Iraq, 2013: The Horrors Remain the Same -- Rape, Executions and Torture Abound

From Al Jazeera courtesy of AlterNet:

Heba's story, horrific as it is, unfortunately is but one example of what a recent report from Amnesty International refers to as "a grim cycle of human rights abuses" in Iraq today.

The report, "Iraq: Still paying a high price after a decade of abuses", exposes a long chronology of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees committed by Iraqi security forces, as well as by foreign troops, in the wake of the US-led 2003 invasion.

And 

"Death sentences and executions are being used on a horrendous scale," Amnesty International's Hadj Sahraoui said in the groups recent report. "It is particularly abhorrent that many prisoners have been sentenced to death after unfair trials and on the basis of confessions they say they were forced to make under torture."

"It is high time that the Iraqi authorities end this appalling cycle of abuse and declare a moratorium on executions as a first step towards abolishing the death penalty for all crimes," he added.

More here.

Okay, so why did we invade Iraq again?  

The biggest reason offered by the Bush administration was to get those weapons of mass destruction.  But they weren't there, so we failed to accomplish that goal.  And we wanted to get rid of the WMD because we were afraid that Iraq might hand them over to Al Qaeda.  But there was no connection between Iraq, a secular military dictatorship, and Al Qaeda, a radical fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization--indeed, the desert nation and the jihadist group were at ideological odds with one another, so it was extraordinarily unlikely that the two would ever collaborate in the first place.  So that's another failure, pretty much from the get-go.

What else?  There were also the unofficial reasons.  It was pretty clear at the time that we wanted to get our fingers into Iraq's massive oil deposits in some way, or to "control the spigot" as Noam Chomsky and others asserted.  There was also much speculation that we wanted to create a permanent US military presence in the region pretty much because of all that oil.  Of course, that project went to hell because the occupation was botched so badly.  So we eventually left.  Without accomplishing the unofficial agenda, either.

I guess that just leaves us with "liberation."  You know, freeing the Iraqi people from the tyranny and oppression of Saddam Hussein.  Bringing freedom and democracy to the Fertile Crescent because we're America, and that's what America does.  But no.  We didn't pull that one off, either.  In fact, it's sounding now like the regime we installed is trying to outdo its predecessor.  So billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dead bodies later, Iraq is pretty much the same as it was before we invaded.

I'd call the Iraq invasion the biggest failure in US history, but then that would be giving short shrift to the African slave trade and the Native American genocide.  That is, there's no such thing as "American Exceptionalism," and it should by now be achingly obvious that, when we put our minds to it, we can be as brutal and stupid as the worst the human race has ever created.

We won't move forward as a people until we've admitted this essential truth about ourselves.

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