by JA Daraja

Created on: August 19, 2009   Last Updated: August 21, 2009

"Iraq: After Six Years and One Million Lives"

The US war against Iraq has reached its six-year milestone. Non-government agencies estimate that more than a million Iraqis have been killed thus far.

Contrary to current US propaganda, the US did not invade Iraq to free the people from Saddam Hussein, or to help the Iraqi people establish "democracy". The US invasion was based on the claim that Iraq had "Weapons of Mass Destruction", and that these WMDs posed an immediate threat to the US. US troops going to war said they were going to fight terrorism, and to repay the terrorists for "9/11".

Six years on, the US media portrays the Iraq war in precisely the same terms as they used for VietNam: " The US is trying to help a struggling democracy against an evil and brutal enemy." - Not true then, not true now.

The invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein were US actions to establish an economic base that Hussein had taken away. As one US oil ececutive put it, "Before Hussein we owned the oil industry in Iraq".

As the "Cash Cow" of global capitalism, the US is obligated to generate profits for "investors". In order to create those profits the US government fashions both foreign and domestic policy toward particular economic goals. The removal of Saddam Hussein was called "regime change" by both Bush and Clinton. That is a euphemism for overthrow of the government. And it is illegal.

A "Cash Cow" is a product or service that a business relies on to generate profits. For example, an auto-maker like Ford Corporation might earn enough from its "F-150" truck sales to sustain operations, even though other models are not selling enough to pay for their production costs. The F-150 would be Ford's "cash cow." - The United States (more exactly, the American people) is the "cash cow" of world capitalism.

Because the United States is the largest single department-store in the world, the multi-national corporations can generate enough profits in the US "market" to keep the system going, even if other areas are not doing so well. As the primary agent of world capitalism, the US government sells "access" to the American "market" (the American people) to influence other nations and to establish cooperation with the projects of world capitalism. Those projects make up what is called "the World Bank".

"Access" to the American people comes in three forms: 1) allowing foreign companies to sell their products ( and make profits) in the US department store; 2) the actual

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