[promoted by BooMan]
Three years ago, the US President co-piloted a fighter aircraft onto the deck of the USS Lincoln to declare “the end of major hostilities” in Iraq. Above him a banner proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished.” Today, a humble 9 percent of Americans believe that the mission has really been such.
Though I respect the majority view, I have to say that it is, in fact, mistaken.
It is true that the Iraq War has been far from flawless in its conception and execution. The war:
- was justified to the Congress and public with tailor-made and strongly counter-indicated reports of an ultimately non-existent threat to the US homeland — reports in large part supplied by a wanted criminal;
- was prepared in the face of warnings by numerous experts and international statesmen, including President Bush sr. and his senior foreign policy staff;
- triggered an international diplomatic crisis pitting the US against major allies including Germany and France, as well as against Russia, China, and other important countries;
- was blatantly illegal according to most qualified observers, including the International Commission of Jurists and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, thus undermining the authority of the UN Security Council;
- was conducted even though the Iraqi President offered to step down and go into exile;
- precipitated a costly, graft-ridden and utterly bungled reconstruction program of which only 30 percent of Iraqis are even aware, as exemplified by the miserable failure to build a health infrastructure;
- was marred by titanic tactical and strategic blunders such as allowing the looting of 250,000 tons of heavy ordnance from unguarded dumps, which is enough for several hundred years of attacks, and the decision to disband Iraq’s police force and 300,000 strong army overnight, thus offering the budding insurgency vast numbers of professional fighters as well as 1769 miles of unsecured border to exploit;
- has deteriorated to a brutal counter-insurgency involving the use of chemical weapons in cities; systematic torture by US troops, implicating hundreds of US service members and extending in some cases to rape of women and children, alienating even close US allies; and death squads manned by US-trained police;
- was based on planning which severely underestimated the required troop strength, against the advise of the US Army and US Air Force chiefs of staff and that of the Secretary of State, himself a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
- involves an effective occupation that keeps 132,000 US service members and thousands of others — many on their second or third deployments — away from home, but which nonetheless only 1 percent of Iraqis trust for their personal protection;
- depends for military morale on fantastic misconceptions among US troops, with 85 percent believing the US mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks” and 77 percent that a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq”; while even with such false beliefs at work, 72 percent of troops on the ground hold that the US should exit Iraq within this year whether it is needed there or not;
- in fact diverted key special operations forces and intelligence resources away from the hunt for al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, and by depleting the US presence there, has enabled their allies the Taliban to reclaim most of that country and parts of Pakistan;
- has generally served the strategic interests of the USA’s principal enemy while likely also spurring it to develop nuclear weapons;
- has claimed an estimated 200,000 Iraqi lives, of which 120,000 directly by violence;
- has spawned a major civil war even by the most stringent definitions (pdf), forcing up to 100,000 families into internal displacement at present and threatening to destabilize the region;
- has not only caused enduring distrust and resentment of the US in Arab countries, including Iraq, but also become a rallying cry for international terrorism even by the administration’s own admission, as well as the main source of US civilian deaths in terrorist strikes;
- may within a matter of months have claimed as many American lives as the terrorist attack of 9/11 2001, preventing whose repetition was used to justify the war in the first place;
- will soon have seen 18,000 US service members wounded in combat, though actual numbers must be much higher considering that 144,424 veterans have sought treatment from the swamped and underfunded VA system since returning from Iraq (and Afghanistan), not counting those hospitalized in military hospitals; and considering that 35 percent of Iraq veterans have already sought treatment for emotional problems;
- has already cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the ten-plus-year war in Vietnam, and will, according to estimates by two world-class economists, cost current and future US taxpayers $1-2 trillion when such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for injured troops as well as the impact on the US economy are factored in.
How, then, is the war a success? Well, do you have to ask?
The Iraq War allowed George W. Bush — who, to dedicate himself more fully to his primary interest, the joys of prostitutes, booze, and cocaine, deserted from the stateside posting his dad had secured for him to keep him out of combat in Vietnam — to at long last fly a fighter jet in war.
That mission, I submit, was accomplished to his satisfaction on May 1, 2003.
“Aftershock”
{Working Title}
But first: Click To Play Sample Trailer
More to the point (and on a more serious note) is Greg Palast’s recent excellent article in The Guardian with a similar title, “Bush Didn’t Bungle Iraq, You Fools
THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCOMPLISHED.” The original is no longer posted, but you can read it at Peace, Earth & Justice News here:
http://www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=4394&mode=
thread&order=0&thold=0
Here’s a brief quote:
Palast offers evidence to back up his point of view–interviews with Robert Ebel and a copy of a secret State Department draft plan for Iraqi oil.
It’s well worth a read.
I’m skeptical of that theory, but thanks, I’ll read it!
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Plan Z:
When all has failed count your blessings, or in this case your money.
● Iraqi Oil – the $250bn gift to Saudi Arabia and Russia
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
…of Palast’s work, I’m pretty skeptical about this. I’d like to see some quotations from that 323-page State Department document he’s acquired.
in his new book that’s coming out soon, I assume. When I was Googling for the article on Palast’s website, where this article it used to be, I saw a reference to a long interview Palast gave on a similar topic. If I can find it again I’ll come back with the url (if it’s any good, that is).
OT–FWIW I cannot figure out how to get the html to work here for links, when you want to give an abbreviated text description for a link. They don’t give specific examples. I gave up after wasting several hours on a couple occasions (with brackets, without brackets, with spaces, without spaces, with comma, without comma–all possible permutations of the “Allowed HTML” below the comment box. No joy. Where should I post/send a suggestion about this?
