Category Archives: War in Iraq

Suskind Pens Another Bombshell

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By Mark Adams

This one’s huge.  From Politico’s Mike Allen (Hat Tip: TPM):

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from [Iraq's former intel director] Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

Obligatory quotes from the likes of Bill O’Reilly are included which helped spread the fabrication written about at the end of 2003 on the front page of the London Daily Telegraph the very day they (supposedly?) captured Saddam, and the reporter was interviewed on Meet The Press soon after.  The letter was crafted by the CIA, but used to “prove” the 9/11 hijackers were connected and even trained by Iraq.

They absolutely lied us into a war.  Suskind seems to concentrate on the angle that it was illegal to use the CIA this way, influencing domestic politics, and that’s grounds for impeachment.  It seems to me there’s got to be a law somewhere out there that mandates the gas chamber for anyone who commits mass murder on the scale this represents.  The invasion of Iraq was not an act of war, it was an act of homicidal mania.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

Evidently, they secreted Habbush to Jordan and paid him $5 million in hush money, even though he still has a $1 million bounty on his head at the State Department.

The legendary tone-deafness and refusal to listen to advice that didn’t match the White House’s pre-conceived notions is also explored as well as a study on the rise of “plausible deniability” to a high art form under Dick Cheney’s influence.

So just how much time and money and lives did it cost us to go through the motions and act like they were really looking for WMD’s they knew weren’t there?

And for that matter, do you really trust them when the likes of Osama bin Laden conveniently shows up on our TV screens on the eve of an election, his authenticity “verified” by a CIA who could also magically produce letters “proving” the biggest lie of the 21st century?

Somebody’s got to charge someone with a goddamn crime sooner or later dammit, or we might as well shut this charade we call Truth, justice and the American Way down.

Mission Creep

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By shep

“The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable — and must be preempted.”
- Charles Krauthammer, October 2002

“With its oil, its urbanized middle class, its educated population, its essential modernity, Iraq has a future. In two decades Saddam Hussein reduced its GDP by 75 percent. Once its political and industrial infrastructures are reestablished, Iraq’s potential for rebound, indeed for explosive growth, is unlimited.”
- Charles Krauthammer, 2003

“There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world–oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.”
- Charles Krauthammer, February 2004

“[M]aintaining a U.S. military presence in Iraq would provide regional stability, as well as cement a long-term allied relationship with the most important Arab country in the region.”
- Charles Krauthammer, March, 2008

“McCain, like George Bush, envisions the U.S. seizing the fruits of victory of a bloody and costly war by establishing an extensive strategic relationship that would not only make the new Iraq a strong ally in the war on terror but would also provide the U.S. with the infrastructure and freedom of action to project American power regionally…”
- Charles Krauthammer, July, 2008

So there you have it: when push comes to shove, the reason for invading and occupying Iraq is (and always has been) about “U.S. infrastructure”, i.e. military bases in Iraq, to “project American power”, presumably for oil and Israel, our two most regionally important foreign policy objectives.

Or, as Krauthammer put it to Bill Clinton in 1998 (with assorted PNAC co-conspirators such as Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey and Robert B. Zoellick): to protect “our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil…[w]e believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf.”

You see boys and girls, the pre-meditated and long before 9-11 planned purpose of invading Iraq was to construct a pliable foreign government and large forward military bases to protect “U.S. interests”. <i>Everything</i> else you were told was a <i>complete lie</i>.

It appears that since the rest of the world, including the Iraqi government and the next President of the United States, have caught on to and rejected the neoconservative’s neocolonialist plan, they have failed spectacularly. But for all the cost in American blood, treasure and moral standing, at least now you know who and what you are dealing with.

<b>UPDATE:</b><a href=”http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43339″>This</a> is the story about how we would have been out of Iraq last year under <i>a plan from the al-Maliki government</i> if not for the neocons’ desire to salvage some “infrastructure” to justify their treason (I understand that, thanks to The Surge, they’re responsible for only 219 dead American soldiers this year). [H/T: TPM]

<a href=”http://displib.blogspot.com/2008/07/mission-creep.html”>[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]</a>

Time Horizons?

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Yeah, I know it sounds either like a neo-con version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Time Warp, or there has been a really big shoe drop with the PrezNitWit accepting even the notion of the word “time” to be associated in any way with his Iraq War final solution.

Never fear my pretties. The administration indeed keeps faithful to it’s roots in Orwellian double-speak by “agreeing” to sometime down the road, maybe, talking about negotiating an agreement in a statement so vague and meaningless it’s announcement can only have one possible effect — put an annoying speed bump in Barack Obama’s triumphant sprint to the White House.

The statement, if you can call it that since usually those imply some sort of declarative sentence, speaks of inclusion of a “general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals.“

Aspirational goals. Say that with me one more time.

Go ahead. No one’s listening.

Aspirational goals. Not just goals. You know, things that you aspire to, but Aspirational goals.

After all these years of Bush Speak, I still marvel that they can confound and confuse me again and again. Not over what they are trying to sell us, which is the usual bar-b-qued defecation, but that I still can’t figure out whether I should be resentful they treat us like children or horrified they are working at the intellectual level of a second grader.

Sometime, almost out of sight down on that horizon somewhere, maybe, hopefully, if we’re all good boys and girls and click our heels together they might actually agree that the Iraqis will stand up so we can stand the fuck down. Useless bureaucratic, power-mad morons.

If we haven’t kicked enough ass over there by now so that the guys we’ve been training for five frickin’ years can at least handle the mop-up operation, they’re hopeless, and so are we.