Ukraine conflict exposes West's hypocrisy

As the US and Europe weep for Ukraine, what their extensive reports and images fail to show are the corpses of the forgotten Iraqis, Afghans and other people in the region torn to shreds by the West's war machine. 

Condemnations are mounting against Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, contrary to the global impunity that the US and the Europeans were met with following war crimes in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

In early 2003, the US invaded Iraq under the later debunked pretext that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

It withdrew soldiers from Iraq between 2007 and 2011 but redeployed them in 2014 along with other partners to allegedly counter the threat of the Daesh terrorist group.

Iraq managed to end the territorial rule of the Takfiri outfit in the country thanks to the sacrifices of the national army as well as the anti-terror Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) or Hashd al-Sha’abi, which had the backing of neighboring Iran.

However, Washington remained in occupation of Iraq in defiance of a resolution that required its withdrawal. The resolution was passed by the Arab country’s parliament on January 5, 2020, two days after the US assassinated Iran’s anti-terror commander General Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi trenchmate Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of the PMU.

The US military declared the end of its combat mission in Iraq in December 2021, but said it would keep a number of troops in the country there under the guise of training Iraqi forces or playing an advisory role.

The Middle East Eye (MEE) news portal said the war machine unleashed an orgy of death in Baghdad, which unfolded to hysterical ululations from Western newsrooms.

Unlike Russia’s military operation against Ukraine, “the Iraq war was met with no sanctions or diatribes, receiving hardly a fraction of the condemnation we hear today. In 2003, generations of Iraqis came out limping from a decade of sanctions and into the arms of another war, sugarcoated in ostensibly benign intentions by the US and UK. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had their lives ended early and quietly by UN sanctions, and those who survived were irreparably damaged by repeated air raids,” it read.

“Today, each bomb launched by Russian soldiers lays bare the West’s hypocrisy, piercing its tattered cloak of righteousness and morality.”

Iraq War: From 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' to 'Operation Inherent Resolve' and beyond

Today marks the nineteenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq on the false pretext of destroying the country’s weapons of mass destruction.

The article, written by journalist Nabil Salih, said the US invasion of Iraq did not bring about democracy for the country but rather diseases for its children.

“It seems that the Iraqi babies born with encephalocele, cleft lips, and spina bifida are not enough of a reminder that it was not democracy, but depleted uranium and white phosphorous that the US was spreading in places that definitely had no interest in them,” it added.

“In the face of this forgetfulness and denial of our pain and our dead, I feel violated. There is no escape from the beasts of trauma when acknowledgment, let alone accountability, is absent.”

The Iraq Body Count database documented 315 daily civilian deaths during the US invasion of Iraq, from 20 March to 9 April 2003, according to the article. More than 22,000 others were wounded during the invasion phase alone.

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