E D I T O R I A L

Iraqi Cauldron: Raving and Renting

THE cauldron of violence in the hapless Iraq, a direct result of the naked American aggression is devouring more lives of innocent men, women and children. The whole Iraqi race faces the threat of being wiped out either by the American bombs rained in daily on one part or the other or by the inner sectarian strife now being abetted by the Americans. No one is safe in Iraq.  One estimate puts the number of Iraqi casualties at least at fifty thousand  since the America lead attack began three years ago. Civic life has just broken down with a little electricity, water and other amentias and the price of food and medicines skyrocketing. Thousands are fleeing every day to nearby Jordan and Syria. U.S. force levels currently are 133,000. More than 2,300 American troops have died in Iraq.

No one is safe over there and American picked up ministers admit that it is a civil war over there. It's a civil war, people are getting killed every single day, every hour ... everywhere in Iraq. It's a civil war and we're still shying away from the word civil war." Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi photojournalist, said at Reuters sponsored seminar in New York last month.

Zaki Chehab, political editor of London-based Arab newspaper Al Hayat, said security had deteriorated so much in the past year that it was no longer possible for Arab or Iraqi journalists to travel safely outside Baghdad.  And, Reuters Baghdad Bureau Chief Alastair Macdonald said the agency's about 70 Iraqi staff in some 18 cities around the country was finding it increasingly difficult to work because of sectarian tensions. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 67 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in early.

That is the situation for the media and it is worst for common unprotected persons. The talk of reconstruction in this kind of atmosphere is all delusion and deception and meant perhaps to feed the American public getting disenchanted by this war by choice. America has found no weapons of mass destruction and no al Qaeda jihads and now they have  created a whole lot of them, seem to be common refrain among the public.  There was only mass deception that has cost the American taxpayer something like 276 billion dollars.  And according to UNDP the world needed just 27 billion dollars to make everyone literate, get water supply and health care.

Situation is as horrendous and distressing in Afghanistan where the Americans attack began earlier than Iraq. The writ of the Karzai administration is limited to Kabul and Kandhar at best. Strife and violence and the bombing by American lead forces have reduced the country to stone age.

And, stung by falling acceptance percentage, President George W. Bush is planning air strikes on Iran’s nuclear installations. American newspapers tell us that the Bush administration is acutely considering options for military strikes as part of a broader strategy of coercive diplomacy to force it to abandon its alleged nuclear development programme.

Preparations for confrontation with Iran underscore how the issue has vaulted to the front of President Bush's agenda even as a relentless war in next-door Iraq is getting beyond him. Bush views Iran as a serious menace that he must deal with before his presidency ends. The new National Security Strategy has labeled Iran as the most serious challenge to the United States posed by any country.

Yet ever increasing number of military officers including serving and retired generals and specialists view this saber rattling with alarm. A strike at Iran would at best just delay its nuclear programme by a few years but could inflame international opinion against the United States, particularly in the Muslim world and especially within Iran, while making U.S. troops in Iraq targets for retaliation.

President Bush is neither sensitive to the human suffering and the bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq nor to his falling popularity ratio back home. Not more than 30 per cent Americans approve of what the American forces are doing in Iraq.

A latest poll surveyed in early March 2006 by www.WorldPublicOpinion.org revealed only 28 percent of respondents said they were confident the U.S would succeed in its aims in Iraq, down from 40 percent 18 months ago. And the public now believes by a two-to-one margin that the Iraq war was one "of choice" and that "it was not necessary for the defence of the United States".  In addition, one out of three respondents -- up from one in four in October, 2004 -- said Bush decided to go to war on the basis of assumptions that he knew were incorrect.

This is the public mood in the United States. Elsewhere it is above 80 per cent against the war.  For the first time, a majority now believes that Iraq did not have a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme, though the public is still divided on whether Iraq supported al Qaeda" the survey noted, adding that, "Such beliefs are highly correlated with support for the war."  The policies of president Bush In several key areas, including energy, Iraq, Afghanistan, global warming, democracy-promotion, and immigration are looked with skepticism and disbelief.

Administrations own credibility is surely at stake. Half of the public doesn't think it has been truthful about why the U.S. invaded Iraq, and 51 percent said they trusted the government "not too much" or "not at all" to tell the truth about relations with other countries.

Bush is not troubled for anything of the sort and would like to go down in American history as a Great War President. The blood and gore do not disturb his grand view of himself and America, a country destined to rule the world. He would surely leave the world a much dangerous place when he leaves in 2008.

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