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Dirty tricks in Iraq

IRAQI leaders have woken up a bit too late, when the Nour Al Maliki government called for prosecution of the erring, US-sponsored Blackwater security personnel: the private guards who had killed 17 Iraqi civilians in what looked like an unprovoked firing in Baghdad last month.

In the first place, why did the successive governments of the Iraqis grant the guards immunity from prosecution, and why at all did an Iraqi dispensation sign an agreement to this effect with the US in 2003, at the very start of the occupation?

Was the then (interim) government guided by national interests when it responded to the American call that acts by the armed guards contracted by the US should not come under the purview of the legal systems in Iraq? And, why did the present government sleep over such an agreement, until saner elements within America itself exposed the impropriety of private agencies being given a free go and extra-judicial authority in Iraq?

What are the Iraqi dispensations saddled with if they have no time to care for, speak up for, and protect the interests of their own people? How many innocent lives might have been lost by the reckless acts of these guards so far?

That the past four years of the American experimentations with Iraq have been a period of untold sufferings to the Iraqis is common knowledge. But, much of the indignities that are being heaped on the hapless population there might still not known to the world, because of the secrecy of the American operations and the information black-out that has been effected there. Yet, ugly heads keep coming up, like the Blackwater expose now. Such annihilation operations are acceptable neither in times of war, nor in times of peace. That American should choose to leave security in private hands speaks poorly of the efficacy of its own security systems, and of the Bush Administration’s dangerous, even detestable, liaisons with business interests.

The fact is, no one really knows who rules Iraq today: the elected people’s government from the front, or the Americans from behind? Prosecution of erring Blackwater guards alone will not do. Why Blackwater at all on the Iraqi soil? And, as for compensation, the security firm must be made to pay through its nose for the death, or maiming, of every innocent Iraqi.