A year ago, John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a report , estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had lost their life since 2003. They might still be alive but for the US-led invasion on Iraq.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has warned that the displacement of civilians from Iraq is now the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world, as up to 4 million Iraqis have been displaced due to the escalating violence in their country.

Luke (not his real name) is one of them. He has been lucky to escape the maddening situation in Iraq, but many of his compatriots have not.

Luke comes from a rather privileged background. His parents used to teach at Baghdad University, and sent the children to elite schools. Their Assyrian Christian faith was never an issue, and the family was well respected by those around them, Shiite or Sunni alike.

All this took a drastic turn after the 'War on Iraq' launched by the US in March 2003. Luke's parents lost their teaching jobs, having been told they had served under people close to president Saddam Hussein. Luke's elder sister, a pharmacist, immediately left the country and now lives in Zurich with her Swiss fianc. The parents have since moved to the neighbouring Jordan. Being still in university at the time, Luke refused to leave his homeland.

With his family now scattered in different countries, Luke was forced to fend for himself. Fortunately, his impeccable English became a huge advantage. To survive, he took up the job as an interpreter for the occupying American forces, attached to the ministry of electricity.

His services were needed as the Americans were studying the possibilities of privatising electricity. Permitted to stay in the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupiers, Luke was shielded from the daily bomb attacks and insane killings wrought by both Shiite and Sunni extremists.

But his good fortunate did not last long. In late 2004, Luke was urged by his parents in Amman to expedite the sale of their family home in the exclusive and posh district of Mansour in Baghdad following series of church bombings . For that, Luke had to travel between home and his workplace every other week or so, and the journey was strewn with dangers as sectarian violence went on unabated.

One day in January 2005, Luke went home after work, only to find a death threat wrapped around a bullet, with a simple message that could not be clearer to anyone living in this city paralysed by fear: leave now, or you will be killed for being an American stooge.

Without even entering the sitting room, Luke rushed back to the Green Zone for the night. The next day, he handed in resignation, and enquired with his American supervisor if he had a chance of getting resettled to the US. The answer was an unequivocal 'No'.

Instead of being granted leave to set foot on American soil, Luke was given a couple of thousand dollars and told to seek help elsewhere. As the Chinese adage goes: the bow is put away after all the birds are killed. Never late for work, ever so professional, Luke's months of dedicated service had gone down the drain.

In fact, many Iraqis who had been quietly disagreeing with Saddam earnestly believed they could rebuild their country by working for the Americans, but most of them have now ended up the targets of sectarian violence. The US has in most cases refused to help, effectively trapping them in an endless Catch-22.

Shaky argument

When I met Luke, he had just into the third week of his entry into Malaysia, having been stranded in Amman for nearly two years awaiting an American visa. The route to other western countries was also closed to him as Australia, Canada and Britain had tightened entry requirements. Malaysia became a natural choice as the country, amazingly, still maintains the visa waiver policy for Iraqis.

Like it or not, the 'War on Iraq' has produced nothing but disastrous consequences, not just for Iraq, but the world at large also. The international community is forced to pick up the pieces of the ill-thought, badly executed American adventure, supported by Washington's apologists worldwide.

Nearly five years on, more and more details are being unravelled proving only one thing: the war was founded on mendacity and deceit, which has resulted in a haemorrhage of American moral authority under President George W Bush.

One of the many blessings of the free-for-all information on the Internet nowadays is that we do not have to wait for days before evidence becomes available. Just last weekend, CBS' 60 Minutes programme revealed that the Iraqi whose sources were said to be central to the Bush administration's argument for war was "not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be". Within hours, the news travelled halfway around the world. Little wonder that the neo-cons are livid.

In his latest article, Francis Fukuyama, trying to assert himself as a serious analyst, has again criticised Bush for having "dropped the ball on very straightforward operational issues in Iraq", while conveniently forgetting that he was once a staunch advocate for the military action.

Similarly, Ricardo Sanchez, the retired US army lieutenant general, has described the administration's "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan glaring, unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership". But Sanchez had been more than willing to prosecute a war that he now sees as doomed from the start. Now, it is the Americans' turn to have a taste of their own medicine, as envoys refuse to be posted to Iraq.

In the 1998 movie 'Wag the Dog', the spin-master, played by Robert de Nero, simply looked up the world map and picked Albania as a target for bombing to divert the American public from the president's scandals.

Having a world map on the wall is useless if one has no idea about the conditions on the ground, and the current nightmare in Iraq is a direct consequence of an illegal war propagated by armchair strategists who were so convinced of their "intelligence".

But some of the diehard Bush propagandists continue to argue the catastrophe in Iraq today cannot be blamed on the US, as the Middle East was already a messy place before American post-WWII intervention. This shaky argument is akin to saying the Chinese have no reason to be angry with the Japanese invasion in the 1930s given that China had been on the verge of disintegration.

Perhaps one of the reasons why the world is in a mess is because we have too many dubious analysts around, such as Ralph Peters, who has gone as far as to call for a partition of Iraq for a sake of a "better" Middle East.

But is that really what Iraqis want? Luke is not too sure.

"Perhaps the Americans should not have invaded my country. There could have been many other options to topple Saddam ( photo ), but the Bush administration wanted war because that was the quickest way to get oil and other resources. I do hold those warmongers responsible. But I have lost hope for Iraq, and want to start a new life somewhere in Europe."

Luke sounds exasperated. A new life, of course, can only begin if he gets to Europe at all.