hedge

Make yo mamma and yo papa proud
for you are the chattel of the hood

Serve ‘the man’ to show that you made good

hedge, hegemony, ..... hedge your money
hedge on gold ..... yellow or black
let the MICC take up the slack
vote for the hacks who say they have your back
to ‘tax and spend’ so that the “others" bend

Please bend for austerity
so we can bomb for posterity

the ‘to be’ ... of the first to the post

the posterior kiss

the good-bye bend

America certainly left its mark (FOREVER) - YOU BET ...

Watch this video and see the horror unfold ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUDFicLNZ0&feature=player_embedded

A new, unspeakably cruel way to perpetrate a (slow) genocide ... poison the DNA / chromosomes of your victims and all of their offspring will suffer and die prematurely ... soon the women will refuse to become pregnant again ... or the parents will die of cancer themselves ...

http://nonuclear.se/files/busby_dysonpapers20090911.pdf

... a new Holocaust in the third millenium - "the American Way" ...

http://www.euradcom.org/publications/ecrruraniumrept.pdf

"Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain" ... (

I am just listening to the Doors, trying to hold back the tears ...

the suffering of these children is unbearable to see and even more so the injustice of it all ...

and the media is largely SILENT on this .... even Democracy Now! treats the reports of deformed and dying babies in Iraq merely as a footnote ...

oh yeah!
mission accomplified.

what do I remember most fondly of this jolly unfinished escapade?
the Mars bars littering Saddam's rathole.
beyond surreal.

robert fisk is one of the truth tellers you will NEVER see on "HARDBALL" or any MSM network.

3. The number of buildings turned to dust by 2 planes on 9/11/01.

2. The number of planes that vaporized on 9/11.

1. The number of times the above two things have ever happened in the history of the universe.

"American Football" by Harold Pinter

Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

–Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Referring to Ghandighost below, you are thinking along the same lines as I have thought for 10 years now. The tear in the fabric of science and logic that 9/11 represents is, in my, quite informed opinion I should say, is the seminal event of the first part of the 21st century. Not the invasion of Iraq, but 9/11 itself.

I have realised that since I first saw it live on TV as it was happening: 250,000 tons of concrete and steel were disintegrating in their own footprint in a cloud of powdery dust. Every law of physics, from molecular bonding to gravitational energy and laws of resistance to free-fall per Newton's Laws, the tensile properties of steel beams nearly a foot thick disappearing into thin air, was being repealed in front of my very eyes by the fiat of humans. Nature had no part in it. Nature was NOT violating its own fundamental laws. Or I was witnessing a new order of laws that had not yet been announced to the world but were now being announced by this spectacular visual experiment.

Very few understand the visceral meaning and sense of the above paragraph, especially coming from a trained physicist and mathematician like myself. It seems that you may be one of them. The mass of "ordinary people", especially those who are literarily erudite but quite innumerate and anti-science, a consequence of a "liberal arts" education, including thousands of readers and commentators of CD, this ENORMOUS event is a footnote in the grand scheme of things. For them the, the poli-science jargon and political chase of the “grand chessboard”, Brzezinski, Kissinger, oil, greed and whatnot are the determinants of history. They think that physical events are simply things that happen by "chance" having no consequence for the course of that history. While they would protest belief in the supernatural, they implicitly accept super- naturalness as routine and dismiss the greatest televised violation of the laws of science in the history of humankind as “one of those things."

I am not using “supernatural” in its traditional hocus pocus sense of religion and spirituality. I mean it in the sense of the breaking fundamental, mathematical laws of science. Consequent to 9/11, I have been forced to conclude that large masses of humans are simply no good at being able to discern a completely new phenomenon taking place in front of their eyes from what they believe to be a “trick “. For example, if we were to assemble the average, mentally dull masses of America on a field and were to demonstrate a flying elephant, only some would realise that a fundamental law of science had been broken. Most would dismiss it, in their usual simplistic cocksure way that it is a "trick" or "mass hallucination" without giving any thought to the agency that was able to bring about the "trick". This is especially true of "practical", "hardnosed", "feet-on-the ground" people, such as business people and Republicans.

Having come to realize this aspect of human nature vis-a-vis the yet, logically unexplained, 9/11 violations of the laws of physics including the most fundamental law of conservation of mass/energy evinced by Building 7, which decided to fall by itself though no plane struck it, I explain the American masses’ ignorant, non-challant, cynical attitudes as simply coping methods in the face of overwhelming and frightening strangeness. It is the self-preservation mechanism of the human brain to escape reality when it terrorizes you or shakes your beliefs to the point of insanity. The mind envelopes the mystery in a cocoon of cynicism and sarcasm such as "conspiracy theory" as a soporific.

