IRAQ: Five Years, And Counting

Analysis by Dahr Jamail

"......With more than a million dead, more than four million displaced, and another four million in need of emergency aid, a third of Iraqis are displaced, in need of emergency aid -- or dead.

All this Cheney calls a "successful endeavour"[It depends on your definition of success. If it is defined as the destruction of Iraq as a modern state and society, then Cheney is right. From the USraeli perspective, it has been a success ]......

Baghdad has become the most dangerous city in the world, largely as a result of a U.S. policy of pitting various Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups against one another [ and the fools are doing it with gusto ]. Today Baghdad is a city of walled-off Sunni and Shia ghettoes, divided by concrete walls erected by the U.S. military.

These areas even fly their own flags; Sunni areas fly the old Iraqi flag, Shias use the new version, and the Kurds have their own flag.

Ethnic and sectarian cleansing strategies, backed by occupation forces, have virtually eliminated all mixed areas of Baghdad.

Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain, also in Iraq, met with Iraqi leaders as part of a Senate Armed Services Committee fact-finding mission. He, like Cheney, said he would support the Iraqi government and maintain a long-term military commitment in Iraq.

"The surge is working," McCain told reporters, referring to the troop build-up in Baghdad.

With "enduring" U.S. military bases established in Iraq, and an embassy in Baghdad the size of the Vatican City, there appears to be no end in sight for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. "