Why history repeats itself.

The Iraq war, which started in March 2003 and ended up costing $3 trillion and anything up to 500,000 Iraqi lives, was a confidence trick played by a man called Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi who proudly confessed to his lies last year. TOI, 2 April 2012. " My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more Iraqi people will suffer from the regime's oppression," he said. The Iraqi defector, code named " Curveball ", said " Yes " with a smile when he was asked " We went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie," on a BBC2 program called Modern Spies. A chemical engineer, al-Janabi sought political asylum in Germany in 1999 and claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory. Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to the former Secretary of State, Gen Colin Powell admitted that al-Janabi's drawings of the biological weapons lab was " sexed up " by his staff. " I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he said, adding that the " Intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy." Thus a fictional lab, convincingly disproved by the Chief of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, Hans Blix, was used to kill so many innocent Iraqis. Trouble is that Saddam Hussein was from the minority Sunni community in Iraq whereas the present Prime Minster is from the majority Shias. Hence the Iraqis are not complaining of the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and the use of depleted Uranium, which is causing, and will cause for hundreds of years, vast numbers of cancer and congenital defects in babies. Exactly the opposite obtains in Syria where the minority Alawites are in power over the majority Sunnis. The alleged chemical weapons attack last week in a suburb of Damascus is being used by the UK and France to push the US for an attack on Bashar al-Assad. Even a chronic ditherer like Barack Obama is being persuaded to go along. However Syria is not Iraq. " We once again decisively urge ( the US ) no to repeat the mistakes of the past and not to allow actions that go against international law," said the Russian Foreign Ministry while Iran warned of " severe consequences " if the US crosses Syria's red line, in a reference to Obama's red line. msn.com, 26 August. Iraq is near civil war, Afghanistan is lost while Libya remains divided. Have they learnt? No. Hence, history will repeat itself.