More Iraq Lies Unearthed

A newly released memo shows that in 2002 then British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged his support to the Bush Administration for an invasion of Iraq a full year before the attack took place. During that year, he lied continuously to the British people claiming that he was seeking peaceful means for dealing with Iraq, while he had actually committed himself to be part of an armed invasion of that country.

That’s bad enough, but it also strengthens the argument made by some that the Bush administration had been planning an attack on Iraq from day one. Depending on where you stand, 9/11 was the fortunate Pearl Harbor moment that allowed the administration an opening to invade Iraq, or was a government orchestrated event intended for just that purpose.

It has to make one wonder. We know Cheney and Bush wanted very badly to bring down Saddam Hussein, that they were loathe to leave the vast oil reserves in Iraq to an avowed enemy and (from the PNAC documents) wanted a strong military presence in the Middle East. So along comes 9/11, and in our moment of panic, the media and the American people gave the neocons in the administration a blank check to take away our Constitutional rights at home and kill hundreds of thousands of people in the Mideast. Doesn’t that strike you as an amazing coincidence?  On a September morning early in Bush’s first term, the physical manifestations of our economic and military might are attacked and thousands of Americans die, and this event allows him to do exactly what he and Cheney and the other administration necons want to do. 

For me, it is too much of a coincidence. From my reading and research, I am convinced 9/11 was an inside job, a false flag event, intended to gain support for an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The Left Was Right On Iraq

I wanted to make one more point about the, “With what we know today, would you still invade Iraq” question. The corporate press and political pundits make it sound as if everyone on the planet was fooled by the flawed intelligence supplied by the CIA. What they neglect to mention is that there were many voices on the left opposing the invasion of Iraq, they just got drowned out by the media megaphone supporting the war. Turned out we were right. Do you think we’ll ever hear anyone in the mainstream media say, “You guys were right. We should have listened to you.”? Don’t hold your breath.

Another Republican candidate stumbles over the Iraq question

It happened again. A Republican Presidential candidate was not prepared to answer this simple question: Knowing what we know now, would you still Invade Iraq? This time it was Marco Rubio on a Sunday talk show who stumbled over his own tongue trying to dance around the question that every Republican candidate should have known they were going to be asked. Are they really that stupid? Really?

What’s interesting about the critiques of both Rubio and Bush’s inept handling of the question is the fact that writer’s keep focusing on the weapons of mass destruction issue, but fail to mention that the original argument for invading Iraq was its supposed ties to al Qaeda and terrorism in the Middle East. When that argument began to weaken (although it was still being peddled by Colin Powell when he addressed the UN) the emphasis was switched to the supposed WMDs that, of course, never materialized.

Even the bumbling Bush administration knew there had to be some kind of tie to terrorism to get support for attacking Iraq, and Bush and Cheney (and Judith miller) enthusiastically championed a number of stories they claimed connected Saddam Hussein to terrorists, all of which turned out to be false. It’s an important part of the “what we know now” question that is getting little attention.

The whole Iraq war question should raise huge red flags for anyone thinking they might vote for a Republican, but it will have little impact on wealthy Republican supporters. They could care less what the candidates say or do, as long as they believe the winner will do their bidding.

The Iraq War: No Apologies, No Justice

This is the golden age of unaccountability. In the past week, Bush’s Brain Karl Rove and the Bush Administration stenographer, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, have both refused to apologize for their roles in selling the disastrous Iraq war to the American people. Like the snakes that they are, they both wriggled and squirmed and hissed indignant rejoinders to those who believe in the antiquated concept of justice. Having thrown the gas and lit the match that set the Middle East on fire, Rove and Miller and Cheney and all of the other pyromaniacs associated with President Bush retain their jobs and esteemed status in Washington.

Despite sending thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths, sparking violent clashes throughout the region and creating new terrorist groups, no one is paying any price for one of the biggest international blunders in American history. Obama’s reluctance to bring anyone to justice over the Iraq debacle is maddening. Clinton was impeached for lying about a brief romantic fling, yet no one today has the courage to indict actual war criminals who were responsible for torture and untold death and destruction.

The rewriters of history are already trying to work their magic by claiming the Bush Administration didn’t actually “lie” to the American people, but were simply misled by the intelligence. This is, of course, a blatant lie, but as time goes by, who knows which version of events will become the historical record. With their power, influence and money, the Bush’s have a long record of avoiding accountability and escaping punishment. Why should Iraq be any different?

Discovery of Iraq chemical weapons does NOT vindicate Bush

Yesterday’s New York Times investigative piece on chemical weapons found in Iraq is a bombshell of an article, but not for the reasons that many conservatives would have you believe.

As an article in today’s Salon and other publications point out, there are two very solid reasons why this revelation is not vindication for those who are crying, “Bush was right. Saddam did have chemical weapons.” The primary point to make is that the chemical weapons our military uncovered in Iraq were pre-1991, degraded chemical munitions that were buried during the Iraq-Iran war and forgotten about. These corroded weapons were not useable and definitely not part of an ongoing WMD program by the Iraqi government. Ironically, many of the weapons were built with the assistance of Western companies

The second point that should be clear to even the dimmest conservative pundit is that a number of these buried caches were found during our invasion of Iraq and after, yet there was not a peep about them from the Bush Administration. If they had found proof that Iraq actually had an active WMD program, don’t you imagine there would have been trumpets blaring and hearty rounds of “I told you so” from Bush and the right-wing media? The Pentagon has admitted that the chemical weapons they found, “Were not the WMDs we were looking for when we went in this time.”

And that brings me to the most disturbing revelation in the Times article. Not only were these weapons not “the WMDs we were looking for,” the Pentagon would not even acknowledge they were found at the time, and even went so far as to deny medical treatment for troops injured during the excavations. Instead of a ticker tape parade down Broadway celebrating the discovery of WMDs, the Pentagon was throwing a blanket over the operations and pretending the weapons didn’t even exist.

George Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a disaster that keeps on giving, and the more we learn about it, the clearer it becomes that this was the largest, and most costly, military blunder in U.S. history.

FOX News rewriting Bush era history

All written history is subjective to a point. As humans, we can’t help but bring our biases and prejudices to accounts of the past, even when it comes to what we choose to leave out. A problem arises, however, when you try to revise well-established historical evidence for purely ideological reasons. This was the work of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, but there is a parallel organization operating right now with the same agenda as Orwell’s fictional government office, and it’s name is FOX News.

Examples of FOX News’ historical revisionism are too numerous to list, but the latest foray into turning the past on its head is a recent interview with former president George Bush. As if being broadcast from a television studio in the bowels of the Ministry of Truth, sycophant Brian Kilmeade praised Bush for his handling of the Iraq war and focused on a Bush comment that there would be problems if the military left Iraq too soon. Treating him as if he was a wise political sage instead of the man who opened the Pandora’s Box of death and destruction in the Middle East, Kilmeade and FOX News ignored reality altogether, never broaching the subject of WMDs or the missing billions of dollars or the devastated country he handed over to Obama in 2008.

It’s just one more example of why regular viewers of FOX News are the least well-informed consumers of television news.

Cheney's bold move to rewrite history

“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

No single sentence could so accurately encapsulate the tenure of George Bush than this one.

• Missed or ignored warnings about potential terrorists plans
• Worst attack on American soil happens under his watch
• Makes case for war based on lies and false assumptions
• Invades country that has no ties to terrorism and no WMDs
• Kills hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
• Nearly 5,000 Americans lose their lives
• Completely misreads post-invasion needs of the country leaving millions in misery
• Post-invasion American overseers lose billions of dollars
• Allows torture and indefinite detention without trial
• Vacuum in Iraq emboldens terrorists and incites sectarian violence
• Dismisses then stalls investigation into 9/11, then sets up commission with predetermined outcomes
• Opium production rises in Afghanistan after the American invasion
• U.S. backed Maliki government mired in graft

The irony is that the above statement wasn’t from some liberal commentator about Bush, but comes from a recent Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal by Dick Cheney trying to shift blame for the failures of the Bush Administration onto Obama.

