The United States is mulling further intervention in Iraq as government forces flee Al Qaeda-linked insurgents and the country appears teetering on chaos. While the Administration is not ready to commit boots on the grounds, we may be moving toward a further influx of hundreds of millions or billions in military aid and even air strikes. As ISIS insurgents are seizing U.S. weaponry, the U.S. has already started to flood the country a new massive shipment of new free weapons.
Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant or ISIS is on a roll and nearing the capital. It is an al-qaeda linked terrorist group following the Wahhabi movement, the extreme religious view advanced by our ally Saudi Arabia.
So let’s take stock. We replaced a dictator based on lies in a massive invasion ordered by George W. Bush. We then spent over $2 trillion (the cost is over $4 trillion when you include Afghanistan). Both President Bush and President Obama continued to pour hundreds of billions of dollars in the country despite massive corruption and billions that simply disappeared. At the same time we have been cutting back on our own educational, environmental, scientific, and social programs due to a lack of money. Consider what $4 trillion would have done.
More importantly, we have lost some 4,486 U.S. service members between 2003 and 2012. Thousands have been wounded, many with lifelong disabilities. Our leaders continued to pour troops into the country because no one wanted to admit that the war was a mistake or that we were losing to Islamic insurgents. We continued to lose people and spend trillions in the belief that we could reverse centuries of sectarian and social strife.
In the meantime, we became increasingly hated by many Iraqis and we opened the country not to Saddamists but Al Qaeda forces who moved into the area as an opportunity to fight America and take over large parts of the country. They are now seizing advanced US weaponry so we are again arming extremists. Now to make our disaster complete we not only have Al Qaeda taking control of areas but Iran has now reportedly sent in troops to fuel the Shiite/Sunni violence. It is offering as many as 10,000 Iranian troops.
It is another example of the economic principle of “path dependence”: we have so much invested that we cannot change course. So once again, we will open up our coffers until the last helicopter leaves from the roof from the Green Zone.
Bob, There is always a price for fraud. And EVERYONE pays the price. You’re talking to a fraud investigator.
We should not commit another single bullet or drop of blood to Iraq.
Nick,
Sure. Question is can we afford any more fraudulent rhetoric.
Thanks Saucy, I noticed that (in that thread) and I do thank you for your support.
Saucy, People put links to their blogs all the time. What JT doesn’t want is people who carry their dysfunctional relationships from other blogs here. A quick perusal of your blog shows you hate PC. I just bookmarked you for that reason alone. We got some real PCers here. And, like you, I have liberal people think I’m conservative and conservatives think I’m liberal. I am a financially conservative, libertarian, independent. We type don’t fit into the box the cultist duopolists find so much comfort.
Until grand juries are sat to probe matters of war crimes, there won’t be any “moving on” for America.
Bob, We are in a clusterf@ck. Can we agree on that?
Annie wrote: “Saucy, we may not agree on most political subjects, but you are clearly a reasonable guy. I’m glad you decided to comment here.”
Oh, gee, thanks (blushing like a five-year-old). 😉 I first jumped in when people were ganging up on you regarding nursing. If I remember correctly, one person even tried to use Wikipedia as the definitive source!
My litmus test for determining whether someone is reasonable is their reaction after we disagree. I cannot tell you how many people have accused me of being a liberal or a Tea Party member, when in truth, I’m neither and everything in between.
At the risk of breaking JT’s rules, I will advertise the fact that I write a political blog (just search for “saucymugwump” and take the first result).
And my name is not actually Saucy Mugwump, but it’s okay if people call me that (it’s better than blockhead).
Nick,
It’s also relevant as to who we or the media should listen to regarding the current crisis.
And what are the first two rules of navigation?
Figure out where you are
THEN
Figure out where you’re going.
Bob, I concede it is relevant. But, the damn is broken, the city is being flooded, and we’re debating how the dam was built.
These San Diego Christians predicted what would happen when we left. They were certain that once US Troops left it would be chaos. These folks have friends and family in Iraq but have not returned for safety. They were sympathetic to the Iraqi’s who wanted US Troops to stay and they are also sympathetic to us folks here who are tired of war. These are good people who love this country more than many of the spoiled people who were born here and take so much for granted. I’m not in San Diego now but I’m sure these good people are conflicted. They understand, on a profound level, just how screwed up their country is. They have somewhat od an affinity toward Sunni’s since they were also oppressed under Hussein.
