WMD Stop Looking I Think I Found 'Em

PICTURES ARE NOT LOADING

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I was in college in 1991 when Saddam Hussein stood up to the West and refused to vacate Kuwait.

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No one was gullible enough back then to believe that the West really cared about Kuwaiti sovereignty. If the Kuwaitis had been exporting taro and sugar cane instead of oil, Saddam would still be alive and building palaces and lining up mistresses in Kuwait City.

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Here’s the remarkable thing about Saddam. He met a bitter end by the Americans, yet he was no stranger to the Americans or their ways. He’d worked with the CIA as far back as 1959 in a failed attempt to assassinate the then Iraqi prime minister Abdul Karim Kassim.

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The CIA then helped his party get into power in 1963, and thereafter Saddam shacked up with the Americans to insure Iraq was a bastion of anti-communism.  

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When the Shah of Iran was overthrown in an Islamic Revolution in 1979, not only the Americans backed him in his invasion of Iran, but also the Soviets, the Europeans, and the Persian Gulf Arab states. 

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So, I suppose in some ways, Saddam could be forgiven for later marching into Kuwait and thinking he could get away with it. He had friends in high places, and none of those powerful friends ever accused him of compromising Iranian sovereignty by storming into Iran in 1980 and renaming Iranian provinces. His Western allies didn’t scold him. Quite the opposite. They offered him enough financial assistance to carry on the war for eight years.  
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By 1990, Saddam had some sensible reasons for forging into Kuwait. He claimed the war with Iran had spared Kuwaiti derrieres from Iranian pressure and domination. Besides that, he added, Kuwaiti territory was historically Iraq’s. It was only British control of the region in the 1920′s that had partitioned Kuwait off as a separate nation, stealing what would have been prime Iraqi seafront property. Saddam just couldn’t be absolutely sure the Americans would care if he invaded Kuwait. He was then getting U.S. assistance in the multibillions. He was, officially, a “buddy,” and we tend to cut our buddies a lot more slack when they break the rules. 

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In this case, Saddam calculated wrong. The U.S. did care. Kuwait had the equivalent number of oil reserves to Iraq, and if Iraq controlled Kuwait, a fifth of the world’s oil would be in Saddam’s hands. Saddam had bullied the wrong nation. He should’ve invaded Zimbabwe instead, removed the mentally demented Robert Mugabe from power, and annexed the tobacco fields. The world wouldn’t have blinked.

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I don’t know about you, but if my benefactor who’d put me into power and aided in my subsequent power plays told me to do something, I’d do it. Never mind if that benefactor is hypocritical and corrupt and puts its own citizens’ lives at risk in wars that benefit only a chosen few. Saddam had been in bed with the U.S. for years and knew how the game was played. Perhaps it could be argued that Saddam was in the moral right — that Kuwait was sneaking oil out of Iraq’s reserves by slant drilling on their border or  that Kuwait should’ve forgiven a share of the debt Iraq racked up in its war with Iran. In the end, it doesn’t matter who’s right. In the real world, might is right. 
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When the U.S. told him to get out, he should’ve sat down in secret negotiations with the Americans and worked out a face-saving way of extricating himself from the mess he’d started.

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It’s not like Saddam was taking a moral stand against the U.S. either. He’d long ago sold himself to the highest bidder. Saddam was no Omar Torrijos or Jaime Roldós, former leaders of Panama and Ecuador, respectively, who  Confessions of an Economic Hit Man author John Perkins maintains were knocked off by American forces in 1981 because they refused to do as Uncle Sam commanded.

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Up until 1990, Saddam had been doing exactly what Uncle Sam said, with Uncle Sam’s financial support, and reaping the rewards.

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There are so many perks to becoming a dictator. You can pilfer national wealth and not worry about being reported, caught, or fined. You can kill or sleep with anyone you want whenever you want. The job is yours for a lifetime, too, if you know how to keep it. Notice: renewal isn’t automatic or easy. Someone else always wants your job. At least if you’re President of the United States, the wannabes have to wait 4 years until they can try to take your position. If you’re a dictator, you can be booted out, usually by assassination, at any time. The dictators of the recent past have pragmatically discovered that teaming up with a bigger pal and doing its bidding, while providing a minimum of domestic disturbance, is the best way to get a dictatorship position renewed.  
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You don’t lose a dictatorship position and then apply or get transferred to a new one, like some sort of dictatorship-CEO network. Dictatorship jobs just don’t grow on trees. Saddam Hussein had to know that. And after the Gulf War of 1991, he had to know that the renewal of his dictatorship application wasn’t a foregone conclusion anymore. I honestly believe the Western forces could’ve had him sent on a one-way ticket to Assassination Row in 1991 if they’d really wanted to. But they really needed that oil, they didn’t desire a power vacuum in the region, until fracking came along and required oil to be above forty dollars a barrel to be profitable.
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I know if I were a corrupt dictator, I would’ve heeded the lesson well. In 2003, Forbes estimated Saddam’s net worth at US$2 billion, four times the wealth of the Queen of England. He possessed eight presidential compounds. That’s a nice deal. The President of the United States just leases the White House. He doesn’t get to keep it. If I were on a probationary period with the West for causing problems, I would’ve been on best behavior thereafter. “Sorry, guys, for the mess I stirred up. Won’t happen again. Can I have another $10 billion of assistance in the meanwhile to keep the region stable?”