The new Crusader was ready in the year 2000 AD.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
I guess the question is “Who is the terrorist?” The examples cited would point to someone or something other than the folks Dubya is rompin’n’stompin’ after around the world. The American electorate should be outraged that the mission of cleansing the terrorists out of Afghanistan and truly and effectively putting that nation back onto the tracks could have been accomplished, politically and economically after 2001. Instead, we have a total trainwreck with toxic and potentially fissile material just waiting to meltdown in the Middle East because of the current administration’s policies. They’ll be analyzing this debacle in the grand strategy classes a millenium from now.
Your premise is absolutely correct. your assumption that by posting all of the opposit justifications is a false assumption. And you are in effect losing your
real position. The simple fact is that you have really overlooked what the president and his cabal had and still have as their goal.Not your goal. They want, they want, they want. And what they want is control. Control of land, control of as mich of the natural resources as is humanly possible, control of the lives of as many human beings as they can,- in other words total and complete control of the world. In this regard, they are winning!
Don’t think that for one single second they will stop their compulsive behavior because of a few thousand or even a few million people. Not happenning. Don’t think for one second that if and/or when they percieve any real threat, they won’t squash that threat without a single moment of remorse. So, if ya want to revisit your headline, be my guest. I realize that it was a tongue in cheek approach but guess what. We aint got the time to play games.
billjpa
ps- your list was one of the best compilations I have seen yet!
I don’t buy the “Bushies want to conquer and subdue the whole planet” idea.
Here’s a more sober perspective on their motivations.
The regime change in Iraq was calculated to resolve an inherent dilemma in American Middle East policy – the tension between the friendship with Israel and the dependency upon Arab oil.
Per A. Christiansen, Aftenposten 11.02.05
[From the Norwegian by Sirocco]
The high-ranking American diplomat does not hesitate for a moment. We are discussing the US relationship to the oil states of the Golf, where he has been posted for years. And my question goes something like this:
To understand the depth of this answer we must go 60 years back in time to a meeting held on board an American naval vessel in the Suez Canal, whence two thematic threads weave themselves through American Middle East policy. One twists its way through developments that have established Israel as the US ‘strategic ally’ in the region. The other is simpler and straighter, following the USA’s increasing dependency on Arab oil.
Palestine and oil.
The historic meeting took place on 14 February 1945 on board the American warship USS Quincy. There US President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Saudi King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia.
Two main issues were on the agenda: First, the question of developments in Palestine where the Zionist movement wanted to create a Jewish state contrary to the wishes of the Arab popular majority. Second, the question of how the USA could contribute to oil production in, as well as the defense of, Saudi Arabia.
Jewish suffering.
King Abdul Aziz acknowledged that the Jews had suffered during the world war now nearing its end, but he believed it would be wrong to let the Palestine Arabs pay the price. – Let the Jews take over the best and richest areas of Germany, was his councel to his host.
Roosevelt then pointed out that the Jews who had survived the Nazi horrors would hardly want to become Germans after the war. But at the same time he promised to abstain from helping the Jews against the Arabs and to take no initiative detrimental to Arab interests. He subsequently confirmed in a letter to the King that this was indeed the official US policy, which the Americans would not change without consultations with both Arabs and Jews.
However, Roosevelt died a mere week after writing this letter, and his successor Harry S. Truman would as time went on completely disregard his promise.
Oil and defense.
As to the other main issue, the source material is less extensive. What is nonetheless clear is that the Saudi treasury was running out and that the country needed new and considerable oil revenues, while the USA was pursuing access to oil.
The US was already involved in Aramco, the company managing Saudi oil production. As the vastness of the resources hidden beneath the deserts sands became evident, new American companies were pulled into this cooperation during the 1940s. Meanwhile the US military was allowed to use the airport the Americans were building near Dhahran in the oil-rich area close to the Golf.
A conflict of interests.
For nearly six decades now the US has been living with this inherent conflict of interests – on the one hand, its ever stronger support of Israel; on the other, its increasing dependency on Arab, and especially Saudi, oil.
In later years the situation has become even more acute as the US boosted its military forces in the Golf following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, seeking to defend Saudi oil fields against possible further Iraqi aggression. This military presence in the holy land of Islam has intensified the wrath of Muslim extremists toward the USA, a wrath contributing to the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001.
Iraq as a solution.
The US invasion of Iraq nearly two years ago was in reality aimed at resolving this conflict of interests, suggests the French Middle East scholar Gilles Kepel.
By deposing Saddam Hussein and his regime, the so-called neo-conservative driving forces behind the invasion intended, according to Kepel, once and for all to conciliate the Americans’ need for reliable oil supplies with their obligations toward Israel’s security.
Specifically, the US would reduce its dependency on Saudi oil through the emergence of Iraq as a heavy new supplier. Thus the need to defend Saudi oil fields would also vanish, permitting the US to downscale its military presence in the Golf. Additionally, a new and democratic Iraqi government might establish diplomatic ties with Israel and by its example lead other Arab countries to do the same.
In other words: Through such an alliance between the USA and an oil-rich, Israel-friendly Arab country with major political clout, the Americans would once and for all get rid of the inherent dilemma in their Middle Eastern policy.
So far, however, none of these chips have fallen into place.
Throw in two parts military/industrial profit and one part reverse domino theory, and stir.
…but how do you code for that scrolling story inside a comment? Very cool.
Something like this:
<div style="height: 300px; width: 400px; overflow: auto; border: 1px solid #666;background-color: #fff6d5; padding: 8px;">TEXT GOES HERE</div>
It used to work at dKos as well, but doesn’t after the injection of Ajax code.
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It’s not about public opnion or controling the minds of the masses. As I learned in the sixties, the cold war and communism was a battle of economics.
At this moment, the U.S. is on a sliding scale downward to dominate the financial world due to the fall of the dollar, trade deficit and total debt of government and the consumer.
● Gold at record high
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY