Re: SC56

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7671

'It's Madness'.

If the scale of the unimaginable tragedy the British have wrought in Basra was not of the historical enormity which it is and for which the UK will never be forgotten and likely, never forgiven, world wide (only second to the Americans, of whose accountability for unspeakable atrocities, words temporarily fail) with Prime Minister Gordon Brown again trying to dress up defeat as victory, as the British 'left' the city last week, it would be laughable. The British actually slunk off from their illegally inhabited palace in central Basra in September, to cower in a base well outside the town, spent, redundant and now with the loss of one hundred and seventy four tragically wasted lives, for UK government lies..........

............ In context, should anyone doubt the absolute disregard of parliamentary 'democracies' for the lives of their own citizens, yet alone other humanities, expendable for oil, gas pipelines, minerals, metals, gemstones, one only has to consider yet another October stunt. On the weekend of October 18-19, 1980, a former and future CIA head, met with Iranian officials in Paris. In an act of treason (US private citizens negotiating with a foreign government without official authorization) with calculated, cold, callous ruthlessness, the pair cut a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini's clerics, to ensure that the fifty two American hostages held in Tehran, stayed hostage until after the upcoming election between President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger Ronald Reagan. The Americans in question were George Herbert Walker Bush, the former CIA Director and William Casey, the future one.

'The Republicans were terrified of an October Surprise--a move by the Carter government to free the hostages before the vote. So Bush (who became) Reagan's vice-presidential candidate--and Casey were dispatched to Paris to offer the Iranians a covert deal to keep the Americans in chains until Reagan was safely in office. The proposed payoff? A newly-elected Reagan-Bush administration would supply Khomeini's military with a secret supply of American weapons.' ( See: 'Speak Memory', Chris Floyd, Counterpunch, 9th September 2002.)

Another cynically manipulated October occurrence was Iraq's 2002 referendum, where Saddam, predictably, garnered little short of 100% of the votes, in his favor. The American and British administrations notched it up as another reason for regime change, these people needed liberation from questionable vote manipulation. No one should know better about alleged vote fixing than the Bush administration, from dimpled chads, to excluded likely Democrat voters, to accusations of eminently adjustable vote counting machines. In post-invasion Iraq they turned it in to a murderous art form, with death threats, ration coupons confiscation and no potentially murderous or otherwise, manipulation barred, to get their puppet 'government' voted in.

So what October surprises have the British left for the people of Basra? The ancient, battered, but still heart-wrenchingly beautiful (B.C., - Before 'Crusade') 'Venice of the Middle East'? They have left rubble where homes and historic buildings nurtured and were nurtured , by successive generations. They have left broken doors, windows and walls, kicked down or blown in on raids on families sleeping in their beds. They have left broken hearts and lives.

The have left fundamentalist militias they either brought in with them, or against whom they failed to control the borders (and then blamed the Iraqis.) They have confined women to their homes at best and to death, often by beheading, for even wearing makeup, at worst. Britain's finest have returned secular women to the equivalent of the burkha they were so keen to free them of in Afghanistan (nonsense of course, it was about strategic interests and a gas pipeline.)

They have taken a town, where the worst harassment a woman walking alone, through streets, by the canals, or the beauty of the Shatt Al Arab would suffer, was small, bare foot boys, selling dates, citrus fruits, sweets, who stuck like glue until they had beguilingly somehow persuaded you to buy the whole lot (then they would be back with more.) The embargo's children, providing for their families, instead of aiming to be top of the class. Britain and America's victims.

'I came to rid Basra of its enemies, and I now formally hand Basra back to its friends,' Britain's Major General Graham Binns said, before signing documents giving Iraqi forces operational control of the province, which holds most of Iraq’s proven petroleum reserves. Before Britain's invasion , Basra had few 'enemies', just the sort of policing issues found in any city. He has handed it, in fact, also to police and security forces riddled with Basra's enemies. The British being unable to speak the language, culturally clueless, know not from where their recruits have come -or if they are even Iraqis at all. They have 'handed back' their rubble and mass graves, in a city bleeding from lack of essential services, its children seeping away from malnutrition and lethal diseases resultant from the killer water supply the British army has left them with.

Seldom has: 'We gave them a wasteland and called it peace', been more appropriate....................