"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 !

>> ’What should British, American and Australian Governments do - apart from apologise –for all the death, suffering and trauma, caused in Iraq and spread to the entire Middle East?' <<

At least Americans seem to have found an indirect answer to this question. They are about to elect as their next President one of the (then) supporters of the invasion of Iraq (and Libya) after she proclaimed that her voting for the Act that lead to many hundreds of thousands deaths in the ME (and still growing), was a "mistake" - no apology.

Lyn Bender
your article states
as been noted by many that we respond intensely to a few deaths of people like us, or with whom we identify; yet ignore the plight of many considered unlike us.

This is also true of the Jews after world war2,
In the years just before world war2, Millions of Chinese were slaughtered by
the Japanese, more than the number of Jews killed.
But the Jews act without interest when being told this, and also of the many
others who died in World war2. They only ever grieve for and talk about the Jews.

It is biological, I cant seem to get the academics to understand this.
We grieve for our bloodline, our children, our parents,our aunts and cousins
and at the wider level our tribe because of the intermarriage that has taken place.

We may feel some sympathy for others suffering but we only feel real grief for those
biologically closest to us.
Also the Americans never loaded the trucks with explosives and drove them into
the other tribe in Iraq, or pulled the trigger on the guns in that civil war between the
Shia and the Sunnis. Those murders were entirely the decision of the Arabs doing it.
They are responsible for the high death toll in Iraq.

If the USA, Australia and Britain had no right to liberate Iraq from a crazy dictator who threatened world peace, then they had no right to invade Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or Fascist Italy. We should have kept out of the war in Korea and let the communists take over the South, and Korea would now be twice the problem for the free world as it is now.

The reason why Iraq is a mess is because of the Iraqis. Specifically, it is Islam. The yanks told the stupid Shiites to bury the hatchet with the Sunnis and rule together for the future of all Iraqis. But being Arabs they just could not help themselves to get even on the people who had been giving them stick for years. Now they are all killing themselves, with the Imams in Iran and Saudi Arabia egging them on, but who does Lyn blame? The yanks of course.

One of the reasons why the yanks are going to vote Trump for President Lyn, is because he wants the USA to embrace isolationism again. The yanks are sick and tired of being the world's policeman while people like yourself blame them for everything that goes wrong. The USA is also fed up of allies who will not pull their weight and expect the USA to do all the fighting.

So if you hate the yanks, Lyn, then you had better start worrying about who is going to pick up the load when they retreat back to their own shores and try and fix their own problems. China has just claimed an entire ocean as their sovereign territory, and don't be surprised if they start demanding that all aircraft and ships transiting through "their" ocean must pay tribute.

Lego, I would love some Physiologist with experience in the particular
area of behaviour of people with intellectual handicap to study Arabs
as a race. We know that their handicap is mild and not very severe.
They have a 13% increase in disability incidence over other populations.
If we (ie international diplomacy) knew exactly the situation they
could make allowances for them and not push them into corners that they cannot cope with.
Unless we face the facts we will just go around and around like we
have for the last 1400 years.

I think that their inability to be tolerant of other religions etc is
just one symptom of the problem. I have seen something like this previously.
It is not a very comfortable subject but we are literally up against it.

Hi Bazz, what you have asked is an interesting question.

I do not know the medium IQ score of Arabs, although according to the book "The Bell Curve", cognitive metricians over decades of testing have calculated that the most common IQ score for "white" Americans (a category which lumps whites, Arabs and native Americans together ) is 103. It is possible that including Arabs and native Americans as "whites" may be dragging the "white" score down a bit. For Asians it is 106, for Hispanics 93, and negroes 85. People of mixed race were difficult to quantify so they were generally excluded from the tests.

Human behaviour is a product of both nature and nurture. High school level genetics can easily explain that if a population of people have a culture where the most violent members in it become the most successful, and that they can monopolise the young breeding females, then it is perfectly feasible that the extremely high levels of violence in Arab countries is a product of genetic inheritance.

So too, a religion which strenuously prohibits reasoned thoughts, and which insists upon absolutist attitudes about everything that must be obeyed, will by cultural transmission create a population who never think critically about anything. People who do not think critically are generally considered to be not very bright. That is not to say that they are dumb at everything. They can still be smart merchants or military leaders, but as a population they do not have the collective intelligence to go beyond their religiously imposed moral boundaries and create a society based upon science and technology. Especially where one half of the population are simply considered to be inferiors and minors who's talents outside that of a beaten domestic slave can never be utilised.

While even a tiny country like Finland has a solid reputation for creating quality consumer goods, the entire Muslim world manufactures nothing the world wants with the exception of Persian carpets

What Lego? If a nation of people fail to measure up to the yardstick of the West, in your exotic view, all such are to viewed as cattle?
The word for your view is arrogant snobbish! Closed mind springs up! Ha ha...

The only IQ figure I have seen is the one compiled by the Danish
doctor who tested Arabs/moslems in Denmark. He came up with an IQ of 95.
It would need other testing. The British Midlands National health
service did testing but its results were not in the report I saw.
The NSW Health Dept report also only gave the rate of genetic faults
in just the one maternity hospital.I suspect no other testing was done.

Unfortunately even if they stop the practise today it will take
hundreds of years to fix the problem.
Actually ISIS's practise of killing the men and taking the women is
one way to fix the problem. Maybe that was the reason they invaded
Assyria, killed the men and took the women back around 800 AD.

Lego more;
What you were saying about restrictions of religion forming
genetic pattens got me thinking.
The Arabs in Nth Africa invaded and occupied for hundreds years most
of Spain. Those Arabs brought with them a lot of the scientific
knowledge of the Greeks and Hindus. Spain became the Silicon Valley
of its time. Could it be that those Arabs married with the Spanish
and Jewish women of the area ?

If so perhaps the current attacks on the Jiazdi and Kurdish women may
be their purpose. It is a bit like that New Zealand joke.
Every Australian that goes home raises the intelligence of both
countries !

To Diver Dan.

The one thing which sticks out on OLO like an outback dunny, is how the normal people who are nationalistic and patriotic are willing to write entire 350 word posts (even double posts) expressing their views using reasoned arguments. It is very noticeable how the left wing socialist globalists like yourself for the most part simply resort to hit and run, sneery one liners. The reason is, of course, that whatever views you have are so poorly defined in you own mind that you are unable to construct a coherent argument using critical thinking.

"The yardstick of the west" is that the west has produced functioning and prosperous societies, with well funded and generous welfare policies, and personnel freedoms that have never existed before in the history of the entire human race. The superiority of western secular thinking is written in the trails of the ever increasing lines of unwanted immigrants and so called "refugees" from dysfunctional countries, caused by dysfunctional cultures, who abandon their countries and use every legal and illegal means to get into western countries.

Older people will remember that many Asian countries were once as poverty stricken as African and Middle eastern countries today. Those Asian countries who followed the example of the west are now prosperous. Even those like China who once had idiot leaders who thought like you, have rejected the kinds of catastrophic economic theory that you socialists still advocate. Those that completely rejected our ways, or had populations with a very low collective IQ, are now walking backwards into the future.

If you have the courage to reply to this post, which I doubt, try to at least write a complete paragraph in response. Show us all how you lefties have some capacity to synapse your neurones and think.

Lego & Dan, how many Nobel prizes have been awarded to Islamic countries ?
Very few, some two or three if I remember correctly.
Their early work in the the first 1000 years AD was about it.
They built on the Indian & Greek mathematics and carried it into Spain
and then just gave it all up as too hard.