In the year 750, the Abbasid dynasty "de-Bedouinized" Islam by defeating the Ummayads based in Damascus. The culture of the Abbasid court ceased to be Arab only and started to embrace Persians and Turks, turning Islam into truly a universal religion, no more constrained by geography. Baghdad the great capital of the caliphate was catapulted to the centre of the world.

From 786-809 under fabled Harun al-Rashid, Baghdad established relations with China's Tang dynasty and Emperor Charlemagne in Europe. Baghdad gave the world astronomy, alchemy, hydraulics, diplomacy, fiscal administration, and postal service. Up to the early 12th century it remained the most important intellectual centre of the world. Modern Iraq was then yet to be born.

Modern Iraq was the creation of European colonial power. It was only after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I that the British carved it out of an area known as Mesopotamia. Baghdad continued to remain a capital -- now of Iraq.

Baghdad had been under siege by the Assyrians and later by Cyrus the Great from Persia. But it was only in 1258 that Baghdad was sacked by the hordes of Mongols riding their lightning quick horses under the command of Hulagu, Genghis Khan's grandson. Legend has it that he erected a pyramid of 700,000 skulls out of his victims. In 1401 another invader, the Turko-Mongol Tamerlan (Timur the Lame) devastated Baghdad yet again.

In 2003 came the Christian army of George W Bush with the refrain of "shock and awe."

From the beginning of it the comparisons with Hulagu and Tamerlan were vivid in popular imagination. Over time Baghdadis, Sunni or Shia, were saying that they would dictate their rights over the occupiers. That's what is now happening. It's a wrenching story with rivers of real blood and a terrible accumulation of real corpses.

The story was scripted in Washington and the plot wouldn't be advancing were it not for the United States. The US bears the legal and moral responsibility for the destruction of the fabled capital of the caliphate. It is in this contest that the current avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak in the US should be placed.

The recent months in Iraq have reflected the hellish mechanism unleashed by the invasion and occupation, the daily gruesome banquet of death provoked by state-sponsored terror, counter-insurgency stoked by sectarian hatred, or the total collapse of social contract.

The logic of extermination of society and culture as well as their heritage was in-built in the process since 2003. In fact, the systematic annihilation of 2-3% of the entire Iraqi population according to the study by The Lancet, not to mention the one million people displaced since March 2003, follow more than 500,000 children who died during the 1990s as victims of UN sanctions.

Iraq has been systematically destroyed for more than 15 years. The great irony is this that all this death and destruction is, for the US administration, just a minor detail in "the big picture."

In a perverse replay of what happened in the jungles of Vietnam, the Pentagon has lost the asymmetric guerrilla war raging in the Sunni Belt which is in favour of attacking the occupiers, no holds barred.

It is true that Saddam's regime had already started to disintegrate from inside after the war of 1991 -- a process coupled with the devastating effects of UN sanctions. Yet none of this translated into the western perception of Shia-Sunni division, and Saddam alone knew the magic keeping people from diverse origins under his tight grip. Contrary to the western propaganda myth, Iraqi civil society as a whole, apart from few factions, abhors civil war.

The real, not virtual, future of Iraq will be decided now with the enactment of the oil law -- which is in fact the debt for oil program concocted and imposed by the IMF. This is the point of the US invasion -- a return on investment on the hundreds of billion of dollars of US tax payer money spent.

It is not "war as politics by other means" -- it is, rather, war as free market opening by other means. It will give the US full access to the epicentre of the energy wars and the perfect geo-strategic location for "taming" in the near future both Russia and China. The silence of the US corporate media on this is also stratospheric.

It is now only a question of how and when this law will be passed -- once that is done, the rape of Iraq will be complete, and that will be the last nail in the coffin of Iraq's fate.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.