His name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi and according the Guardian, he is the straw that broke the camel's back during the Bush Administrations march to war in 2003. Yahoo has his story on the front page today, plastered with misleading language to get the reader to believe that he's the sole reason for the war. He isn't. It takes more than one man to take a country to war.
In my view, however, he's just as responsible and even more misguided than the Bush administration. Over 100,000 people have died in this conflict, most of them his fellow Iraqis. He does not care that his actions forced his former friends and neighbors to live with the indignity of a foreign military not only patrolling their streets but treating them as second class citizens in their own homes. He was granted asylum three years before the invasion of Iraq so he wouldn't have had to live through the "liberation" of his country. He never lived through the suicide bombers killing innocent civilians, the gun battles in the streets between the Coalition forces and the insurgents, nor the lack of basic resources and chaos that the invasion caused. An entire population had their worlds literally turned upside down because of "Curveball"'s selfishness.
I am not by any means saying life under Saddam was better than the current government. The new Iraqi government is a democracy that will for the first time include ALL of Iraq's people in some capacity in its decision making. The leadership has taken the American example of a representative government and have tried their best to emulate it. They have ushered in a new, more tolerant and modern era for the country. The ends, however, never justify the means. Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Iranians, and Bahrianis are not asking for foreign help to overthrow their corrupt governments. They are doing what countless other civilizations have done when the government has become unjust. They've taken matters into their own hands and forced change.
Some may call him smart for being able to fool the intelligence agencies of over a dozen nations but it could also be argued that these countries were already looking for an excuse to invade. The United States had been conducting military operations in Iraq since the end of the Gulf War in 1990, enforcing the no-fly zone that was imposed by the UN. Al-Janabi gave them the opportunity they needed to take out the threat of Saddam permanently.
Thousands of American lives were lost and are still being lost because of this war. We like to think that they died for patriotism. I have no doubt that they did. The question, however, is who's patriotism?
Ours or Al-Janabi's?
