Middle East in turmoil 10 years after Iraq invasion that officials said would bring peace

[unhappycamper]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/14/185865/middle-east-in-turmoil-10-years.html



Unrest continues in Egypt

Middle East in turmoil 10 years after Iraq invasion that officials said would bring peace
By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Thursday, March 14, 2013

CAIRO — President George W. Bush kept it simple in his short television address the evening of March 19, 2003: U.S. forces had begun their campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein, he said. The goals, he outlined in his first sentence, were straightforward: “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Some 522 words later he promised the result: “We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail.”

As he spoke, members of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were already crossing from Kuwait, where they’d been preparing for weeks, into southern Iraq. In those sands, it was Thursday, March 20, the dawn of a new day.

Ten years later, the era that dawn ushered in looks anything but simple. After tens of thousands of deaths, not just of Americans, but also of Iraqis – many, if not most, at the hands of other Iraqis – that country is still in turmoil. American troops are gone and a democratically elected government rules. But bombings and massacres continue, and the country remains mired in sectarian feuding between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Elsewhere, conflict rules – in some cases, coincidentally, with anniversaries that fall also around this weekend:

[leveymg]

1. Destroying the secular Arab Ba'ath Party in Iraq and Syria removed a buffer to Sunni-Shi'ia war

The US and Europe have been goaded into this by the ambitions of the Saudis and the Israelis, and in the end this just accelerates the descent into all-out regional religious war.

[PuraVidaDreamin]

2. What a legacy

But the history books in this country will never acknowledge that.

[leveymg]

3. It's not a legacy yet. The process of destabilization and imperial overreach continues in Syria.

[unhappycamper]

4. And Yemen and Somalia and Mali and .......

[PuraVidaDreamin]

5. And the bees

The water.....