Tag Archives | Iraq War

Bush Speechwriter: Oil Inspired Decision To Invade Iraq

By on March 27, 2013 in News 0

Ten years ago, anyone who said that the United States was invading Iraq in part to take its oil was dismissed as delusional. But via the Daily Beast, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum now confirms:

I was less impressed by Ahmed Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those “others” was Vice President Cheney, it didn’t matter what I thought.

In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.

 

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Statutes Of Limitations Soon Expiring For The Bush Administration’s Crimes

By on March 22, 2013 in News 0

As the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War passes, its architects are close to being in the clear for good, Elizabeth Holtzman writes via the Nation:

A critical deadline is fast approaching without attracting much notice. Statutes of limitations applicable to possible crimes committed by former President George W. Bush and his top aides, with respect to wiretapping of Americans without court approval and to fraud in launching and continuing the Iraq War, may expire in early 2014, less than a year from now. Since no prosecutions can be brought after the statutes run out, unless investigations are started soon, any crimes that did occur will go unprosecuted and unpunished, deeply entrenching the principle of impunity for top officials.

President Bush has publicly admitted to authorizing wiretaps of Americans on more than thirty separate occasions without a court order, an apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Assuming that the warrantless wiretapping ended when Bush left office on January 20, 2009, the statute would run out on January 20, 2014.

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The 2002 Advertisement Which Warned Against Invading Iraq

By on March 20, 2013 in News 0

Via Bear Left!, six months before the start of the Iraq War, the New York Times op-ed page featured an advertisement containing a statement signed by 33 leading scholars of international relations from universities across the United States. Dismissed at the time by mainstream pundits, today their points read as prediction of everything that was to come in Iraq:

WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST

• Saddam Hussein is a murderous despot, but no one has provided credible evidence that Iraq is cooperating with al Qaeda.
• The first Bush administration did not try to conquer Iraq in 1991 because it understood that doing so could spread instability in the Middle East, threatening U.S. interests. This remains a valid concern today.
• The United States would win a war against Iraq, but Iraq has military options—chemical and biological weapons, urban combat—that might impose significant costs on the invading forces and neighboring states.

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Donald Rumsfeld Tweets On The 10th Anniversary Of The Iraq War

By on March 20, 2013 in News 0

Yesterday marked the ten-year anniversary of the start of the invasion of Iraq. Oddly, there was little public celebration or commemoration from the war’s architects, with the exception of Donald Rumsfeld via his Twitter account. Is there any hope that Rumsfeld along with Bush and Cheney can be airlifted and dropped into the rubble that was once Fallujah so that everyday Iraqis give their thanks in person?

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Audio Recording Of Bradley Manning Speaking At Military Tribunal Leaked

By on March 14, 2013 in News 18

Despite a strict ban on recordings and transcripts at the secretive proceedings, the Freedom of Press Foundation has gotten a hold of a covertly-made tape of Manning’s full speech to the court explaining his motivation for leaking classified government materials. He remarks:

“I am the type of person who likes to know how things work. And, as an analyst, this means I always want to figure out the truth. Unlike other analysts within the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, I was not satisfied with just scratching the surface and producing canned or cookie cutter assessments. I wanted to know why something was the way it was, and what we could to correct or mitigate a situation.”

“I began to become depressed with the situation that we [the U.S. military] found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year…we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists…[I wanted] society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the effected environment everyday.”

“I knew that if I continued to assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister al-Maliki, those people would be arrested and in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police and very likely tortured and not seen again for a very long time – if ever.”

“I read more of the diplomatic cables published on the Department of State Net Centric Diplomacy.

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Washington’s War-Makers Aren’t “in a Bubble,” They’re in a Bunker

By on February 11, 2013 in News 7

With the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion coming up next month, we can expect a surge of explanations for what made that catastrophe possible. An axiom from Orwell — “who controls the past controls the future” — underscores the importance of such narratives.

I encountered a disturbing version last week while debating Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Largely, Wilkerson blamed deplorable war policies on a “bubble” that surrounds top officials. That’s not just faulty history; it also offers us very misleading guidance in the present day.

During our debate on Democracy Now, Wilkerson said: “What’s happening with drone strikes around the world right now is, in my opinion, as bad a development as many of the things we now condemn so readily, with 20/20 hindsight, in the George W. Bush administration. We are creating more enemies than we’re killing. We are doing things that violate international law. We are even killing American citizens without due process. . .”

But why does this happen?…

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Iraq War’s Curveball Confesses All

By on April 3, 2012 in News 8

The-Iraqi-defector-codena-007Remember how the Bush era had pivotal, history-altering characters with names like “Brownie” and “Curveball”? The latter comes clean and has no regrets, via the Independent:

A man who helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow. “Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up.

When it is put to him, “We went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi simply replies: “Yes.”

His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003, after US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs, admits General Powell’s former chief of staff.

Mr. Janabi tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq.”

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Mainstream Pundits: Too Smart To Fail

By on March 21, 2012 in News 3

apocalypseThomas Frank on the establishment economists, bankers, journalists, and foreign policy experts who create our consensus reality, via the Baffler:

A résumé filled with grievous errors in the period 1996–2006 is not only a non-problem for further advances in the world of consensus; it is something of a prerequisite. Our intellectual powers that be not only forgive the mistakes; they require them. You must have been wrong back then in order to have a chance to be taken seriously today; only by having gotten things wrong can you demonstrate that you are trustworthy, a member of the team. (Those who got things right all along, on the other hand, might be dubbed “premature market skeptics”—people who doubted the consensus before the consensus acknowledged it was all right to doubt.)

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PTSD And Homicidal Behavior

By on February 5, 2012 in News 18
Benjamin Colton Barnes

Benjamin Colton Barnes

Many commenters on CNN’s website believe this article unfairly conflates PTSD and homicidal behavior.  What do you think?

A man opens fire in a national park, killing a ranger who was attempting to stop him after he blew through a vehicle checkpoint.A second man is suspected in the stabbing deaths of four homeless men in Southern California.

Both men, U.S. military veterans, served in Iraq — and both, according to authorities and those who knew them, returned home changed men after their combat service.

A coincidence — two recent high-profile cases? Or a sign of an increase in hostile behavior as U.S. troops complete their withdrawal from Iraq, similar to that seen when U.S. troops returned home from the Vietnam War?

“You’re going to see this more and more over the next 10 years,” said Shad Meshad, founder of the National Veterans Foundation, who has been working with veterans since 1970.

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Final Bill For US War In Iraq Will Be $4 Trillion

By on December 15, 2011 in News 8

Iraq_header_2Just so you know, that’s $4,000,000,000,000. Christopher Hinton explains for Marketwatch:

The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion.

Over a 50-year period, that comes to $80 billion annually.

Although that only represents about 1% of nation’s gross domestic product, it’s more than half of the national budget deficit. It’s also roughly equal to what the U.S. spends on the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency combined each year.

Near the start of the war, the U.S. Defense Department estimated it would cost $50 billion to $80 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was dismissed in 2002 after suggesting the price of invading and occupying Iraq could reach $200 billion.

“The direct costs for the war were about $800 billion, but the indirect costs, the costs you can’t easily see, that payoff will outlast you and me,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at American Progress, a Washington, D.C.

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