Holding Them Accountable

"Iraq is not a perfect place but we are leaving a sovereign, stable and self-reliant country with a representative government elected by its people. This is an extraordinary achievement and today we remember everything you did to make it possible. Years from now your legacy will endure in the freedom of our children and our grandchildren." U.S. President Barack Obama

Would that it were so. The ill-considered U.S. invasion/occupation of Iraq took a country that suffered hugely under the iron fist of a tyrant who indulged in mass murder, violated the human rights of his countrymen, threatened the stability of the Middle East, invaded a neighbour, fought a horrendously bitter war with another neighbour - but kept the toxic animosities of sectarian violence from erupting.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in the almost-decade of U.S. occupation. Having removed a deadly adder, the American invasion of Iraq loosed deadly scorpions who came out in their droves to massacre one another in the stealth of night and the exercise of morbid hatred for one another. Their presence, as hated foreigners in the alienated Middle East, hastened the arrival of viciously fanatical Islamists to Iraq to further threaten, destabilize and slaughter.

The American military forces that once stood at 170,000 have now departed, less the 4,500 American soldiers who departed life fighting for their country in a strange and foreign land. Americans sacrificed their lives, and many American soldiers sacrificed their health and their limbs obeying their Commander-in-Chief's demands commanding that they fight on behalf of their country. Vanquish the enemy where he lives, or face him where they live. But Baathist-governed Iraq had no relations with al-Qaeda.

Americans see themselves with pride. They liberated a people from the deadly tyranny of a monster. Kurdish Iraqis are doing very well indeed. The Sunni and the Shia perhaps less well, having traded places, with the Shia now in the ascendancy and the Sunni accepting their fate as the lesser-favoured of a government that has far more now in common now with their neighbour, Iran, than with much of the Middle East.

Whatever their brand of Islam, however, few regret the departure of the Americans with perhaps the exception of whatever few Christian remnants are now left in Iraq.

"We are proud to have driven the occupier out of Iraq, at the cost of enormous sacrifices. Those who destroyed Iraq paid the price because the people here held them accountable."