Is Saddam Hussein a scapegoat?

The recently sacked Donald Rumsfield was the key planner of the deals between the then US administration and Saddam Hussein.

In the 2000, US Presidential election, US Republican Party campaigned for the removal of Saddam Hussein, to get Iraq free from Saddam totalitarianism, bring democracy to Iraq and to rid Iraq of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs). The 2000 election results apparently showed that the people of United Stated trusted George W. Bush on Iraq and a Republican victory in presidential election made him the president of United States.

In 2003, the US and the UK used allegations of Iraqi WMD as a key reason for going war. The US asked the international community to take action against Saddam Hussein because Saddam had violated the United Nation Security Council Resolution 1441 regarding WMD. The US and the United Kingdom attempted to get the UN Security Council resolution approved but France, Russia and later China signalled they were not prepared to use force against Iraq.

Despite the historic opposition from the international community shown by the huge demonstrations by millions of people in almost every major city of the world, President George W. Bush put the United Nations aside, formed a coalition of the willing and on March 20, 2003, invaded Iraq through US-led forces.

Subsequently, reports from the chief US weapons inspector and other surveys revealed Iraq had no stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

The invasion of Iraq was called “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. The proclaimed goals were to disarm Iraq from WMD, make the country a safer place for Iraqi people and free from terrorists’ threats to the outside world.

Saddam claimed that his army and the people of Iraq would never let the US army return home alive and they would be buried in the streets of Iraq. Many analysts had already predicted that, as there was no exit strategy, if the operation failed a reaction could spread to the entire Middle East.

Whether President Bush accepts it or not, the reality is that since the invasion of Iraq, the death toll of US soldiers has been continuously rising. Suicide attacks and ambushes on US and western convoys are now a daily occurrence in Iraq. Iraq has never been such a divided and dangerous place.

In the last year or so the US army generals have claimed the situation in Iraq is declining into a full-scale civil war. On average 50 to 60 people are killed with deadly bomb blasts every day. According to a study, published in the Wall Street Journal in October 2006, about 600,000 Iraqis have died from the violence since the US-led invasion in 2003. The entire Iraqi infrastructure has collapsed. There are hardly any basic civil facilities such as water, power and healthcare.

The Iraqi conditions have stirred an international reaction. The continuous killings of Iraqi civilians have given more excuses to the extremists and so the world has witnessed more suicide incidents in the last four years in Iraq than anywhere else in the world.

Terrorism has increased globally. Osama bin Laden and his key members are still hiding in Afghanistan. The Taliban in Afghanistan are rising again. Several new terrorists groups in Iraq and elsewhere have been established since the invasion of Iraq. The hatred against US has increased remarkably, not only in the Middle East but in the Islamic world. US popularity in the western world has decreased and the US image has been damaged even among its closest allies.

President George W. Bush never accepted the basic realities and mistakenly committed the US and other forces to a war with no end.