Foreword
It was in Babylon, now Baghdad, at Balthazar’s feast, that the eclipse of this fabulous city and the empire it controlled had its future determined. Reaching out to the Mediterranean and what we know as Israel, Babylon’s future was foretold, according to the prophet Daniel. Balthazar, (descendant of the mighty Babylonian king.
Nebuchadnezzar), called upon Daniel to interpret the writing on the wall that had mysteriously appeared. It read: “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it; thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians.”
Thus, fulfilling the prophecy, the Persian king, Cyrus II, invaded and triumphed. Resulting from this oracle the Persians and Mesopotamians - today’s Iranians and Iraqis - have been squaring up to each other ever since. They last fought a bruising, inconclusive war between 1980 and 1988 that claimed the lives of 450,000 Iraqis and left 750,000 wounded. Everything changes, says history, and everything remains the same.
The discovery of oil - a blessing and a curse - in 1927 made modern Iraq a target of envy for foreign powers, and the land between the rivers again became central to western interests. Britain and the US became determined to fan and whirl Saddam, a would-be Nebuchadnezzar, into the sand - as Cyrus and Alexander, the Mongols and Turks, had done to his predecessor's thousands of years before.
Democracy and oil do not mix and Iraq is oil rich. It has greater resources than Saudi Arabia and, with production costs at 50c a barrel, is the lowest in the world. Forget the British and American governments’ quest for weapons of mass destruction. Access to oil by an oligarchy of powerful mechanistically driven capitalists is the key, a pretext to change the regime. Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972 and the US did not like that.
Aside from phantom WMDs and the American lust for oil, the
US has another agenda for its invasion of Iraq. This, the real agenda, is based in something so fantastic that it leaves “Star Wars” in the shade. Read on:
