Hubris: Selling the Iraq War

[Adele Edisen]

Hubris : Selling the Iraq War

Video Documentary: 43:40 mnutes long

We must not allow the perpetrators of the Iraq War to rewrite history. Their actions
and the consequences of their actions must be remembered in infamy.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e34021.htm [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001xL9kE2GA7...PreKJdjK0]

This was a special documentary on MSNBC last night (Feb. 18, 2013), based on a book written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, and narrated by Rachel Maddow.

Adele.

[Adele Edisen]

The Uncommon Courage of Bradley Manning
By Marjorie Cohn

Global Research, March 01, 2013
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-uncommo...ng/5324709


Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to 10 charges including possessing and willfully communicating to an unauthorized person all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure. The charges carry a total of 20 years in prison. For the first time, Bradley spoke publicly about what he did and why. His actions, now confirmed by his own words, reveal Bradley to be a very brave young man.

When he was 22 years old, Pfc. Bradley Manning gave classified documents to WikiLeaks. They included the "Collateral Murder" video, which depicts U.S. forces in an Apache helicopter killing 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and wounding two children.

"I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan," Bradley told the military tribunal during his guilty plea proceeding. "It might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day."

Bradley said he was frustrated by his inability to convince his chain of command to investigate the Collateral Murder video and other "war porn" documented in the files he provided to WikiLeaks. "I was disturbed by the response to injured children." Bradley was bothered by the soldiers depicted in the video who "seemed to not value human life by referring to [their targets] as dead bastards.'" People trying to rescue the wounded were also fired upon and killed. A U.S. tank drove over one body, cutting the man in half. The actions of American soldiers shown in that video amount to war crimes under the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit targeting civilians, preventing the rescue of the wounded, and defacing dead bodies.

No one at WikiLeaks asked or encouraged Bradley to give them the documents, Bradley said. "No one associated with the WLO [WikiLeaks Organization] pressured me to give them more information. The decision to give documents to WikiLeaks [was] mine alone."

Before contacting WikiLeaks, Bradley tried to interest the Washington Post in publishing the documents but the newspaper was unresponsive. He tried unsuccessfully to contact the New York Times.

During his first nine months in custody, Bradley was kept in solitary confinement, which is considered torture as it can lead to hallucinations, catatonia and suicide.

Bradley maintained his not guilty pleas to 12 additional charges, including aiding the enemy and espionage, for which he could get life imprisonment.

Bradley's actions are not unlike those of Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers helped to expose the government's lies and end the Vietnam War.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and co-author of "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" (with Kathleen Gilberd). She testifies at military hearings about the illegality of the wars, the duty to obey lawful orders, and the duty to disobey unlawful orders. See http://www.marjoriecohn.com.

Copyright © 2013 Global Research

Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

Obama the invisible [to most] Trojan Horse for the National Security State and their Masters has prosecuted and convicted more whistleblowers of government wrongdoing than any other President. He has also sought more convictions under the Sedition Act than all Presidents combined. Some 'Liberal' President; some progressive; some Constitutional lawyer! MLK would have welcomed his ability to become President, but given him one tongue lashing the likes only he was capable of...had he not been assassinated by the very people and powers that Obama now is frontman for. Obama even allowed an 'outsources' [Chinese] artist and bronze foundry produce the horrible statue that is supposed to honor King in the Capitol. Whistleblowing is now a high treason crime post 9-11. We really do live in a Police State, being ratcheted up every year and most sheeple not noticing like slowly boiled frogs. Manning is a hero, IMO, and should be treated as such - instead, he will likely face life in prison for exposing warcrimes and other misdeeds. He embarrassed the 'enemy' which is within the Beltway.

