Tag: Iraq

May 27, 2003: Pentagon Memo To Admin.: Iraq Trailers Not WMDs…

May 29,2003: Bush: “We Have Found Weapons Of Mass Destruction.”

Gary Hart wants to know why the White House Press Corps is avoiding an obvious question:

I have been pleading with the American press corps for months to ask the Bush administration one simple question, a question designed to expose our true agenda: “Are we, or are we not, constructing permanent military bases in Iraq?” Full stop.

Finally, this from Gen. John Abizaid, our senior military commander in Iraq: The United States may want to keep a long-term military presence in Iraq to bolster moderates against extremists in the region and to protect the flow of oil…

As we learned nothing from the French experience in Indochina, we have learned nothing from the 28-year British occupation of Iraq. Presumably, our remaining forces, say 50,000 to 75,000, will be garrisoned outside the chaotic urban areas where they will be used to keep Syria at bay, intimidate the Iranians, and protect the Saudis (and their/our oil). Problem is, garrisoned U.S. forces will be safe within their fortresses from suicide bombers but sitting targets for mortars and IEDs launched by primitive artillery.

Hasn’t this been the long-range plan all along? In the run-up remember hearing that we could use a conquered Iraq as a sort of aircraft carrier from which we could police the Middle East.

Fabulous analysis by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in today’s L.A. Times. Makes you wish she were still in that position, instead of the lying, apologist idiots who have followed her.

Albright points out that Bush continues to make the same mistake in foreign policy he does in virtually every other area: he oversimplifies and ignores important details that don’t fit his predetermined ideas.

For years, the president has acted as if Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein’s followers and Iran’s mullahs were parts of the same problem. Yet, in the 1980s, Hussein’s Iraq and Iran fought a brutal war. In the 1990s, Al Qaeda’s allies murdered a group of Iranian diplomats. For years, Osama bin Laden ridiculed Hussein, who persecuted Sunni and Shiite religious leaders alike. When Al Qaeda struck the U.S. on 9/11, Iran condemned the attacks and later participated constructively in talks on Afghanistan. The top leaders in the new Iraq — chosen in elections that George W. Bush called “a magic moment in the history of liberty” — are friends of Iran…

The administration is now divided between those who understand this complexity and those who do not….

Although this is not an administration known for taking advice, I offer three suggestions. The first is to understand that although we all want to “end tyranny in this world,” that is a fantasy unless we begin to solve hard problems…

Second, the Bush administration should disavow any plan for regime change in Iran — not because the regime should not be changed but because U.S. endorsement of that goal only makes it less likely…

Third, the administration must stop playing solitaire while Middle East and Persian Gulf leaders play poker…

In the long term, the future of the Middle East may well be determined by those in the region dedicated to the hard work of building democracy. I certainly hope so. But hope is not a policy.

President Bush’s uncle, William H. T. (“Bucky”) Bush, has made $2.7 million off the recent sale of a company with war contracts, for which he served as a director, according to the Los Angeles Times:

As President Bush embarks on a new effort to shore up public support for the war in Iraq, an uncle of the commander in chief is collecting $2.7 million in cash and stock from the recent sale of a company that profited from the war.

A report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows that William H.T. Bush collected just under $1.9 million in cash plus stock valued at more than $800,000 from the sale of Engineered Support Systems Inc. to DRS Technologies of New Jersey.

The Bush family has a history of war profiteering, most notably including the president’s grandfather:

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The reason Bush’s handlers kept him out of town hall forums during the election is because he his horrible at speaking extemporaneously — and because he is prone to slip up and blurt out the truth. As Keith Olbermann pointed out on Countdown last night, the president did just that yesterday in a Q&A session with regular folks when he said:

“I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America.”

Really, sir? And why was that? Did someone coach you to be careful not to make the connection? Wonder who? Wonder why?

And how did it come to be that vast majorities of your supporters (who also happened to be Fox News viewers) came to believe that Saddam had ordered the 9/11 attacks?

Mr. Bush also — ho-hum — told a big fat lie during the same exchange. Here his full answer to a question about the bogus justifications he used to get us into the war in Iraq:

First, just if I might correct a misperception. I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein. We did say that he was a state sponsor of terror — by the way, not declared a state sponsor of terror by me, but declared by other administrations. We also did say that Zarqawi, the man who is now wreaking havoc and killing innocent life, was in Iraq. And so the state sponsor of terror was a declaration by a previous administration. But I don’t want to be argumentative, but I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America.

Here is Mr. Bush speaking in his State of the Union speech in 2003, during the White House marketing campaign for the war:

[…]

Three years ago today, most of us were as close as we could stay to CNN or NPR. Today was the day, at 0230 GMT, that the arbitrary 48-hour deadline which Bush gave Saddam Hussein to vacate his country expired. The day before, France, Germany, and Russia condemned Bush’s plan since it was not approved by a U.N. resolution. But in what would become a pattern over the next three years, Bush plowed ahead anyway.

So Junior, three years later, in the words of Dr. Phil, how’s that working for ya? Chicago Tribune:

In a bustling shopping district in a Shiite neighborhood that has been a frequent target of terrorist attacks, grocer Duraid Mohammed Hussein recently created a no-parking zone in front of his shop, fashioned from red packing cord and a couple of metal stands that he prays will keep car bombers at bay.

The notion that a piece of cord could improve his chances in an insurgent attack is illogical, Hussein acknowledged. But the 35-year-old shopkeeper said he had to do something to ward off a suffocating sense of vulnerability, a feeling that seems pervasive among Iraqis these days.

“In 2003 and 2004, I thought the violence would pass and we would be OK,” Hussein said. “Now I feel as if this will never end. The situation seems to be only getting worse.”

On the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion, anxieties in the capital are high, and Iraqis–politicians and average citizens–are debating whether their fragile country is tearing apart at the seams. Even Iraqis who considered themselves optimists about their country’s future say they fear the deepening Shiite-Sunni strife will push the country into a dark abyss.

At the Pentagon last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that Iraq is in a “very difficult situation” but that overall things are going well…

If by “going well,” you mean more than 2,300 American troops and upwards of 40,000 Iraqi civilians dying and many more thousands of both being injured and maimed, and the country being lawless and chaotic and without basic human services, then yeah, things are great. Thanks, George, Donnie, and Dicky. Heckuva job!