The current administration in the US is planning to leave office without any apology to the people of Iraq or that of Afghanistan. In the process, it has stepped up its battle plans in Afghanistan and has successfully cleansed Iraq of many of its promising youth and of many more innocents.

They are called collateral damages in a violent spell that will characterize the Bush regime in history as a barbarian and warmongering one. The Iraqis, the Afghans and many Muslims across the world were made the scapegoats of the death of merely 2500 people in a suspicious terror attack on the US in 2001.

Since then, the US decided that it should kill at least 10 Muslims a 100 Muslims for each and every one of the American deaths suffered on the tragic 911.

Gun diplomacy pushed the American ideals of democracy in Iraq instead of peace and negotiations. Since 2001, the world changed to become a place where the like of G. W. Bush, D. Rumsfield, D. Cheney and T. Blair decided that ‘God’ told them to attack Iraq and to go to war against Afghanistan.

It was clear that they could use God to do anything they want, including killing, maiming, raping and violating all the other humans in their way in Iraq and now increasingly in Afghanistan.

Devastation in Iraq and the death toll has made the country a place where life is cheaper and being alive is a scourge. The least the Iraqis for all the people would expect from the administration of G. W. Bush in the US is an apology for the massacre that followed its illegal and brutal invasion of Iraq.

What the Iraqis would expect from the Muslim world will be an apology too for not interfering against the American invasion and for watching the brutality against their nation being carried out for 5 years since 2003.

What we can offer them as Muslims is a prayer, a Fateha, that from this year on they can find peace and from that peace they can unite and from the unity they can become a stronger nation than ever before. We can also apologize to them for having been passive and for crossing our arms and not helping Iraq in its most dire moments.

Indeed that would not pay for the pain and the miseries they went through in the past 5 years but it will tilt the balance towards reconciliation between the Iraqis and the rest of the Muslim world. The Muslims can learn from the lessons the Iraqis were taught when they faced the American and its allies during the invasion and after.

I feel that it is time to face the reality of the Iraqi nation coming back together, facing its future together and it is time to extend our hands to them to help lift them up. At least we will not be seen as the people who abandoned them totally.

It is clear that due to our government’s incapacity and our leader’s betrayal of the Iraqi people, we the Muslim Ummah were made to sit aside and watch the destruction of their country and the murder of their people.
I do sincerely hope that the valiant Iraqis will forgive us the Muslim Ummah for being selfish, for not forcing our regimes to do more and for not helping the refugees of the Iraqi nation when they are still out there outside their borders, begging for safety and for food from others.

Now that the anti-American fighters have found a new ‘heaven’ to attack the Americans and the Western forces in Afghanistan, it is plausible to believe that Iraq will reconstitute itself and at least it will become a nation in the making rather than a nation in civil war.

There will be killings, attacks and more deaths in the process but once the foreign forces stop their abuse of the Iraqi people and allow the Iraqis to control their country, there should be some peace and some concrete rebuilding of the country.

That will be their internal matter and as long as the Iraqis do not carry out the destructive civil war that was waged for so long, the country should settle and its future designed.

I can only offer a strong apology to the Iraqis for not participating in their troubles with more ideas and greater physical efforts to assist them to reach peace. I can only offer my deepest sympathy for what has happened to them in the past 5 years and my prayers to all the people of Iraq who lost their lives in the process. Ameen.

Notes:

One puzzling aspect of the news media’s coverage of the Iraq war is their squeamish treatment of Iraqi casualties.   The scale of fatalities and wounded is a difficult number to calculate, but its importance should be obvious.   Yet, apart from some rare and sporadic attention to mortality figures, the topic is virtually absent from the airwaves and news pages of America.   This absence leaves the field to gross misunderstandings, ideological agendas, and political vendettas. (By John Tirman who commissioned several researches on the death of Iraqi civilians)

Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million

A British survey offers the highest estimate to date.

by Tina Susman

The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed statements this week from the U.S. military defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its strategy appear successful.

The [US occupation] military has said civilian deaths from sectarian violence have fallen more than 55% since [US] President Bush sent an additional 28,500 troops to Iraq this year, but it does not provide specific numbers.

According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million.