Unfortunately, one of the leaders of this innumerate and unscientific literati is Fisk himself, who, to preserve his own sanity or hide what he knows, coined the derogatory epithet of the "truthers" for those of us who were stunned by the unexplainable science of the phenomena on 9/11. Truthers have been relegated to the ranks of “conspiracy” cranks. Yet Fisk now wants us to be surprised and mournful at the devastation that has been wrought in Iraq and in Afghanistan par 9/11. He wants us to mourn the loss of order in Iraq resulting from the fall of a tyrant, who though vicious, was a capable administrator, and be upset with the Anglo-American hegemony that made Iraq into a mess that only a 100 year rule by Saddam could have accomplished. That is, the Anglo-American hegemony that made the most educated and secular Arab country in the ME into a sectarian hellhole is a tyranny whose arrogance, inhumanity and incompetence makes Caligula look like Santa Claus

Americans cannot wrap their mind around the notion that their tyranny is much more evil and cruel than that of Saddam Hussein because it is the same mindset that cannot wrap its mind around the phenomena of 9/11. Nevertheless, I have also come to realize that this is not an American condition alone. It is the human condition. The brain-minds of humans have not evolved to grasp such profound and gigantic events. In this milieu, I am sceptical of the mob democracy of America, since it is a reckless giant loose on the world with enormous destructive military and economic power that it finds pleasure in using to inflict pain on life on Earth like a particularly psychopathic child chopping a frog’s legs. Nor do I have much faith in the American "people." Therefore, the world is in for a decade of American destructiveness until it exhausts itself economically and in human capacity.

Still, I believe that if 9/11 were revisited with a focus by truthful scientists the world over, the human race may be weaned off its torpor and enter into the domain of the intellect and out of the domain of brute force.

As I keep saying over and over...wherever the US goes (or has been), shit is sure to follow. And Iraq is no exception.

A censure of the entire human race.

The famous IPAT equation says amount of destruction is in proportion to population multiplied by affluance multipled by technology. This is true especially for the USA both locally, globally, and especially in all aspects of its wars, as the leader of industrial civilisation. Lets just call this Consuming Civilisation. (CC)

IPAT says that the most fortunate human beings in the history of CC are also the most destructive. The USA would of course claim they are the noblest and most democratic, but their waste tastes the same as everyone elses, and their is more of it. Our CC normal way of life eats up resources, and adds waste and carbon emissions to plague the globe for millenium.

With the glorification of war by the CC, IPAT adds the affluance and technology to war and has given us the great human wasters of herbicides, depleted Uranium, the cluster bomblets, drones, missiles and nuclear weapons. Great wealth is used to lay to waste all others with permanent effects. These are not just war crimes, they are the crimes of hell. Turning the earth into hell makes our CC the agency of evil, fully active and aware. There are no excuses other than total depravity.

Without using a single weapon, there are great environmental costs and corruption in fueling, feeding, housing and transporting the global military empire every day. Every day the great evil must patrol its territories, every foot, sea and air soldier fully packed and ready to inflict violence. Every day the generators must burn oil, keep the air conditioners going to avoid adaption to the climes of its conquests, and engines power the monstrous vehicles of the clones of the empire. Corporations fly their accolytes around the world in airplanes to supervise the processing of the environment.

In their homes the wealthy CC have become a consuming culture, to imbibe the rationales of continuing the empire for global production and consumption. Education for the next generation is a dangerous business, as ever more facts about the deteriorating environment and government corruption must be denied, and government lies must be upheld, so education itself must be denied to many. The mass media has become a mass of intellectual compost which buries the simple truths. The culture of CC is the beast of destruction.

The empire of CC will die as the flow of resources to consume must become less than that which can sustain it. The power and reach of CC, and its ability to re-source from anywhere, indicates that when the critical resources finally run out, and climate change is out of control, there will be very little of anything left. Then all the military and nuclear weapons in the world will not be enough to resurrect it, and their will be not enough left to fight over.

Entropy says we live in Humpty Dumpty world, and there is only one direction, and a very hard floor.

Many thanks to the commentators below (obedient Servant, Sioux Rose, VasHar Kim and others) who responded with pithy phrase and intellectual insight to my post. It is good to have thoughtfull discussion on a topic that the PTB have attempted to bury under a mountain of prevarication and totalitarian suppression of facts.