[Peter Lemkin]

Malice v. Nobility

Scooter Libby v. Bradley Manning

by SAUL LANDAU
After 9/11, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Yale graduate with a law degree from Columbia, and fellow neo cons plotted to twist and invent "intelligence" data to convince the public that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, so as to build a case for invading Iraq.
From 2001 to 2005, Libby served as Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States and Assistant to President George W. Bush.
Libby and fellow neo cons stressed Bush's dubious claim that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." (2003 State of the Union Address)
Cheney repeated that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons" in March. ("Meet the Press")
The CIA was asked to investigate. Joe Wilson a former US Ambassador and expert on Africa got chosen for the mission. His wife, Valery Plame, worked as a covert CIA operator.
Wilson dismissed the "yellow-cake tale". His New York Times op ed ("What I Didn't Find In Africa, July 6, 2003) suggested the Bushies had invented pretexts for the Iraq war.
Libby and fellow war plotters Karl Rove and Richard Armitage, not satisfied by their success in making war, wanted to punish their Washington enemies. They leaked Plame's name to the mischievous columnist Robert Novak to punish her husband, Wilson. Novak's story ended her CIA career, and exposed her agents and contacts.
A jury later convicted Libby of obstruction of justice and perjury around the case. A judge sentenced him to 30 months in prison, and fined him $250,000. Bush, months later, commuted his term. But no one got charged with plotting to distribute false information to lure the public to war. The New York Times had even helped the campaign by publishing the lies as news stories on its front page.
Count the Bush cabal's accomplishments: thousands of dead US military personnel and contractors, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis; hundreds of thousands wounded, physically and mentally here and there. Iraq remains broken. 13000 Iraqis died violently last year. W. Bush destroyed Iraq's integrity. His profligate war spending vastly increased the national debt. His definitive biography might be called: "Lying The Nation Into War."
Libby served some months in prison. But the neo con gang should be called simply "cons" as in convicts. Most of them got great jobs instead.
In November 2005, a Marine Corps unit killed 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq. Investigators determined all died from multiple gun shot wounds at close range apparently as payback for an Iraqi rebel attack on a US convoy in which a Marine Corporal died the mini My Lai of Iraq.
This January 24 a US military judge handed down harsh sentences. Squad leader, Staff Sgt. Frank G. Wuterich, pleaded guilty of war crimes and received a maximum of 90 days in prison and a reduction in pay and rank. He served no time in the brig. One Marine was acquitted; six others had their cases dropped. (Dirk Adriaensens, Truthout, February 28, 2012)
No US official has been charged for the massive number of civilian deaths in Iraq, or for lying as a pretext for war. Who remembers the Nuremberg laws?
Now look at Private Bradley Manning's ordeal. He had access to and allegedly released to Julian Assange of Wikileaks hundreds of thousands of secret documents. These documents exposed not secrets vital to our enemy, but lies, corruption and crimes by US officials and those of other countries. Manning's defense team stresses that what Wikileaks published wasn't or shouldn't have been secret.
Manning did however embarrass US officials by exposing their illegal, stupid, selfish and downright inane activities. If he illegally distributed those documents, why doesn't the Justice Department charge the New York Times and other newspapers that gleefully distributed this supposedly classified (mortifying) material? One video Manning allegedly released spread virally. US helicopter gunship members get orders to fire on Iraqis because one (a Reuters cameraman) might have a weapon (a video camera). We witness from the camera mounted on the gun the massacre of a group of men near the cameraman, and then of others who subsequently arrive to help the wounded, including a child in a van. Humanitarian behavior in Iraq? Who invited us there?
Was this classified because Iraqis didn't know our troops did such things or because it disgraces our military?
With vindictiveness aforethought the military held Manning for months in solitary confinement often naked with the light on all night in the Quantico Virginia Marine Base. Solitary "crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment." (John McCain, on his two years of solitary confinement in Vietnam)
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times concluded that solitary confinement constitutes torture, designed to break a person. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture tried to investigate Manning's prison conditions. The military refused his request for an unmonitored visit.
The 24 year-old Manning faces 22 charges, including "aiding the enemy." If convicted, the government will call for life imprisonment, unless Manning implicates Julian Assange in the "conspiracy" to expose the "secret" sins of US national security. Members of the Icelandic Parliament have nominated Manning for a Nobel Peace Prize. Let's help him win it as a free man.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/...adley-manning/

