Attack on Iran is just history repeating itself — same actors, same reasons

In 2003 the US and the UK, under George W Bush and Tony Blair, respectively, invaded Iraq on a barrage of security and humanitarian claims. Nine years, one-million Iraqi civilian deaths and $6-trillion later, those claims were exposed as bogus. The primary assertion that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein possessed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction was based on fabricated “intelligence”.

Ignoring official UN International Atomic Energy Agency reports, and cheered on by the Western mainstream media, Bush insisted Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction “within 45 minutes”, and was purchasing “yellowcake” uranium from Niger, brandishing documents later proven to be crude forgeries. Exploiting global sympathy after 9/11, Bush posited links between Hussein and al-Qaeda, despite clear evidence that Hussein was actively fighting al-Qaeda. Viscerally evocative phrases framed in inflammatory language and manipulative imagery — “mushroom clouds”, “beheaded babies”, “axis of evil” — psychologically stirred public resentment against Hussein.

So effective was the propaganda that “WMD” became a buzzword in conversational parlance, nonchalantly applied to everything from natural disasters to a Sanath Jayasuriya pull shot. Bush and Blair promised liberation, stability and prosperity for Iraq and the Middle East. As former prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu championed the cause, repeatedly labelling Hussein an “existential threat”, “a ticking time-bomb, weeks away from a nuclear arsenal”.

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He penned articles on the “yellowcake” narrative and aggressively lobbied for US pre-emptive strikes, dramatically asserting: “Take out Saddam Hussein and I guarantee it will have enormous positive reverberations throughout the region.” Subsequent investigations, including the US Iraq Survey Group and the UK Chilcot Inquiry, found the alleged intelligence to be, at best, flawed, exaggerated and misused. The underlying motives pointed instead to geopolitical control, regime change and oil.

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