Trying to wrap my head around just how the invasion and occupation of Iraq is continually sold the American people still gives me a headache. It seems the excuse of acting on inaccurate intelligence to do with WMD’s has placated many, including the likes of US Senators that voted to back the President at the time but have since changed their tune claiming that they were acting on the information given them at the time. It has also caused many others to simply become more apathetic and disenfranchised than they were to begin with.

From there, of course, the list of justifications grows exponentially to completely fabricated claims that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, that it was a state sponsor of terrorism and had ties to al-Qaeda, that Saddam Hussein, once a US ally in the region, was a war criminal that had to be removed from power, that the goal of the occupation was to ensure that Iraqis would be afforded security and the ability to form a truly representative government, and so forth.

The truth, of course, tells quite a different story. The Central Intelligence Agency had no hard evidence that Hussein’s regime possessed WMDs, though that rather important fact was left out of the speech given by then Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations. In fact, there were those within the CIA that were railroaded because of their unwillingness endorse unsubstantiated information that proved Iraq a threat. And then there was the completely false and ridiculous claim by the Blair government that Hussein could launch such weapons within 45 minutes.

And then there is the Iraq – 9/11 connection, proof of which was never substantiated by any intelligence agency on either side of the ocean. And yet the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, then Donald Rumsfeld, unflinchingly lied on television that such a connection did indeed exist, something that many Americans to this very day still believe to be true.

As for Saddam Hussein, there’s no arguing that he was a war criminal. There’s also no arguing that the United States, by way of the CIA, aided him during the Iran-Iraq war in targeting the Iranians so that they could be attacked with chemical weapons. Nor can it be overlooked that the primary elements used to create those very weapons came from a number of Western sources and that financial aid was provided Hussein during that period. At no time was his use of such weapons deterred by the United States, no matter if they were condemned publicly. In fact, after he gassed Halabja in 1988, the United States Congress drafted a bill calling for all aid to Iraq to be terminated, a bill that was vetoed by the Reagan White House because it believed that the Iranians were responsible. So, despite the perpetration of such crimes, aid to Hussein’s regime continued.

As for the fate of Iraq, the United States invaded the country with absolutely no post invasion strategy. The destruction of its infrastructure is something that has yet to be realistically addressed (power in Baghdad itself is still limited to various hours of the day four years after the invasion), and the guerrilla resistance that rose up following the invasion to counter the occupation itself, despite warnings from CIA station chiefs that it was not to be taken lightly, continues unabated in various forms. The occupation has also split the country, despite attempts to consolidate it by quickly ushering in a completely ineffectual government, which has plunged Iraq into a state of civil turmoil. Thus, not only are Iraqis combating the occupation both militarily and politically, but they are also combating themselves.

Four years after the fact, Baghdad now holds the title of the world’s most dangerous city, one that it didn’t prior to the spring of 2003, even under the rule of a despot. It is, in a word, chaotic, and that would probably be putting it lightly. Along with US military operations, Iraqis also have to contend with military contractors which largely operate without impunity, renegade factions within various Iraqi government Ministries, and foreign fighters that have entered the country to stir up as much trouble as they can.

This leads me to the purpose of this entry, one that highlights the immense propaganda employed by the United States with regards to the realities of what is actually transpiring in Iraq.

It has long since been the position of the Bush administration that al-Qaeda represents the foremost enemy in Iraq, an assertion that is entirely inaccurate. Unfortunately, by merely mentioning the name of the group itself, the American public has been led to believe that the war being fought in Iraq is now largely against insurgents either sympathetic to al-Qaeda or directly connected to them – something that, again, couldn’t be further from the truth.

From the Associated Press…

“BAGHDAD - Inside the bloody kaleidoscope called Iraq, the list of enemies and allies is long, shifting and motley, running from “revolution brigades” and Baathists, to Salafists, secularists and suicidal zealots. But one group alone gets routinely tagged “Public Enemy No. 1″ by the Americans.

