[AK47rulz]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...ariq-aziz-iran

Tariq Aziz: 'Britain and the US killed Iraq. I wish I was martyred'

• WMD an illusion was to deter Iran, says former minister

• Nostalgia for Saddam Hussein rule – but he calls on US to stay

• US troop pullout will destroy Iraq, says Tariq Aziz

Martin Chulov in Baghdad guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 August 2010 23.03 BST


Tariq Aziz is slumped on a tattered brown sofa seat cradling his walking stick and cigarettes, his gaunt face topped, incongruously for a practising Christian, by a Muslim prayer cap. It is perhaps only the familiar black-ringed spectacles that signal to the visitor that this was Iraq's former face to the world – Saddam Hussein's right-hand man, his most powerful deputy.

Apart from his captors and lawyers, Aziz, says he has not seen or spoken to a foreigner since the fall of Baghdad. But after years rotating between solitary confinement and a witness box in court, he is now more than ready to speak.

"It's been seven years and four months that I have been in prison," he told the Guardian. "But did I commit a crime against any civilian, military or religious man? The answer is no."

Iraq has been through hell since Aziz was last seen in public, days before Baghdad fell in April 2003, toppling Hussein and the totalitarian Ba'athist regime that Aziz had helped lead for 30 years.

In his first face-to-face interview since then, Aziz seemingly longed for the old days, while at the same time calling on the US president, Barack Obama, not to "leave Iraq to the wolves".

"Of course I was a member of the Revolutionary Command Council, a leader of the Ba'ath party, deputy prime minister, foreign minister – all of those posts were mine," he says inside the Iraqi prison that he now calls home. Aziz had just returned from another court hearing inside Baghdad's green zone, where the ghosts of Iraq under Saddam are being exorcised in a series of painstaking trials.

[lisualsethelp]

So someone with zero credibility on what's good for Iraq has an opinion from his jail cell? I'd guess the wisest thing to do would be the exact opposite of what he proposes.

[huedaanydrax]

I agree with the notion though, that when we leave Iraq, it will be the start of that country's worst age. But, that was the foregone conclusion even before we mobilized there this century. Anything that happens will be because we should never have invaded in the first place.

[SnareeWer]

I'm coming to the conclusion that anything that happens over the next generation in Iraq will have largely happened anyway. Removing Saddam may have advanced the timeline by a decade, but it was out of our hands before Bush declared war, and it'll be out of our hands after we leave. What will happen with be a logical progression of the tensions of the Baathists, the Sunnis and the Shia that have played out for centuries.

Our adventure there has been largely the equivalent of going to the bathroom during a commercial break. A blip of a distraction. And frankly, our place against the destiny of Afghanistan is largely the same. The U.S. geopolitical agenda there will fade to background noise once we pull our troops out of the region.

[mloversia]

I agree re: Afghanistan. Nothing we do will ever truly change things there. Nothing we've done in 30 years has really changed things, and good guys become bad and so on and so forth.

I think it would have been a different scenario in Iraq though, for the reason that I think Saddam's sons would have been as bad of tyrrants. However, it would have remained stable for a while, I think more than one generation. Sped up, definitely. I sure don't think we'd have to still worry abou al Qaeda there though had we not interfered, at least not for a long while. So with that aspect also sped up, we now have to worry about our own security more in ways we didn't have to before.