Rebuild Gaza? Look at Iraq

The world powers and their proxies are masters at destruction, but rebuilding is something they’ve never learned to do.  

By Saad Albazzaz

The ruinous war over Gaza is over. Gaza and its 1.5 million people have borne the brunt of Israel’s disproportionate, reckless and massive use of fire power which killed more than 1,300, people most of them civilians, and injured thousands.

Homes, schools, government buildings, mosques whole quarters were razed down by Israeli troops as the influential and most powerful world leaders pondered on who was right or wrong and who was to blame.

This was yet another of the ruinous wars in which U.S.’s lethal weapons reigned supreme.  It is the fourth devastating war waged by the U.S. or its ally Israel against Arabs and Muslims in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks –- Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.

In all these wars it is the Arab and Muslim lands that are being ruined; it is Arabs and Muslims who are being killed in tens of thousands; it is the Arabs and Muslims who are being driven out of their homes, countries and cities.

And after each war the U.S. and its Western allies make big promises to rebuild what their monstrous military machine has destroyed.

But those vows of reconstruction never materialize.

Look at Iraq. It is infrastructure is still worse off than the days of former ruler Saddam Hussein.

More innocent people have been killed as a result of the U.S. and British invasion than those Saddam Hussein and his wars put to death.

Conditions in Afghanistan are no better and the villages which Israel destroyed in southern Lebanon still wait to be rebuilt.

And now the world leaders, who did almost nothing to stop the flow of bloodshed, massacres and destruction by Israel in Gaza, shamelessly announce that they would contribute to its reconstruction.

"If we do not destroy we cannot rebuilt," is apparently the motto which world leaders are most fond of.

But while the world’s powerful countries and their proxies are masters when it comes to destruction, rebuilding is something they have never learned to do.

© 2009 Azzaman All rights reserved.