Cheney to Obama: “I shit on the floor and you didn’t clean it up.”

This cannot go by without comment. Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz are conducting an all out frontal media assault on Obama for abandoning Iraq and failing to keep the peace. A man who by all international standards of justice should be sitting in jail for war crimes and his little parrot are given air time and column inches to attack Obama for a disaster he inherited. This is not merely madness, it is hubris on a galactic scale. It’s a slap in the face to every American and a thumb in the nose to rest of the world.

And it’s not only Cheney who is being given a bull horn by the media but other nincompoop neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, members of the Bush administration who were colossally wrong about every aspect of the Iraq war. Still think the media has a liberal bias? Write to the papers that publish Cheney's editorial and call the television stations who air his lies and tell them how wrong this all is.

Iraq bearing the fruits of Bush/Cheney invasion

As al-Qaida inspired militants capture key cities in Iraq and threaten to march on Baghdad, the disastrous legacy of Bush and Cheney’s illegal invasion of that country in 2003 becomes horribly apparent. Militant Islamist groups rose from the chaos of post-war Iraq, intent on taking advantage of the vacuum to control territory and impose their radical religious views on the previously secular country.

Our blundering, ill-conceived assault on a country that had no ties to terrorism has created a fertile breeding ground for extremists and potential terrorists. The Plan for a New American Century crafted by neocons in the late nineties and then used as the basis for the Bush administration's Middle East policies was a blueprint for disaster, an ideological veneer thinly covering a belief that the oil rich countries of that region must be under our government’s thumb and the oil fields under the control of American companies.

It was a plan grounded on hubris and greed destined for failure. And yet, no one has paid a price for the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, for sending Americans to be killed in a war based on false pretenses or for destabilizing an already volatile part of the world. If there were justice, George Bush should be painting portraits of his cellmate, Dick Cheney.

Ten Years After

On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, this is Donald Rumsfeld's Twitter post for today:

"10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation."

Thanks Donald. Here's what you deserve:

Iraq: An Unwelcome Anniversary Approaches

There has been a hew and cry over the past few years that no major Wall Street honchos have gone to jail related to criminal acts leading up to the 2008 financial meltdown from which this country is still trying to recuperate. And so there should be. However, as much as I think these white collar criminals should pay for their crimes, and as much damage as they did to ruin the financial futures of millions of Americans, they did not send our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, off to a foreign country to kill and die under false pretenses.  

Ten years ago this March 19, President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. Aided and abetted by administration neocons Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney and others, Bush lied us into a war that went on for nine years, cost $3 trillion dollars, and resulted in the deaths of nearly 5,000 Americans and over 100,000 Iraqis. There were no WMDs, and Saddam Hussein was not working with Al Qaeda. What a decade of investigative reporting has uncovered, is that far from the blundering incompetents they are made out to be by some, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others knew they were starting a war under false pretenses. They had planned to topple Hussein from the earliest days of the Bush Administration.

If anyone should be tried for anything, it should be Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for instigating a disaster of epic proportions that continues to have negative ramifications for our country a decade later. These people are war criminals and should be treated as such. They used 9/11 as a pretext to rain war down on a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on America, and had the gall to ridicule and marginalize those who disagreed with their rush to battle.

The roadblock to justice is that there was such widespread collusion among America’s elites and the media that no one wants to open up that Pandora’s Box of embarrassment. Not to mention that even though he opposed the Iraq war, President Obama seems to have no desire to pursue criminal charges against an ex-president, especially now that he has drone blood on his hands.

I’m afraid our only hope is that we will have history on the side of truth, but even then, it’s a toss up at this point as to what the “official” history of the Iraq war will be. George Orwell knew well the dangers of relying on history for truth when he wrote, “He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past.”