INVINCIBLE? So it seemed: USAF aircraft of the 4th Fighter Wing (F-16, F-15C and F-15E) fly over Kuwaiti oil fires set by the retreating Iraqi army during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Photo: Wikipedia flicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East – and ultimately the planet – as no other imperial power had ever done.
An invasion of Iraq would, predicted Amr Moussa, “open the gates of hell Their overwrought geopolitical fantasies and their sense that the US military was a force capable of accomplishing anything they willed it to do launched a process that would cost this world of ours in ways that no one will ever be able to calculate. Who, for instance, could begin to put a price on the futures of the children whose lives, in the aftermath of those decisions, would be
twisted and shrunk in ways frightening even to imagine? Who could tote up what it means for so many millions of this planet’s young to be deprived of homes, parents, educations – of anything, in fact, approximating the sort of stability that might lead to a future worth imagining? Though few may remember it, I’ve never forgotten the 2002 warning issued by Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League. An invasion of Iraq would, he predicted that September, “open the gates of hell”. Two years later, in the wake of the actual invasion and the US occupation of that country, he altered his comment slightly. “The gates of hell,” he said, “are open in Iraq.” His assessment has proven unbearably prescient – and one not only applicable to Iraq. Fourteen years after that invasion, we should all now be in some kind of mourning for a world that won’t ever be. It wasn’t just the US military that, in the spring of 2003, passed through those gates to hell. In our own way, we all did. Otherwise, Donald Trump wouldn’t have become president. I don’t claim to be an expert on hell. I have no idea exactly what circle of it we’re now in, but I
ColdType | Mid-May 2018 | www.coldtype.net
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