Iraq a Decade Later

                                                               Part I: El Diablo

I believe President Bush must be tried by the International Court of Justice as a war criminal for crimes against humanity. The actions of this president and his administration have brought misery and death to tens of thousands of innocent families and citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as hundreds of American soldiers and their families in a brutal, premeditated, invasion of a sovereign nation that was in the process of submitting to U.N. inspections for WMD and had been effectively disarmed.  Repeated distortions and flagrant fabrications of the truth by Bush and his cabinet  culminated in the savage assault on a people who had no capacity to defend themselves. The actions of the Bush administration have made the American people less secure, crystalyzed world opinion against us as a rogue nation, polarized radical Islam to mobilize in Iraq and elsewhere,  and brought lasting shame and suffering to this country and its people. 

Bush claims he relied on the reports from foreign intelligence supporting the existence of a vast stockpiles of WMD  to validate his intransigent posturing towards Iraq. Bush spared no unseemly tactic to promote a fever pitch for war in this country despite considerable uncertainty at the lower levels of the CIA regarding the existence of any significant WMD capability. The “Downing Street Memo” erased any possible lingering doubt that Bush was simply led astray by bad advice. The head of British Intelligence, identified only as “C” in the document, claims that “ intelligence and facts were being fixed around policy.” The “Downing Street Memo” makes it tragically clear that the Bush administration had already made up its mind to remove Hussein at least eight months prior to “Shock and Awe” using WMD as the most palatable pretext for waging a “pre-emptive” action against Iraq. If a marketable justification for war had to be concocted by the “neo-con”, ”theocon” junta, it would seem logical to conclude that this senseless, and criminal slaughter was engendered for nothing more than greed and ideological hubris. One thing is clear, the American war machine was not launched to protect the American people from any imminent or distant threat from Hussein. The great tragedy of 9-11 provided the ultimate pretext for going into Iraq. If we didn't engage the terrorists in Bagdad we would have to fight them on Main street. It is a testament to the cynical contempt that the “architects “ of the Iraq invasion knew that launching this unjustified and illegal war was a mere marketing problem. But never did they doubt “ Shock and Awe” could be sold to the ever credulous American people. After so many wars and so many atrocities we have never lost our belief that America, as John McCain repeated several times in one of the 2008 presidential debates, “is a force for good around the world.” The irrational hysteria leading up to "Shock and Awe" was engendered by the Administration and an obscenely obeissant media and  never elicited  any serious mainstream discussion of the fact that that neither Iraq nor Hussein himself had been implicated in the horrific events of 9-11. Most Americans did believe, as they do to this day, that Iraq had been responsible for the horrific events on that tragic day. Bush and his ideological storm troopers would give America its deserved revenge against a godless rabble of Arabs. A million innocent civilian victims of our blood lust was a small price to pay for a national boner. 

 Our bloody history is replete with examples of manufactured consent to kill the innocent that is based on the flimsiest and oft repeated lies. Lyndon Johnson’s insistence that if we did not slaughter (my word) Vietnamese in their own country, American streets would be flowing with torrents of American blood. Let’s not fail to give that august American hero and failed presidential candidate, John McCain his due.  McCain became a real American hero when he was shot down while dropping bombs on godless commies. The fact that most of his victims were non-combatants has done little to tarnish McCain’s hero status in the minds of the American people. McCain like so many of our god-fearing elected representatives seems to believe that reducing human beings to splattered hemoglobin and purees of unrecognizable tissue is a laudable and patriotic act. 

If ideological pablum evinces nothing more than uncritical credulity among the very people expected to make the ultimate sacrifices in our perpetual state of empire building, we have no right to be surprised or outraged that the same pablum is recycled to justify our war crimes over and over again. Repeat the lie often enough and our kids will be reading it in their history text. One can almost see hordes of Nicaraguans marching northward along the Pan American highway to wage war against democracy and our way of life. After all, the promise of a continuous strip mall meandering over the entire planet is an alluring image. Who would not be jealous our pimped up lifestyle. It really is no surprise that the world envies us for Walmart and the Khardasians.  We are a nation of consumers as we are continuously reminded.
Terrorists are just pissed that they don't have as much stuff as we do.  Remarkably, the American people never fail to  purchase this improbable fantasy like the latest must have toy from Apple( assembled in China). All Wolfowitz and Perle had to do was string together a few outrageous lies on the same level of sophistication as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, repeat them often, and make them part of the half -baked, half off everything sale of American common sense at your local made in China box store. Critical thinking is willingly suspended as we indulge our national responsibility to consume like giant, Biblical hordes of rapacious locusts.