[Adele Edisen]

Iraq After Ten Years
By Paul Craig Roberts

It is difficult to discern which is the most despicable, the corrupt Bush regime,
the presstitutes that enabled it, or the corrupt Obama regime that refuses to prosecute
the Bush regime for its unambiguous war crimes.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e34347.htm [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001QnIkAucgP...9hWTkgoVC]


Iraq After Ten Years

By Paul Craig Roberts

March 19, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - March 19, 2013. Ten years ago today the Bush regime invaded Iraq. It is known that the justification for the invasion was a packet of lies orchestrated by the neoconservative Bush regime in order to deceive the United Nations and the American people.

The US Secretary of State at that time, General Colin Powell, has expressed his regrets that he was used by the Bush regime to deceive the United Nations with fake intelligence that the Bush and Blair regimes knew to be fake. But the despicable presstitute media has not apologized to the American people for serving the corrupt Bush regime as its Ministry of Propaganda and Lies.

It is difficult to discern which is the most despicable, the corrupt Bush regime, the presstitutes that enabled it, or the corrupt Obama regime that refuses to prosecute the Bush regime for its unambiguous war crimes, crimes against the US Constitution, crimes against US statutory law, and crimes against humanity.

In his book, Cultures Of War, the distinguished historian John W. Dower observes that the concrete acts of war unleashed by the Japanese in the 20th century and the Bush imperial presidency in the 21st century "invite comparative analysis of outright war crimes like torture and other transgressions. Imperial Japan's black deeds have left an indelible stain on the nation's honor and good name, and it remains to be seen how lasting the damage to America's reputation will be. In this regard, the Bush administration's war planners are fortunate in having been able to evade formal and serious investigation remotely comparable to what the Allied powers pursued vis-a-vis Japan and Germany after World War II."

Dower quotes Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: "The president [Bush] has adopted a policy of anticipatory self-defense' that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy."

Americans paid an enormous sum of money for the shame of living in infamy. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes calculated that the Iraq war cost US taxpayers $3,000 billion dollars. This estimate might turn out to be optimistic. The latest study concludes that the war could end up costing US taxpayers twice as much. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/1...BN20130314

In order to pay for the profits that have flowed into the pockets of the US military-security complex and from there into political contributions, Americans are in danger of losing Social Security, Medicare, and the social cohesiveness that the social welfare system provides.

The human cost to Iraq of America's infamy is extraordinary: 4.5 million displaced Iraqis, as many as 1 million dead civilians leaving widows and orphans, a professional class that has departed the country, an infrastructure in ruins, and social cohesion destroyed by the Sunni-Shia conflict that was ignited by Washington's destruction of the Saddam Hussein government.

It is a sick joke that the United States government brought freedom and democracy to Iraq. What the Washington war criminals brought was death and the destruction of a country.

The US population, for the most part, seems quite at ease with the gratuitous destruction of Iraq and all that it entails: children without parents, wives without husbands, birth defects from "depleted" uranium, unsafe water, a country without hope mired in sectarian violence.

Washington's puppet state governments in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Japan seem equally pleased with the victory--over what? What threat did the victory defeat? There was no threat. Weapons of mass destruction was a propaganda hoax. Mushroom clouds over American cities was fantasy propaganda. How ignorant do populations have to be to fall for such totally transparent propaganda? Is there no intelligence anywhere in the Western world?

At a recent conference the neoconservatives responsible for the deaths and ruined lives of millions and for the trillions of dollars that their wars piled on US national debt were unrepentant and full of self-justification. While Washington looks abroad for evil to slay, evil is concentrated in Washington itself. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pi...later-8227 (AE - See next post for this article)


The American war criminals walk about unmolested. They are paid large sums of money to make speeches about how Americans are bringing freedom and democracy to the world by invading, bombing and murdering people. The War Crimes Tribunal has not issued arrest warrants. The US Department of State, which is still hunting for Nazi war criminals, has not kidnapped the American ones and sent them to be tried at the Hague.

The Americans who suffered are the 4,801 troops who lost their lives, the thousands of troops who lost limbs and suffer from other permanent wounds, the tens of thousands who suffer from post-traumatic stress and from the remorse of killing innocent people, the families and friends of the American troops, and the broken marriages and single-parent children from the war stress.

Other Americans have suffered on the home front. Those whose moral conscience propelled them to protest the war were beaten and abused by police, investigated and harassed by the FBI, and put on no-fly lists. Some might actually be prosecuted. The Unites States has reached the point where any citizen who has a moral conscience is an enemy of the state. The persecution of Bradley Manning demonstrates this truth.

A case could be made that the historians' comparison of the Bush regime with Japanese war criminals doesn't go far enough. By this October 7, Washington will have been killing people, mainly women, children, and village elders, in Afghanistan for 12 years. No one knows why America has brought such destruction to the Afghan people. First the Soviets; then the Americans. What is the difference? When Obama came into the presidency, he admitted that no one knew what the US military mission was in Afghanistan. We still don't know. The best guess is profits for the US armaments industry, power for the Homeland Security industry, and a police state for the insouciant US population.

Washington has left Libya in ruins and internal conflict. There is no government, but it is not libertarian nirvana.

The incessant illegal drone attacks on Pakistani civilians is radicalizing elements of Pakistan and provoking civil war against the Pakistani government, which is owned by Washington and permits Washington's murder of its citizens in exchange for Washington's money payments to the political elites who have sold out their country to Washington.

Washington has destabilized Syria and destroyed the peace that the Assad family had imposed on the Islamic sects. Syria seems fated to be reduced to ruins and permanent violence like Libya and Iraq.

Washington is at work killing people in Yemen.

As the video released to WikiLeaks by Bradley Manning shows, some US troops don't care who they kill--journalists and civilians walking peacefully along a street, a father and his children who stop to help the wounded. As long as someone is killed, it doesn't matter who.

Killing is winning.

The US invaded Somalia, has its French puppets militarily involved in Mali, and perhaps has Sudan in its crosshairs for drones and missiles.

Iran and Lebanon are designated as the next victims of Washington's aggression.

Washington protects Israeli aggression against the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon from UN censure and from embargoes. Washington has arrested and imprisoned people who have sent aid to the Palestinian children. Gaza, declares Washington which regards itself as the only fount of truth, is ruled by Hamas, a terrorist organization according to Washington. Thus any aid to Gaza is aid to terrorism. Aide to starving and ill Palestinian children is support of terrorism. This is the logic of an inhumane war criminal state.

What is this aggression against Muslims about?

The Soviet Union collapsed and Washington needed a new enemy to keep the US military/security complex in power and profits. The neoconservatives, who totally dominated the Bush regime and might yet dominate the Obama regime declared Muslims in the Middle East to be the enemy. Against this make-believe "enemy," the US launched wars of aggression that are war crimes under the US imposed Nuremberg standard that was applied to the defeated WWII Germans.

Although the British and French started World War II by declaring war on Germany, it was Germans, defeated by the Red Army, who were tried by Washington as war criminals for starting a war. A number of serious historians have reached the conclusion that America's war crimes, with the fire-bombings of the civilian populations of Dresden and Tokyo and the gratuitous nuclear attacks on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are of the same cloth as the war crimes of Hitler and the Japanese.

The difference is that the winners paint the defeated in the blackest tones and themselves in high moral tones. Honest historians know that there is not much difference between US WWII war crimes and those of the Japanese and Germans. But the US was on the winning side.

By its gratuitous murder of Muslims in seven or eight countries, Washington has ignited a Muslim response: bitter hatred of the United States. This response is termed "terrorism" by Washington and the war against terrorism serves as a source of endless profits for the military complex and for a police state to "protect" Americans from terrorism, but not from the terrorism of their own government.

The bulk of the American population is too misinformed to catch on, and the few who do understand and are attempting to warn others will be silenced. The 21st century will be one of the worst centuries in human history. All over the Western world, liberty is dying.

The legacy of "the war on terror" is the death of liberty.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

Adele

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e34347.htm [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001QnIkAucgP...9hWTkgoVC]

[Adele Edisen]

Iraq war costs U.S. more than $2 trillion - study
By Daniel Trotta

Thu Mar 14, 2013 9:59am EDT

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pi...later-8227


* Says interest payments could swell cost to more than $6 trillion

* Estimates at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians killed

* Huge increase in spending on U.S. veterans in past two years

By Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK, March 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war's death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000, the study said.

The report, the work of about 30 academics and experts, was published in advance of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.

It was also an update of a 2011 report the Watson Institute produced ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that assessed the cost in dollars and lives from the resulting wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.

That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion in the update.

The estimated death toll from the three wars, previously at 224,000 to 258,000, increased to a range of 272,000 to 329,000 two years later.

Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.

The interest on expenses for the Iraq war could amount to about $4 trillion during that period, the report said.

The report also examined the burden on U.S. veterans and their families, showing a deep social cost as well as an increase in spending on veterans. The 2011 study found U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.


FEW GAINS

The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women's rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud, it said.

Former President George W. Bush's administration cited its belief that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government held weapons of mass destruction to justify the decision to go to war. U.S. and allied forces later found that such stockpiles did not exist.

Supporters of the war argued that intelligence available at the time concluded Iraq held the banned weapons and noted that even some countries that opposed the invasion agreed with the assessment.

"Action needed to be taken," said Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think-tank.

Bucci, who was unconnected to the Watson study, agreed with its observation that the forecasts for the cost and duration of the war proved to be a tiny fraction of the real costs.

"If we had had the foresight to see how long it would last and even if it would have cost half the lives, we would not have gone in," Bucci said. "Just the time alone would have been enough to stop us. Everyone thought it would be short."

Bucci said the toppling of Saddam and the results of an unforeseen conflict between U.S.-led forces and al Qaeda militants drawn to Iraq were positive outcomes of the war.

"It was really in Iraq that 'al Qaeda central' died," Bucci said. "They got waxed."

Adele

[Magda Hassan]

Iraq war costs U.S. more than $2 trillion - study
By Daniel Trotta

And that is just what it cost in dollars. What it cost is immeasurable and can never be paid back or made good. Lives losts, orphans, widows and widowers created. Broken hearts broken minds and broken bodies. Infrastructure that makes a civilised life and human dignity possible all destroyed. Culture and communities obliterated. Mass poverty and destitution. Toxic depleted uranium everywhere. Hopes and dreams and futures lost for generations. While others wallow in their blood money.

[Adele Edisen]

You are correct, Magda. That's why all weapons of war, nuclear, biochemical, chemical, mechanical, etc., should be destroyed. All wars should be outlawed.

Maybe if we drafted those who profit from wars, and their offspring, to fight their own wars, all wars would stop automatically. (Daydream...)

Adele

[Magda Hassan]

You are correct, Magda. That's why all weapons of war, nuclear, biochemical, chemical, mechanical, etc., should be destroyed. All wars should be outlawed.

Maybe if we drafted those who profit from wars, and their offspring, to fight their own wars, all wars would stop automatically. (Daydream...)

Adele

I bet they would stop instantly too if it cost them their own money and their own lives and that of their loved ones.

