Malcolm Eves: Our Iraq involvement all wrong

New Zealand Army personnel from the building partner capacity mission in Iraq return to Ohakea Air Force Base. Photo / NZDF

John Key and his Government are going to retain New Zealand troops in Iraq for another 18 months, also deploying them to a second military base with the total associated costs now reaching $50 million for the New Zealand taxpayer to fork out.

He says, according to the Hawke's Bay Today item of June 21, that the "work in Iraq is not done, that it would be difficult to do nothing when 66 other countries were contributing".

This is rubbish and must be condemned. Contributing to what? The disaster impacting Iraq and costing millions of Iraqi lives - either dead, maimed or now displaced and homeless - is entirely an American war of aggression, an illegal invasion based on lies ("weapons of mass destruction" of which there were none) and into which the United States has dragged a number of subservient countries like New Zealand that acquiesce to its commands. John Key is one foreign Prime Minister who serves US expectations at our expense.

Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee says we are "training" Iraqis to be able to take control of their own lands and fight Islamic State, but this is also a lie. NZ is involved in Iraq because we were pressured to get involved by the US, so as to make the destruction of this once proud country seem like all of the West (the coalition of the willing) is there fighting terrorism. Rubbish.

The terrorist is the United States itself, driven by Washington neocons (predominantly Zionist Jewish-Americans) with one objective: a destabilised and weakened Middle East being part of the "Greater Israel" policy, part of the original vision enunciated by the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, now promoted by the Israeli Government and supported in the US by the Jewish lobby, an immensely powerful political group in the US politics.

Greater Israel consists of an area from the Nile to the Euphrates, and involves the exclusion of Palestinians from their own lands and the Jewish settlement in occupied Palestinian lands.

Iraq is predominantly Islamic, so which part of Iraqi Islamists are we training? Are they Sunni or Shia, and then which sect of these Islamic divisions? Out of the vacuum of destruction delivered by US bombs rose Islamic State, the violent group that the CIA secretly funded for years in Libya and continue to do so now in neighbouring Syria. These are indisputable facts not reported by mainstream media to keep us in the dark about US objectives.

Among others, it is to grab the oil - oil that is now reportedly recently contracted by the newly US installed puppet government of Iraq to US oil companies.

I wonder why Brownlee recently visited Israel in May? The visit was kept pretty quiet, the blog Whale Oil being the first to reveal the news. Perhaps to discuss trade? Or perhaps to discuss new farming techniques? It's doubtful that any of these things were discussed. It is far more likely that Brownlee was there to be "bought off" by the Israeli Government to become a strong advocate of continuing war in Iraq and Syria. This is how they operate.

So here we are: New Zealand "doing its bit" helping the big players in their dirty war of attrition in Arab lands, where we blame the Arabs for all the wrongs in the world as we crush them one country after another creating crises the world over. Maybe even Brexit is an unexpected outcome to the global elites that is a response to the refugee crisis created by the bombing and destruction of Syria.

The terrorist is the United States itself, driven by Washington neocons.

Malcolm Eves

Even more importantly, how many more schools or hospitals are New Zealanders forgoing to remain entrenched, indeed trapped, into an American war that is none of our business? Our media and the "entertainment" dished up nightly on television is all about numbing minds to expect war, indeed to glorify war.

It is outrageous that we are involved with troops in Iraq training the locals to in fact continue to kill even more of themselves because this work will never be complete. There are much bigger agendas in play, none of which are our business except to object to these policies of destruction, much less to be part of them. We should indeed "choose to do nothing".

Bring our troops home now and condemn American-led hostilities in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, indeed anywhere.

- Malcolm Eves is a retired financial adviser who has worked all his life in the Hawke's Bay region. He researches and studies international affairs and has recently set up a website: kiwiwatch.org.nz.

- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz