英美报刊选读 阅读材料.docxVIP

— PAGE \* Arabic 1 — 英美报刊选读 阅读材料 Lesson Nine. Iraq: Who won the war?  Not the 90,000 Iraqi civilians or the 4,200 US and UK troops killed since 2003. The big winners are the money men who have made billions.  Raymond Whitaker and Stephen Foley report  1.Five years ago today, Britain stood on the brink of war. On 16 March 2003, United Nations  weapons inspec-tors were advised to leave Iraq within 48 hours, and the shock and awe bombing campaign began less than 100 hours later, on 20 March. The moment the neocons around President George Bush had worked so long for, aided by the moral fervour of Tony Blair, was about to arrive.  2.I believe demolishing Husseins military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,  Kenneth Adelman, a leading neocon, had said a few weeks before, and so it proved. Within barely a month, Saddams bronze statue in Baghdads Firdaus Square was scrap metal. But every other prediction by the Bush administrations hawks proved wrong.  3.No weapons of mass destruction –Britains key justification for war –have been found. The  Pentagon acknowledged last week that a review of more than 600,000 captured Iraqi documents showed no evidence that Saddam Husseins regime had any operational links with Osama bin Ladens al-Qaida terrorist network.  4.In 2008, there are still more American troops in Iraq than during the invasion, with no exit yet in  sight. Britains Ministry of Defence has just admitted that it has been unable to withdraw as many British troops as it planned – there are 4,000 still based just outside Basra, instead of the projected 2,500. So far 3,987 American soldiers and 197 British troops have died in Iraq.  5.So, five years on, who can be said to have won the war? Certainly not Iraqi civilians, at least  90,000 of whom have died violently since 2003, at the most conservative estimate. Other studies have multiplied that figure by five or six. Two million Iraqis have fled the country,