War is actually already illegal. To wage war against another country is a crime. The only justification is to defend one's state from the invasion by another. But the actual primary attack is absolutely illegal. Which is why false flags are so beloved by those that profit from them and the resulting slaughter. http://warisacrime.org/content/imagine-i...2%80%94-it

[Magda Hassan]

The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War

March 20, 2013

Exclusive: Americans today know a lot more about Iraq than they did ten years ago, knowledge gained painfully from the blood of soldiers and civilians. But a crucial question remains: why did George W. Bush and his neocon advisers rush headlong into this disastrous war, a mystery Robert Parry unwinds.
By Robert Parry
A decade after President George W. Bush ordered the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, one of the enduring mysteries has been why. There was the rationale sold to a frightened American people in 2002-2003 that Saddam Hussein was plotting to attack them with WMDs but no one in power really believed that.
There have been other more plausible explanations: George Bush the Younger wanted to avenge a perceived slight to George Bush the Elder, while also outdoing his father as a "war president"; Vice President Dick Cheney had his eye on Iraq's oil wealth; and the Republican Party saw an opportunity to create its "permanent majority" behind a glorious victory in the Middle East.
A satirical Mad magazine poster connecting George H.W. Bush's Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 with George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Though George W. Bush's defenders vigorously denied being motivated by such crass thinking, those rationales do seem closer to the truth. However, there was another driving force behind the desire to conquer Iraq: the neoconservative belief that the conquest would be a first step toward installing compliant pro-U.S. regimes throughout the Middle East and letting Israel dictate final peace terms to its neighbors.
That rationale has often been dressed up as "democratizing" the Middle East, but the idea was more a form of "neocolonialism," in which American proconsuls would make sure that a favored leader, like the Iraqi National Congress' Ahmed Chalabi, would control each country and align the nations' positions with the interests of the United States and Israel.
Some analysts have traced this idea back to the neocon Project for the New American Century in the late 1990s, which advocated for "regime change" in Iraq. But the idea's origins go back to the early 1990s and to two seminal events.
The first game-changing moment came in 1990-91 when President George H.W. Bush showed off the unprecedented advancements in U.S. military technology. Almost from the moment that Iraq's Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Iraqi dictator began signaling his willingness to withdraw after having taught the arrogant al-Sabah ruling family in Kuwait a lesson in power politics.
But the Bush-41 administration wasn't willing to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the Kuwait invasion. Instead of letting Hussein arrange an orderly withdrawal, Bush-41 began baiting him with insults and blocking any face-saving way for a retreat.
Peace feelers from Hussein and later from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev were rebuffed as Bush-41 waited his chance to demonstrate the stunning military realities of his New World Order. Even the U.S. field commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, favored Gorbachev's plan for letting Iraqi forces pull back, but Bush-41 was determined to have a ground war.
So, Gorbachev's plan was bypassed and the ground war commenced with the slaughter of Iraqi troops, many of them draftees who were mowed down and incinerated as they fled back toward Iraq. After 100 hours, Bush-41 ordered a halt to the massacre. He then revealed a key part of his motivation by declaring: "We've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all." [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Neocons Celebrate
Official Washington took note of the new realities and the renewed public enthusiasm for war. In a post-war edition, Newsweek devoted a full page to up-and-down arrows in its "Conventional Wisdom Watch." Bush got a big up arrow with the snappy comment: "Master of all he surveys. Look at my polls, ye Democrats, and despair."
For his last-minute stab at a negotiated Iraqi withdrawal, Gorbachev got a down arrow: "Give back your Nobel, Comrade Backstabber. P.S. Your tanks stink." Vietnam also got a down arrow: "Where's that? You mean there was a war there too? Who cares?"
Neocon pundits, already dominating Washington's chattering class, could barely contain their glee with the only caveat that Bush-41 had ended the Iraqi turkey shoot too soon and should have taken the carnage all the way to Baghdad.
The American people also rallied to the lopsided victory, celebrating with ticker-tape parades and cheering fireworks in honor of the conquering heroes. The victory-parade extravaganza stretched on for months, as hundreds of thousands jammed Washington for what was called "the mother of all parades."