That’s right Paul.
The congressional authorization procured by fraud does not come from the U.N.
Aridog, I have actually gotten to know many Iraqi Christians who moved to San Diego during Hussein’s rein of terror on Christians. They own virtually every liquor and convenience store in Mission Beach, where I spend winters. They LOVE the US. They LOVE that we got rid of Hussein. They are jovial, ball busting, great small businessmen.
Nick,
There is no statute of limitations on murder.
So I’d say this is still quite relevant.
From the Greatest Hits album of the Bush Administration
On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney’s assertions went well beyond his agency’s assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, “Our reaction was, ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?’ ”
In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.” A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn’t been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn’t requested it.
In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: “Sure.” In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of “compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.” What’s more, an earlier DIA assessment said that “the nature of the regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear.”
On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement “probably is a hoax.”
On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: “What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.” As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named “Curveball,” whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had “decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government].”
Can we get back to the situation @ hand. We can’t change the past. We went into Iraq poorly and we left poorly. What do we do know. The enemy in Iraq, ISIS, is our ally of sorts in Syria. Make no mistake about it, ISIS has their sights on the US. They are in competition w/ Al Qaeda to be the baddest in the world. That’s the sort of competition we don’t need. There are no good choices, only less worse choices. At this point, I say stay out. But, I could be persuaded w/ facts to say otherwise.
False pretenses
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.
It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.
In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.
President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2008/01/23/5641/false-pretenses
The Niger Allegation
One of the most notorious instances of the Bush administration using thoroughly discredited information to frighten the American public was the 16 words in Bush’s January 28, 2003 State of the Union speech: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The Niger allegation was false, and the Bush administration knew it was false.
Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador to Iraq, was sent to Niger by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate a supposed memo that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake (a form of lightly processed ore) to Iraq by Niger in the late 1990s. Wilson reported back to the CIA that it was “highly doubtful” such a transaction had ever taken place.
On March 7, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei told the UN Security Council that “based on thorough analysis” his agency concluded that the “documents which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic.” Indeed, author Craig Unger uncovered at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union address in which analysts at the CIA, the State Department, or other government agencies that had examined the Niger documents “raised serious doubts about their legitimacy — only to be rebuffed by Bush administration officials who wanted to use them.”
On October 5 and 6, 2002, the CIA sent memos to the National Security Council, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and to the White House Situation Room stating that the Niger information was no good.
On January 24, 2003, four days before the president’s State of the Union address, the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, which oversees all federal agencies that deal with intelligence, sent a memo to the White House stating that “the Niger story is baseless and should be laid to rest.”
— Vincent Bugliosi
How many Iraqi’s do most of th folks here actually know? I know a couple of the 10 odd thousand I live among, betwixt the 30,000 Lebanese. I plan to engage as many as I can in conversation over the next couple weeks to hear their opinions and their stories. Just as I did in 2001+ when I was an active member of a group espousing USA invasion of Iraq and we actually debated civilly with those who did not favor it in several community meetings. Democracy at its finest, even if it got “heated” now and then. If you need to know the group, email me at my Blogger address. Be aware that said group had some issues with the federal government. Of course, so did I and I worked there.
The 9/11 Lie
The Bush administration put undue pressure on U.S. intelligence agencies to provide it with conclusions that would help them in their quest for war. Bush’s former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, said that on September 12, 2001, one day after 9/11, “The President in a very intimidating way left us — me and my staff — with the clear indication that he wanted us to come back with the word that there was an Iraqi hand behind 9/11.”
Bush said on October 7, 2002, “We know that Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy — the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high level contacts that go back a decade,” and that “Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.” Of Hussein, he said on November 1, 2002, “We know he’s got ties with Al Qaeda.”
Even after Bush admitted on September 17, 2003, that he had “no evidence” that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11, he audaciously continued, in the months and years that followed, to clearly suggest, without stating it outright, that Hussein was involved in 9/11.
On March 20, 2006, Bush said, “I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack on America.”
— Vincent Bugliosi