It is said that Saddam killed at least 500,000 Iraqis during his nearly thirty-year gulag. The US, Britain and their allies have killed more than double that many in half the time, dating back to the economic sanctions. Whatever else his shortcomings, Saddam built a modern, secular state that provided decent health care and a range of public services. The US and its allies destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure as well as the symbols of its 3,000year-old civilization, and presided over the social disintegration of society. Iraqis got a new constitution and held elections, but they didn’t get clean drinking water and electricity, and they couldn’t venture out of their homes for fear of being shot dead by anti-American insurgents or by American soldiers in “friendly fire” or by American private security contractors, an army of more than 30,000, acting with impunity.12 In the absence of the most basic security, scared Iraqi citizens retreated into the safety of sects, tribes and Shiite or Sunni neighborhoods.

In Afghanistan, years after the ouster of the Taliban, relief and reconstruction work by the US and its allies, including Canada, remained mired in either incompetence or widespread corruption, or both. The promised rebuilding of the economy proved a mirage, and the most lucrative jobs were either in the service of the warlords or in cultivating poppies, as the country went back to being the world’s largest exporter of heroin.

The abused and the tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay (on the US-controlled part of Cuba) and in secret American-run prisons around the globe were Muslims. Some of the detainees were forced to watch the desecration of their sacred book, the Qur’an, or force-fed pork and alcohol or coerced into nudity, masturbation and other transgressions of Muslim religious and cultural norms. These were not isolated incidents carried out by a handful of undisciplined soldiers, as claimed by the Bush administration, but part of a program to break down the inmates by violating their deeply held religious precepts. Yet only eleven low-ranking soldiers were court-martialed for the Abu Ghraib scandal, and not a single officer was punished beyond a reprimand.13