MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

“BAGHDAD – Iraq’s Shiite-led government cracked down harshly on dissent during the past year of Arab Spring uprisings, turning the country into a ‘budding police state’ as autocratic regimes crumbled elsewhere in the region, an international rights groups said Sunday.

Security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, torture detainees and intimidate activists, Human Rights Watch said in the Iraq chapter of its annual report.

‘Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism,’ said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for the New York-based group. ‘Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy (in Iraq), the reality is that it left behind a budding police state,’ she said.

Protests against Iraq’s U.S.-backed and democratically elected government erupted around the country in February 2011, alongside other demonstrations in the Arab world.

While protests in other countries demanded the downfall of autocratic regimes, most of the demonstrations in Iraq pushed for improved services like reliable electricity and water, and an end to corruption.

The government clamped down, sometimes sparking bloody clashes — as when 14 were killed in confrontations between security forces and civilians across the country during the Feb. 25 protests billed as the ‘Day of Rage.’

A year later, with U.S. troops withdrawn and Iraq’s government mired in a political crisis, the protest movement has all but died out. Demonstrators who gather in Baghdad’s central Tahrir Square are usually outnumbered by the security forces watching over them.

‘Iraqis are quickly losing ground on the most basic of rights, including the right to free speech and assembly,’ said Samer Muscati, an Iraq researcher for the group.” Read more.

Flashback: Barack Obama declares Iraq war ‘an extraordinary achievement’ – “Barack Obama marked an end to a war he once described as ‘dumb’ by declaring the conflict in Iraq a success and saying the last US troops will leave in the coming days with their ‘heads held high’. The president told an audience of soldiers at Fort Bragg that the final pullout from Iraq after nearly nine years of war is a ‘historic’ moment and that the country they leave behind is ‘an extraordinary achievement’.” Read more.