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The first Gulf war of 1991, subsequent international sanctions and inspections did their job and that job was very successful — rendering Iraq no threat to even its neighbors.

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In 2003, the American and the British governments cooked the books to document that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and to justify another invasion there to terminate Saddam’s dictatorship post once and for all. Saddam knew all along they could rig the game. Still, he had a third chance to get out of the situation with his neck unhung. “Guys, I know you want me out of power. No need to invade. How about if I step down instead? I only have a few conditions. Let’s just have a little public confrontation in the media where I look like I’m standing up to you, so I don’t step down looking weak. Behind the scenes, I’ll be happy to consult with you to in order find a new suitable dictator to fill the void. All I ask is uninterrupted exile in [Monte Carlo, Switzerland, the Caribbean], and an annual stipend of US$500 million per year.” Believe me, he would’ve been granted his demands. I’ve read estimates on the web that the war which finally did get waged has cost the American taxpayer In US dollars 9 billion to the UK, 845 billion to the US, with a total overall cost of 3 trillion to the economy. Hussein was pushing 70 before the 2003 war began. If he lived to the ripe old age of 95, his total ‘unemployment compensation’ would only come to $5 billion, a trifle next to what’s been spent, and stability in the region would’ve been maintained. At the very minimum Saddam could’ve walked away with a golden handshake of $30 million, which is what the U.S. government spent as a bounty on Saddam Hussein’s two sons.

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According to U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the coalition mission was “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” General Wesley Clark, the former Supreme NATO Allied Commander and Joint Chiefs of Staff Director of Strategy and Policy, describes in his 2003 book, Winning Modern Wars, his conversation with a military officer in the Pentagon shortly after 9/11 regarding a plan to attack seven Middle Eastern countries: “As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.” According to Blair, the trigger was Iraq’s failure to take a “final opportunity” to disarm itself of alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that U.S. and British officials called an immediate and intolerable threat to world peace. In 2005, the Central Intelligence Agency released a report saying that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq.

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NGO-based reports and official figures to measure civilian casualties, approximately 7,500 civilians were killed during the invasion phase. The Project on Defense Alternatives study estimated that 3,200–4,300 civilians died during the invasion.

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What about the Iraqi insurgents and civilians killed in Falluja? At the outset of the attack on Iraq in March 2003, U.S. commander Tommy Franks declared, “We don’t do body counts.” His reluctance was a legacy of the Vietnam War when the body counts of “VC dead” that were daily announced by General Wastemoreland, as he came to be known, were notorious for their lies. Body counts or no, during the fighting in Falluja local commanders claimed that they had killed 3,000 insurgents, later reduced to 1,200. Reporters questioned the figure. But were they rebel fighters? The New York Times (15 November) commented: “The absence of insurgent bodies in Falluja has remained an enduring mystery.” So whose bodies were lying in the streets for days, “half-eaten by dogs”? Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, “said that he did not know of any civilian deaths,” according to the Times (20 November).

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Yet the International Committee of the Red Cross reported that some 800 of those dead were civilians – i.e., the overwhelming majority – many of them buried alive when their homes were shelled by artillery or destroyed by the 500 and 2,000 lb. bombs that the Air Force has been dropping on neighborhoods day and night. The few pictures that have been released show a scene of utter devastation, an entire city laid waste.

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As the photos of obscene torture at Abu Ghraib prison became the symbol of American military, the storming of Falluja was summed up in the video of a U.S. soldier murdering an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner in a mosque. A righteous rage at the cold-blooded executioners swept Iraq and Near East as the scene was played at length on TV, over and over (only a snippet was shown in the U.S., blacking out the shots of the bullet hitting the prisoner’s head and blood splattering as “too gruesome”).

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Defenders of the war and occupation cynically argued that perhaps the soldier was afraid for his life, who knows, and besides the Iraqi prisoners were “people without morals.” The cameraman who filmed it said the prisoner made no threatening moves, and it is likely that four other wounded prisoners in the mosque were killed at the same time. He recounts that as the Marines emerged, a lieutenant asked “did you shoot them,” to which a soldier replied, “Roger that, sir.” Asked if the prisoners were armed, the Marine shrugged. The inescapable conclusion is that the soldiers were obeying orders or following standard operating procedure in shooting the prisoners.