Americans bought Desert Storm T-shirts by the caseloads; kids were allowed to climb on tanks and other military hardware; the celebration concluded with what was called "the mother of all fireworks displays." The next day, the Washington Post captured the mood with a headline: "Love Affair on the Mall: People and War Machines."
The national bonding extended to the Washington press corps, which happily shed its professional burden of objectivity to join the national celebration. At the annual Gridiron Club dinner, where senior government officials and top journalists get to rub shoulders in a fun-filled evening, the men and women of the news media applauded wildly everything military.
The highlight of the evening was a special tribute to "the troops," with a reading of a soldier's letter home and then a violinist playing the haunting strains of Jay Ungar's "Ashoken Farewell." Special lyrics honoring Desert Storm were put to the music and the journalists in the Gridiron singers joined in the chorus: "Through the fog of distant war/Shines the strength of their devotion/To honor, to duty,/To sweet liberty."
Among the celebrants at the dinner was Defense Secretary Cheney, who took note of how the Washington press corps was genuflecting before a popular war. Referring to the tribute, Cheney noted in some amazement, "You would not ordinarily expect that kind of unrestrained comment by the press."
A month later at the White House Correspondents Dinner, the U.S. news media and celebrity guests cheered lustily when General Schwarzkopf was introduced. "It was like a Hollywood opening," commented one journalist referring to the spotlights swirling around the field commander.
Neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer lectured the few dissidents who found the press corps' groveling before the President and the military unsettling. "Loosen up, guys," Krauthammer wrote. "Raise a glass, tip a hat, wave a pom-pom to the heroes of Desert Storm. If that makes you feel you're living in Sparta, have another glass."
American Hegemony
Like other observers, the neocons had seen how advanced U.S. technology had changed the nature of warfare. "Smart bombs" zeroed in on helpless targets; electronic sabotage disrupted enemy command and control; exquisitely equipped American troops outclassed the Iraqi military chugging around in Soviet-built tanks. War was made to look easy and fun with very light U.S. casualties.
The collapse of the Soviet Union later in 1991 represented the removal of the last obstacle to U.S. hegemony. The remaining question for the neocons was how to get and keep control of the levers of American power. However, those levers slipped out of their grasp with Bush-41's favoritism toward his "realist" foreign policy advisers and then Bill Clinton's election in 1992.
But the neocons still held many cards in the early 1990s, having gained credentials from their work in the Reagan administration and having built alliances with other hard-liners such as Bush-41's Defense Secretary Cheney. The neocons also had grabbed important space on the opinion pages of key newspapers, like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and influential chairs inside major foreign-policy think tanks.
The second game-changing event took place amid the neocon infatuation with Israel's Likud leaders. In the mid-1990s, prominent American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for the campaign of Benjamin Netanyahu and tossed aside old ideas about a negotiated peace settlement with Israel's Arab neighbors.
Rather than suffer the frustrations of negotiating a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem or dealing with the annoyance of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the neocons on Netanyahu's team decided it was time for a bold new direction, which they outlined in a 1996 strategy paper, called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm."
The paper advanced the idea that only "regime change" in hostile Muslim countries could achieve the necessary "clean break" from the diplomatic standoffs that had followed inconclusive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Under this "clean break," Israel would no longer seek peace through compromise, but rather through confrontation, including the violent removal of leaders such as Saddam Hussein who were supportive of Israel's close-in enemies.
The plan called Hussein's ouster "an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right," but also one that would destabilize the Assad dynasty in Syria and thus topple the power dominoes into Lebanon, where Hezbollah might soon find itself without its key Syrian ally. Iran also could find itself in the cross-hairs of "regime change."
American Assistance
But what the "clean break" needed was the military might of the United States, since some of the targets like Iraq were too far away and too powerful to be defeated even by Israel's highly efficient military. The cost in Israeli lives and to Israel's economy from such overreach would have been staggering.
In 1998, the U.S. neocon brain trust pushed the "clean break" plan another step forward with the creation of the Project for the New American Century, which lobbied President Clinton to undertake the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