An exchange of blood for oil or some other desirable appurtenance of wealth is the kind of sacrifice privleged, pampered politicians like the dopey Dubya have always been willing to ask of poor and middle class children.
 I have always believed that if we expected the same kind of sacrifice from the offspring of the warmongers we would see diplomacy become the option of choice when settling disputes between nations. War must never be one of several options. It must forever be the only remaining choice after every other possibility has been tried and failed several times. Even a sociopath like  Bush would be loathe to have his clueless twins fighting for the Iraqi freedom he says is so righteous and will make Main St. USA more secure from “evildoers”. I do not believe that we should be allowed to dump the debts of our ill conceived military interventions on future generations. The Bush junta and the reprehensibly linked at the hip media  made this entire war an unreal abstraction, except for the soldiers and their families who literally bathe in the blood that is for the rest of us a silent metaphor. Am I too hard on the media? Hardly. Their responsibility is to find the truth and provide the American people with answers to the many legitimate questions about this war that have never been asked. The occasional question that did make it through the banality filters imposed by the junta and the media were never truthfully answered. An artful dodge isn’t even required by media puppies who have relinquished their sacred duty to inform. Rather, access has become far more important to the a consolidated and thoroughly corporate media. Once upon a time a few notable giants among the neutered rabble  would demand the truth risking alienation from our putative elected advocates who do little more than the bidding of the rich, kill the innocent and defenseless, and above all, practice to deceive. 

Amazingly foreign intelligence was used as the bedrock on which the case to incinerate thousands of innocent people was concocted. Obviously Blair and his gaggle of complicit criminals knew better, but lacked the decency to let the world know what most people had already intuited as the truth. One does have to wonder about Blair and his lapdog allegiance to the dim witted Bush. Was Blair a product of those prestigious British boarding schools where promiscuous homosexuality made a NYC bathhouse look like a chess club. When I see them together it is always with Bush as alpha male and Tony as the adoring sidekick. Tony as Sancho Panza. Tony, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, enchanted by that irresistably simian Bush charm.

The WMD lie coupled with a concomitant and imminent threat to American security was easily falsified  had anyone the desire to do so. UN inspectors had returned to Iraq and while not received as beloved guests, Hussein was by most accounts cooperating with them. The sickening image of Bush mugging for the cameras when asked about the existence of WMD did nothing to tarnish the lie that WMD existed only in the fictional narrative justifying on-going war crimes. Who will ever forget his fatuous pantomine looking for the never to be found WMD behind chairs and television cameras.  The inbred idiot President of the United States responding to hundreds of thousands of civilian murders with a little soft shoe and the irrepressibly remorseless smirk. Bush tangibly manifested himself to be a hollow man whose shoals of arrogance and stupidity trespassed the boundaries of sanity.  As for bringing democracy to the the victims of Hussein’s butchery as a backup motive for another lawless American intervention, altruism has never been in America's foreign policy interests.  America has and will support any regime, oligarch, thug or terrorist as long as it advances our agenda. Our past support of Hussein despite knowing of his homocidal proclivities, and our current support of Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov are but two examples. Karimov has gained some notoriety for reputedly boiling his opponents alive. We, however, are far more interested in Uzbekistan’s oil than human rights and its proximity to the huge reserves in the Caspian sea. Even Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that Iraq was and is about oil. Wolfowitz has bluntly stated that “ we had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil... for reasons that have a lot to do with U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction.”  Hussein gained favor with the US after a bloody coup in which he overthrew his uncle. Shortly after his rise to power, Hussein began his quest to become a modern day Saladin and attacked Iran, a Shia theocracy much out of favor with the hegemons in Washington. We were happy to welcome him into the  Manson family of  dictators, and mass murders beloved, for the moment, by the land of the free. Hussein met the essential criterion to be on America's list of favored thugs; he was willing to sacrifice young Iraqi men in a surrogate war for the US. We provided him with conventional, biological and chemical weapons to facilitate the killing spree. At times we even gave weapons to Iran as did the British and French. Good stuff.