Tag: Iraq

How India Nearly Gave in to US Pressure to Enter the Iraqi Killing Zone

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While the massive 12-volume Chilcot inquiry report on the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is being parsed and debated in Britain, the return of that controversial war to news headlines around the world has revived memories of India’s close brush with disaster.

While India stayed out of the US-led ‘coalition of the willing’ in the months leading up to the invasion, pressure from Washington for Indian ‘boots on the ground’ started to ramp up once the occupation of Iraq began. For nearly two months, Lutyens’ Delhi was fully occupied with how to respond to Washington’s request – which would have meant deploying about 20,000 Indian soldiers in Iraq – with divergent opinions coming from influential voices both within and outside the government.

On March 20, 2003, US President George W. Bush announced the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “It is with the deepest anguish that we have seen reports of the commencement of military action in Iraq,” read the first line of the foreign ministry’s official response. When the Indian parliament re-convened after its recess on April 7, one of its first acts was to pass a unanimous resolution deploring the military action and its attendant regime change:

— source thewire.in | Devirupa Mitra | 19/Mar/2023

Nullius in verba

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Fighting with Rivals in Baghdad Amid Political Deadlock

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At least 30 people were killed and hundreds more injured in Iraq after armed supporters of the powerful Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr clashed with security forces in the capital of Baghdad following the cleric’s announcement Monday he would be quitting politics. The violence comes after months of political turmoil in Iraq that has seen politicians unable to form a government since parliamentary elections in October, and the prime minister said Tuesday he would “vacate his post” if the complicated political situation in the country continues. “The political parties that came to power are in reality just militias who cannot talk politics, do not understand democracy, do not understand what it means to step down once you did not win,” says Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, who joins us from Baghdad. Mohammed says the fighting fueled by

The significance of it reminded us that the powers that came — the political parties that came to power are in reality just militias who cannot talk politics, do not understand democracy, do not understand what it means to step down once you did not win. So, the only way they could resolve this problem was to go down to the streets, to invade the presidential palace and the parliament. And in the last day, they took all their machine guns and their heavy machinery with them, and they held the totality of the Iraqi people in ransom. All of us lost our well-being and were scared. We ran to our homes. People bought as much bread as they could to keep it at home, because it felt like a civil war, like

— source democracynow.org | Aug 31, 2022

Nullius in verba

Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly destroyed following the Gulf War

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The Blair Government has known, almost from the day it came to office in 1997, that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly destroyed following the Gulf War.

Of all the pro-war propaganda of Blair and Bush, and their current threats giving Saddam Hussein yet another deadline to disarm, what may be their biggest lie is exposed by this revelation.

Two weeks ago, a transcript of a United Nations debriefing of Iraqi general Hussein Kamel was obtained by the American magazine, Newsweek, and by Cambridge University analyst, Glen Rangwala (who last month revealed that Blair’s “intelligence dossier” on Iraq was lifted, word for word, from an American student’s thesis).

General Kamel was the West’s “star witness” in its case against Saddam Hussein. He was no ordinary defector. A son-in-law of the Iraqi dictator, he had immense power in Iraq; and when he defected, he took with him crates of secret documents on Iraq’s weapons programme.

KILLED IN HER BED: Little girl, aged eight, lies dead in the rubble of her home after a US missile destroyed their home in a residential area of Basra killing six. Her ten year

— source johnpilger.com | John Pilger | 13 Mar 2003

Nullius in verba