However, Clinton would only go so far, maintaining a harsh embargo on Iraq and enforcing a "no-fly zone" which involved U.S. aircraft conducting periodic bombing raids. Still, with Clinton or his heir apparent, Al Gore, in the White House, a full-scale invasion of Iraq appeared out of the question.
The first key political obstacle was removed when the neocons helped engineer George W. Bush's ascension to the presidency in Election 2000. However, the path was not fully cleared until al-Qaeda terrorists attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, leaving behind a political climate across America favoring war and revenge.
Of course, Bush-43 had to first attack Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda maintained its principal base, but he then quickly pivoted to the neocons' desired target, Iraq. Besides being home to the already demonized Saddam Hussein, Iraq had other strategic advantages. It was not as heavily populated as some of its neighbors yet it was positioned squarely between Iran and Syria, two other top targets.
In those heady days of 2002-2003, a neocon joke posed the question of what to do after ousting Saddam Hussein in Iraq whether to next go east to Iran or west to Syria. The punch-line was: "Real men go to Tehran."
But first Iraq had to be vanquished, and this other agenda restructuring the Middle East to make it safe for U.S. and Israeli interests had to be played down, partly because average Americans might be skeptical and because expert Americans might have warned about the dangers from U.S. imperial overreach.
So, Bush-43, Vice President Cheney and their neocon advisers pushed the "hot button" of the American people, still frightened by the horrors of 9/11. The bogus case was made that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of WMD that he was ready to give to al-Qaeda so the terrorists could inflict even greater devastation on the U.S. homeland.
Stampeding America
The neocons, some of whom grew up in families of left-wing Trotskyites, viewed themselves as a kind of a "vanguard" party using "agit-prop" to maneuver the American "proletariat." The WMD scare was seen as the best way to stampede the American herd. Then, the neocon thinking went, the military victory in Iraq would consolidate war support and permit implementation of the next phases toward "regime change" in Iran and Syria.
The plan seemed to be working early, as the U.S. military overwhelmed the beleaguered Iraqi army and captured Baghdad in three weeks. Bush-43 celebrated by landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit and delivering a speech beneath a banner reading "Mission Accomplished."
However, the plan began to go awry when neocon pro-consul Paul Bremer in pursuit of a neocon model regime got rid of Iraq's governing infrastructure, dismantled much of the social safety net and disbanded the army. Then, the neocon-favored leader, exile Ahmed Chalabi, turned out to be a non-starter with the Iraqi people.
An armed resistance emerged, using low-tech weapons such as "improvised explosive devices." Soon, not only were thousands of American soldiers dying but ancient sectarian rivalries between Shiites and Sunnis began tearing Iraq apart. The scenes of chaotic violence were horrific.
Rather than gaining in popularity with the American people, the war began to lose support, leading to Democratic gains in 2006. The neocons salvaged some of their status in 2007 by pushing the fiction of the "successful surge," which supposedly had turned impending defeat into victory, but the truth was that the "surge" only delayed the inevitable failure of the U.S. enterprise.
With George W. Bush's departure in 2009 and the arrival of Barack Obama, the neocons retreated, too. Neocon influence waned within the Executive Branch, though neocons still maintained strongholds at Washington think tanks and on editorial pages of national news outlets like the Washington Post.
New developments in the region also created new neocon hopes for their old agenda. The Arab Spring of 2011 led to civil unrest in Syria where the Assad dynasty based in non-Sunni religious sects was challenged by a Sunni-led insurgency which included some democratic reformers as well as radical jihadists.
Meanwhile, in Iran, international opposition to its nuclear program prompted harsh economic sanctions. Though President Obama viewed the sanctions as leverage to compel Iran to accept limits on its nuclear program, some neocons were salivating over how to hijack the sanctions on behalf of "regime change."
However, in November 2012, Obama's defeat of neocon favorite Mitt Romney and the departure of neocon ally, CIA Director David Petraeus, were sharp blows to the neocon plans of reclaiming the reins of U.S. foreign policy. Now, the neocons must see how they can leverage their continued influence over Washington's opinion circles and hope for advantageous developments abroad to steer Obama toward more confrontational approaches with Iran and Syria.
For the neocons, it also remains crucial that average Americans don't think too much about the why behind the disastrous Iraq War, a tenth anniversary that can't pass quickly enough as far as the neocons are concerned.http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/20/the...-iraq-war/