Nine out of 10 times, when it names a foe it faces, the U.S. military names the group called al-Qaida in Iraq. President Bush says Iraq may become an al-Qaida base to “launch new attacks on America.” The U.S. ambassador here suggested this week al-Qaida might “assume real power” in Iraq if U.S. forces withdraw.

Critics say this is overblown, and possibly a diversion.

“Such speculation is unrealistic,” Amer Hassan al-Fayadh, Baghdad University political science dean, said of the U.S. statements.

Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, strong Kurdish ethnic minority, secularist Sunni Muslims and others would suppress any real power bid by the fringe Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaida, al-Fayadh said.

“The people who are fighting al-Qaida in Iraq are the Sunnis themselves,” he noted.

He was referring to a movement among some Sunni insurgent and tribal groups, beginning in the western province of Anbar and now developing in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, who have turned against the mass-casualty terror tactics of erstwhile ally al-Qaida, held responsible for spectacular bombing attacks, especially against Shiites.

Since Iraqis rose up against the U.S. occupation in 2003, the insurgency has spawned a long roster of militant groups — the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Islamic Army in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah, Mujahedeen Army, the Mahdi Army, among others — drawing on loyalists of the ousted, Sunni-dominated Baathist regime, other nationalists, Islamists, tribal groups and militant Shiites.

Some 30 groups now claim responsibility for attacks against U.S. and government targets, said Ben Venzke, head of the Virginia-based IntelCenter, which tracks such statements for the U.S. government.

Despite this proliferation of enemies, the U.S. command’s news releases on American operations focus overwhelmingly on al-Qaida.

During the first half of May, those releases mentioned al-Qaida 51 times, against just five mentions of other groups. When other groups tangle with U.S. forces, they’re often described as “al-Qaida-linked,” mainly those in the Islamic State of Iraq, an alliance that is dominated by the terror network. If not, they’re tagged “criminals,” “secret cell networks,” or with similar nonspecific names.

In addition, in a year-to-year comparison, the number of U.S. military releases mentioning al-Qaida almost doubled, from 161 in 2005-2006 to 306 in 2006-2007. Even accounting for an increased number of command reports overall, the al-Qaida releases rose by 40 percent.

Why is the international al-Qaida network, which most stirs American fears, being highlighted?

“There’s a great deal of focus on al-Qaida because they’re Public Enemy No. 1. Simple as that,” said command spokesman Col. Steven Boylan.

“One of the missions is to go after the al-Qaida networks. If we are focusing on them, it stands to reason they are going to be mentioned.”

Back in the U.S., some see more manipulative motives.

Bush’s warning about al-Qaida and Iraq “serves mostly to buttress the administration’s claim that Iraq’s problems are the work of outsiders, and not the result of the administration’s mismanagement of the occupation and internal Iraqi factionalism,” said Steven Simon, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The University of Michigan’s Juan Cole questions how strong the links are between international al-Qaida and the local Iraqi variety, which he describes as Salafists — fundamentalist Sunnis — “who style themselves al-Qaida.”

There are a lot of things happening behind the scenes when it comes to Iraq, be it legislation that would grant greater access to Iraqi oil to foreign companies, or the fact that the Kuwaiti contractor (First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting) that is currently rushing to complete the new US embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone has been accused of employing forced labour…

“Rumors of forced labor in Iraq have plagued First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting for several years, but US government officials have discounted such allegations by workers from Nepal and the Philippines in the past, even as the company continued to rack up contracts now totaling several billion dollars from the Pentagon and US State Department.

Late last year, several US citizens also said they boarded separate chartered jets in Kuwait loaded with work crews from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Africa holding boarding passes to Dubai, but the planes then flew directly to Baghdad.

More recently, another US citizen told IPS that he was told by workers from Ghana on the embassy site that they thought they would have jobs in Dubai but were then taken to work in Iraq.”

Smell that? Ya, that’s the smell of freedom. And God do I love the smell of freedom in the morning.