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A journalist who had accompanied a Marine unit during the 2003 invasion immediately recognized the practice:

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“Marines call executing wounded combatants ‘dead-checking.’ ‘They teach us to do dead-checking when we’re clearing rooms,’ an enlisted Marine recently returned from Iraq told me. ‘You put two bullets into the guy’s chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded you might not know if they’re alive or dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he’s faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain…’.”–“Dead Check in Falluja,” Village Voice, 24 November

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The destruction of Falluja inevitably calls to mind the words attributed to a U.S. officer in Vietnam at the time of the Têt offensive: “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” That certainly is the mentality of the U.S. military in Iraq today. In Vietnam, the United States killed upwards of 3 million Vietnamese during eight years of war. In the Korean War, the U.S. slaughtered more than 2 million Koreans. In World War II, the U.S. notoriously slaughtered more than 200,000 Japanese civilians with the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This came after the deliberate firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, in which the U.S. murdered more than 100,000 civilians. Or the U.S./British firebombing of Dresden, Germany in February 1945 (150,000 to 225,000 dead, almost all civilians and wounded soldiers), part of the Allied imperialists’ systematic campaign of terror bombing German cities in the latter part of World War II which killed an estimated 635,000 German civilians. (See “The Great Chemical Weapons Hoax” and “U.S./British Massacre at Dresden” in The Internationalist No. 16, May-June 2003.) Not to mention the countless bloody crimes of Yankees in Latin America: Bay of Pigs invasion, Pinochet coup in Chile, contra terror war on Nicaragua, death squads in El Salvador, the rape of Grenada, the invasion of Panama, etc.

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The U.S. government under Reagan would train, fund and arm death squads, dismissing accurate reports of massacres they had committed, as well as discouraging attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement between the warring sides.

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 Like in Iraq the U.S. helped to lengthen the conflict solely for profit. During the war there was modest coverage of the atrocities that took place, and relatively little focus on the trail that led to the White House.

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Alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaeda were called into question during the lead-up to the war, and were discredited by a 21 October 2004 report from U.S. Senator Carl Levin, which was later corroborated by an April 2006 report from the Defense Department’s inspector general. These reports further alleged that Bush Administration officials, particularly former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, manipulated evidence to support links between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

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The number of deaths linked to Washington reach into the hundreds of millions, and reach around the globe. With no end in sight. The fact of such injustice is a familiar story; Washington’s legacy of destruction, sadly, is still news to Americans, who after falling for the WMD story, still believe anything they are told to believe, regardless how ridiculous.

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No Accountability

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 No one will be held accountable for the monumental destruction of private property and the death wrought upon the people of Iraq, the destruction of the lives, careers and businesses of our armed service men and women, the damage done to our international relationships, and the incredible waste of our national treasury which could have been used to help solve problems at home thus leading to a more secure, stable and prosperous America.

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http://uploads.savefile.com/users/uploads/codylwentz.jpg

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One of our guys who won’t be coming home.
Codyl Wentz gave his life for what? His family wants to know.

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Our soldiers are killing people and being killed for what purpose and for whose benefit?

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The hunt for [WMD] in Iraq is over

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“The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein.

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“… Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s (Iraq Survey Group) final conclusions and will be published this spring.”

– “Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month,” Washington Post, 2005.01.12 –
Iraq provides the immediate justification

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“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

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– Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) to advise Richard Cheney (vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), Jeb Bush and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff) among others. – 
The American people will buy any official excuse

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“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

– Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Vanity Fair interview, May 28, 2003, reported by USAToday in “Wolfowitz comments revive doubts over Iraq’s WMD,” on 5/30/2003 – 
WMDs were the excuse… 

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“[British] claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ‘not the reason to go to war, but the excuse to go to war.’”

– Sir John Walker, former British officer, Air Marshal, a former chief of Defence Intelligence, “Claims about WMD ‘may have been excuse rather than reason for war,’” By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor, 25 August 2003 –

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“I fear we’re going to be at war for decades, not years. — R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Clinton Administration speaking at the December 2004 ACORE conference –

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Without accountability to the principals who designed, advocated and conducted this reckless and unjustified national disgrace, there is no restraint or deterrent to help minimize whatever crimes future administrations place in the years to come upon the American people, or our national treasury.

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We can no longer in good conscience trust the politicians to police themselves. Link to this article from forums and blogs. Mention it with links in your comments on blogs. PROMOTE IT.

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Read entire article here- http://generalstrikeusa.blogspot.com/2014/09/wmd-stop-looking-i-think-i-found-em.html