Iraq Study Group: a bipartisan coverup of Washington’s war crimes

Bill Van Auken, WSWS

A striking feature of the Iraq Study Group report is that its belated admission of the military-political debacle and catastrophic conditions created by the US intervention in Iraq excludes any assessment of how the "grave and deteriorating" situation in that country came to pass, and who bears political responsibility for it (...) The Iraq Study Group document contains a section entitled "Sources of Violence." It says the following: "Violence is increasing in scope, complexity, and lethality. There are multiple sources of violence in Iraq: the Sunni Arab insurgency, al Qaeda and affiliated jihadist groups, Shiite militias and death squads, and organized criminality. Sectarian violence—particularly in and around Baghdad—has become the principal challenge to stability." Yet it fails to state the obvious. The root cause of this violence is an imperialist intervention that was aimed at reducing Iraq to a semi-colony of the US. It was this intervention that generated the so-called "insurgency"—i.e., the legitimate resistance of Iraqis to the foreign military occupation of their country. And it was Washington’s attempts to impose a client regime, utilizing tactics of divide-and-rule, that gave rise to the nightmare of sectarian violence...

continua / continued