I used to have a little sympathy for those people who were still sitting on the fence over the justness of the Iraq invasion. I understood that the US government and mainstream media talking heads made an effort to imbue their official claims with a semblance of logic and reason, and that the American public could, to some extent, be forgiven for sanctioning illegal war and suffering. They were, after all being deceived.

Not anymore.

It seems that the years of government double-speak and subtle manipulation have led the Bush administration to feel confident that the ability of the average American to think critically has now been compromised to such an extent that they will easily swallow blatant and verifiable fantasy.

The Iraq invasion, we were told, was all about protecting the world against the threat of Saddam's WMDs, yet it was a claim that was inherently flawed because the logical response was to attempt to prove or disprove it - either Saddam had WMDs or he didn't. As we all found out too late, the claim was little more than the product of the minds of American and British spin doctors. A few more hours in the spin room however, and they were back on track, but the back-room boys had learned their lesson, they weren't going to make the mistake of throwing around allegations that were based on something as empirical, and therefore provable or disprovable, as the existence or otherwise of WMDs. This time, it was going to be something much more intangible, like the needs of the Iraqi people and how much happier they (and the rest of the world) would be under American style democracy and without the 'tyrant' Saddam.

This second claim had the potential to fool the American people at least a little longer than the first, appealing as it did to their artificially pumped egos as well as their morbid fear of the unknown i.e. anything outside America's borders. After all, look at how happy the American people are! But really look, not at the details, but the broad panacea of American life, such as it is displayed in Hollywood movies for but one example. Who would not wish such hedonistic revelry for the whole world? In the end however, it seems that the true intention of the Bush cabal towards Iraq is, in its nature, so depraved and far-removed from their claimed altruism, that its face was never going to take long to manifest.

That face today is seen in:

the fact that 655,000 Iraqi people have been murdered since the beginning of the invasion, at least 50% by US forces directly.

that 1.6 million Iraqis have fled the country as a result of the presence of US troops.

that Iraq's health service has disintegrated, with even the most basic treatments unavailable, and that up to half of the aforementioned 655,000 deaths might have been avoided if proper medical care had been available. 2,000 doctors and nurses have been killed with 18,000 more choosing to leave the country in fear of their lives.

the 'Iraqization' of the conflict, where US-sponsored deaths squads being run out of the Iraqi interior ministry are murdering dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians daily in an attempt to twist the root cause of Iraq's problems - the invasion of a sovereign nation by a foreign aggressor - and create the appearance of an internal 'sectarian' conflict between rival Iraqi ethnic and religious factions, when no such serious sectarian strife has ever existed in recent Iraqi history.

the chilling report that the Bush government and its generals are planning to "penalize Iraq if it fails to stop the violence", violence for which the Bush government itself is responsible.

Under this last, the US military would launch an assault on the densely populated neighborhoods of Baghdad, beginning with Sadr City, the home of some 2 million impoverished Shia and the stronghold of the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, that is, one of the groups representing the will of the Iraqi people.

In layman's terms, this means that the Bush government has decided that to "win the Iraq war" and "liberate the Iraqi people", it must wage a wholesale war on the Iraqi people in order to coerce them to accept US government rule over their country and lives. Those that submit will live, those that do not, will die. It couldn't be more simple. Iraq has been destroyed, not liberated.

Here, of course, we are a long way from what "folks back home" believe is being done by their government in their name. Yet there is no real reason that such should be the case, because all of the information I present here is freely available in mainstream publications to the American and 'Western' populations. If there is one thing lacking, some piece of data that is preventing many people from fully awakening to the horror and brutality that is being wrought by their (un)elected officials, then it is perhaps the hard evidence that not all human beings are like you and I - not all human beings possess an innate tendency towards the rejection of mass murder of the innocent. Some of them actively engage in acts of depravity, and seek out positions of power from which they can give vent to their deviant natures with impunity.

Remembering all I have just said, can you think of anyone, or any group, that fits this profile?

Take your time.