"We had tried to bring them freedom after all."

No we didn't.
It was all about oil and the petrodollar.
It was a response to Saddam selling oil for the Euro instead of US$.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Chilcot-Report-UK-Oil-Interests-Were-Lead-Motive-for-Iraq-War.html

It seems to me that the real topic(s) of this excellent essay is very much the same as the essay by John Slater.
By the way, in my opinion anybody who writes or talks about the entirely mythological "far-left" in the context of Australian politics is essentially deluded. Or even in the context of world politics altogether.
The "left" in all of its multi-various permutations has no real power anywhere in the world.
ALL of those who have the REAL power to decide as to who lives and dies, and which part of their country or the planet is to become the next sacrifice zone are on the right side of the culture wars divide.

This truth-telling essay, along with many other describes the situation, and the now uncontrollable chaos that now patterns entire planet
http://www.wildriverreview.com/Column/Thinking-Otherwise/On-Transnational-Military-Interventions/William-Irwin-Thompson

An excellent summation of the lack of empathy that sustains the status quo. The mainstream media are mostly to blame. We are presented with the enormity, the outrageous tragedy of Nice for several minutes, listen to grieving relatives bemoaning their ill luck, and then in the next few seconds are given glimpses of the shattered ruins of Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, cities, without real comment on the shattered lives and social structures. Emotionless voices tell of the latest success in saving our country from terrorism.
We can only feel for people like us, and then only briefly. There is no solution while the world population soars and wealth is accumulated in the hands of fewer and fewer people who genuinely want it to be like this, because it makes them richer.

The "hysterical" reference has a long bad history.
Today, as was always the case, hysteria is used as a way of saying that somebody's behavior is out of control.
But it is only ever used to describe women, a gendered term that in just three syllables can be used to discredit the subject, despite their qualifications or the depth of their research.
It is a word that has been used to belittle women since ancient times: ancient Greeks such as Plato diagnosed the "disease" as the in women as the result of a bewitched "wandering uterus".
In Victorian times, it persisted as a "medical" diagnosis - suffered exclusively by women - allegedly resulting in madness. Symptoms varied from shortness of breath, migraines and loss of appetite to arousal, lesbianism and an unwillingness to have dinner on the table by the stroke of five, seven days a week, 365 days a year. In "extreme" cases the "afflicted" woman had a "tendency" to cause trouble", marching in protests, demanding a vote and a right to work.

Hundreds, if not thousands of "hysterical" women were incarcerated in loony bins and jails. Others were lobotomised or subjected to rudimentary shock treatment.

And of course further back in his-story the same benighted deeply misogynist mind-set was dramatized on to the bodies of countless thousands of women's bodies during the deeply psychotic European "witch"-burning frenzy. All of which was justified by the usual patriarchal "authorities" via such texts as The Hammer of Witches.

and the thousands of Iraq children killed before the ' invasion'?
btw what has gay marriage got to do with this issue. The vast majority of Iraq's population would stone homosexuals.

What the Iraqis have done to themselves has outweighed anything
anyone else has done.
Everyone is just fed up of hearing of bombings in food markets etc.
They are Arabs and it is what they do.
If the earth opened up and swallowed the whole Middle East it would be
good riddance.
Their tribal societies have not yet changed their allegiances to their
countries yet. That just takes more time than they have had.
Sorry Lyn if that offends you but they have lost all sympathy.
Enough is enough !