Lament For Iraq (Bin The Spin)

Nobody should forget that the nation and society of Iraq have been destroyed, ruined and turned into a failed state. The Americans invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured, humiliated and demoralised the Iraqis. They have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives. More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile. Their air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium, beset with the most awful birth defects. Unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up again. The same is happening in Afghanistan.

It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the invasion.h

Iraqis increasingly say how vile Saddam was and how he gassed and killed millions of people ...and he did...but rewind the tape a few years. Saddam did all of these things when he was our ally and Thatcher and Reagan supplied him with the means to gas and kill these people. The political left, myself included, protested this at the time but no-one was listening.
Finally when we invaded Iraq Saddam was nothing more than a powerless demagogue lording it over a destitute and broken economy. Actually tens of thousands of Iraqis were still dying, but mostly as a result of us bombing their water treatment facilities and the sanctions that we imposed that wouldn't allow the importation of basic medical supplies and humanitarian aid.
Blair's greatest sin is that he understood Saddam was a tottering dictator on his last legs (and was absolutely NO threat to us or his own people) and he went along with US neo-conservative realpolitik theories to be on the right side of history because he thought it would be easy, despite the fact that middle east experts told him otherwise.
Obama thinks this is some kind of 'success' for the US military. What kind of a science fiction world are we living in these days?