While the American mindset is,in the heartlands, peculiarly and virulently anti-intellectual and bellicose,perhaps from its puritanical Christian fundamentalism,my moniker of "reasonisreligion" comes from decades of observation of the human mind across cultures and from our fast emerging neuroscientific understanding of the brain and its evolutionary history, that human religions are deadly wasters of our innate Natural gift for communication and sharing. Agrarian religion, which degenerated from a closeness with Nature in ancient Egypt to elaborate supernatural myths enforced by priesthoods with the help of brute force, alienated humans from natural evolution to regimented societies obedient to authority without question and exploitative of Nature. 2500 years of such social conditioning, passed on from generation to generation by brainwashing children in their first five years establsihes certain brain architectures that are extremely difficult to change in later years, even with high levels of monodimensional education. What we have today throughout the world in varying degrees is the hegemony of male brute force, often supported by language crafts of religion and aristo-plutocacy.

A wise man observed nearly a century ago that it is difficult to reason with those who take authority as truth rather than truth as authority.

I don't know how to wean societies that are willing to kill others on the diktat of authority from such predilection. All I can say is that I see hope in the flowering of Nature consciousness among many young and old and rejection of authority that justifies wanton destruction of nature and other humans on religious, political and economic pretexts. Whether this flowering will proceed evolutionarily, which means a very slow process if we ever survive the coming war or wars where I fear nuclear weapons will be used, or whether there is sudden, revolutinary jump in human consciousness among a sufficiently large and coherent group of humans remains to be seen. The evolutionary history of brain that I have mulled over in the last several years tells me that human brain architectures have made sudden jumps. It is not the size of the brain. Argument on the basis of cranial size are moot, I believe because Neandertahls with larger cranial space were with Homo Sapiens very recently (30,000 years ago), but did not survive. HS did not kill them, which is itself a fact of great importance to understanding our innate nature.

Also, we now know that human language is a unique species capacity which is hardwired in that it is a syntax producing machine. But meaning (or semantics)comes from the concept,emotional, numerical and logical faculties which are separate. Consequently, after tens of thousands of years of only oral communication, writing emerged suddenly in human society for no genetic or evolutionary reasons.

Writing is that incredible leap into higher knowledge and generational transfer of knowledge. It occurred almost simultaneously in Mesopotamia and Egypt recently in eveolutionary time, about 4500 years ago. So it is possible that a large number of human psyche may get tired of permanent killing fields and jump to a shared humanity, as result of an internal or external massive shock. The Universe is huge and we are not masters of the universe.

Peace

p.s. Two and a half million Iraqis mostly Sunnis are displaced in Syria, Jordan etc. Two million more have been internally displaced. Baghdad, a mostly Sunni city is now mostly Shiite but for all of those who have been able to survive the Shia ethnic cleansing which we euphemistically called, "the Surge" there will be scores to settle. Yipee, "We won."

And the next war is around the corner, because the anit-terrorist military industrial complex trillion dollar gold rush is in full throttle.

As a victim of the United Stazi of America," or what I call the legal gang stalking nation wide spy network, that the 800000 private contractor analysts of fear mongering in Watchington preside over, for 3 years 24/7," I can tell you that our country has been hijacked by war mongering empirical thugs , and this gravy train will be protected if they have to kill , or institutionalize everyone that gets in the way.

There is no shortage of stupid , hero wannabe , 4th amendment stomping unconstitutional idiots in this country who think they are protecting our way of life by spying,following,stalking,and destroying innocent Americans who dare to use freedom of speech.

They are morons.And there puppet masters are criminals.

And apparently , it pays to spy on your neighbors, and create suspects from anti-war peace activists, anti-government tea party activists,gun owners,and anyone who talks poorly about America, because we are not creating any jobs.

Welcome to the United Stazi of America,,,,

I owe, I owe, its off to war we go.

Bornfreemen ,,, I can only hope that the next round of Wkikleaks details how to build a stazi network of spys in Iraq modeled after the stazi spy network in American..

Then, and only then will the proverbial constitutional shit hit the fan, because if all of America knew what I know, there would be some very serous ass kicking of the United Stazi of America.

Because real patriotic constitutional loving Americans , will not let the Stazi have their spy torture network.
If you are a stazi torture spy prick , you need to get out , or start looking over YOUR shoulder, because constitutional justice is coming.