What Republican Leaders Said--and Promised---About Iraq

Yet they blame and blamed President Obama

What America's priorities are-----and what they should be

A Veteran of the Iraq War says what needs to be said...

...and things only Veterans CAN say:

Absolutely Nothing: A Veteran's Savage Indictment of the Iraq War

It should be required reading for all of-age Americans.

To any politician or pundit on the Right calling for the US to go into Iraq again -- from an Iraq War Veteran

I’ll tell you what, let’s go back to Iraq.

Oh, yes, let us do that.

I’ll dig out my uniform and strap on my pistol and gird up my sword and ride into battle yet again.

Just so long as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and every single one of those powdered, Botoxed talking heads at Fox News are in the vanguard. That’s right, you cowards, you put on a uniform and you lead the charge this time around. The Koch brothers and Mitt Romney can pay for it, every goddamned penny, we’ll bleed them until they’re dry and then we’ll pull the gold fillings from their teeth to pay for it right along with the rest of their Wall Street cronies. You fuckers got rich off the last one, you can damned well pay for this one. And when you run out of money, we’ll take your blood, fair’s fair.

Strap John McCain into the cockpit of an A-4 Skyhawk and let him fly air cover.

If he gets himself shot down and taken prisoner again, well, you know what? Fuck him, leave him to the enemy because frankly his hate and bile and raging insanity have done more damage to this country than Bowe Bergdahl ever did.

The terrorists can keep him.

Peace love and understanding tell me
Is there no place for them today
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord knows there’s got to be a better way

War what is it good for
Absolutely nothing…
- Edwin Starr, “War” 1969

Originally posted by Jim Wright on Stonekettle Station.

Quote of the day---indisputable

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own government, I can not be silent.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

America and War today, from a historian and "insider" (guest post)

Andrew Bacevich writes that the United States no longer knows how to win wars, but it continues to start them.

Confusing capability with utility, the United States knows how to start wars but has seemingly forgotten how to conclude them. Yet concluding war on favorable terms — a concept formerly known as victory — is the object of the exercise. For the United States, victory has become a lost art. This unhappy verdict applies whether US forces operate conventionally (employing high-tech “shock and awe” tactics) or unconventionally (“winning hearts and minds”).

As a consequence, instead of promoting stability — perhaps the paramount US interest not only in the Islamic world but also globally — Washington’s penchant for armed intervention since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, has tended to encourage just the opposite. In effect, despite spilling much blood and expending vast amounts of treasure, US military exertions have played into the hands of our adversaries, misleadingly lumped together under the rubric of “terrorists.”

In a world divided between haves and have-nots, between postmodern and pre-modern, and between those for whom God is dead and those for whom God remains omnipresent, expecting coercion to produce reconciliation, acceptance or submission represents the height of folly. So force employed by the United States in faraway places serves mostly to inflame further resistance, a statement that is true whether we’re talking about putting “boots on the ground” or raining down Hellfire missiles from the heavens.

What then is to be done? That which Washington is least capable of undertaking: Those charged with formulating policy must think anew. For starters, that means lowering expectations regarding the political effectiveness of war, which is demonstrably limited.

Take force off the metaphorical table to which policymakers regularly refer. Rather than categorizing violence as a preferred option, revive the tradition of treating it as a last resort. Then get serious about evaluating the potential for employing alternative forms of power, chiefly economic and cultural, to advance American interests. The result won’t be a panacea. But it won’t cost as much as open-ended war. And rather than creating new problems, this alternative approach just might solve some old ones.

--Andrew Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he received his Ph.D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of Boston University, he taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University. 

Links:  The Misuse of American Might and the Price We Pay

The misuse of American might, and the price it pays

Congratulations, America, you screwed up Iraq

The Iraq War then and Iraq now and what we don't want to know, as Americans who did it:

"We wrecked Iraq. 

We caused the deaths of as many as a million people and displaced internally and externally, another 4.7 million. Today there are still more than a million Iraqis lost in their own country — internally displaced — mostly in Baghdad, according to unembedded journalist Dahr Jamail.

"Most of them have fled from sectarian cleansings," Jamail said when he was interviewed on Democracy Now! last year, on the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. "They're living in horrible situations" — without government help, without hope for the future, surrounded by garbage, anticipating only more sectarian violence.

Our invasion wreaked havoc on the physical and social infrastructure of the country. And the weapons we used, including depleted uranium munitions and white phosphorous, shattered its health. In 2010, for instance, The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published an epidemiological study, "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009," which found that Fallujah — the city we "cleared of terrorists" with two bloody assaults in 2004 — is experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia and infant mortality than Hiroshima and Nagasaki did in 1945.

The country as a whole, according to Jamail, has seen an enormous jump in cancer rates since the U.S. began dismantling it. In 1991, before the first Gulf War, there were 40 registered cases of cancer per 100,000 Iraqis, he noted. By 2005, "we saw 1,600 Iraqis with cancer out of 100,000."

And Fallujah, in particular, has been devastated by an increase in birth defects since 2004 — 14 times higher than the rate measured in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they were bombed, according to Jamail.

It's common in Fallujah, he said, citing Iraqi Dr. Samira Alani, "for newborns to come out with massive multiple systemic defects, immune problems, massive central nervous system problems, massive heart problems, skeletal disorders, babies being born with two heads, babies being born with half of their internal organs outside of their bodies, cyclops babies literally with one eye — really, really, really horrific nightmarish types of birth defects. And it is ongoing."

This is the context in which war talk and the "vital interests" of empire must be placed. Such a context is unacceptable to the corporate and political status quo, of course; so the media it controls have begun to perform cosmetic surgery on recent U.S. history, resurrecting the goodness and purity of our intentions and the simplistic evil of "the terrorists." All they need to be successful is complete denial of reality.

But the invasion of Iraq, Jamail said, "is a crime against peace, according to the Nuremberg Principles." And that makes it, and all future wars, a crime against our own, and the planet's, vital interests.

Link to original post: Lies, Stupidity, Waste and War Crimes: Iraq and the Ongoing Calamity of America's "Vital Interests"

America's 2nd Iraq War, our war of choice

The Iraq War, by the numbers

Number of years since the U.S. invaded Iraq: 10

Number of Iraqi civilians dead as a consequence: At minimum, between 123,000 and 134,000

Number of Iraqis internally displaced or who fled the country: 2.8 million (that’s one in 12 Iraqis)

Number of U.S. troop casualties: 4,484

Number of coalition troop casualties: 4,803

Number of U.S. troops wounded: 32,223

Number of non-Iraqi contractors killed: at least 463

Number of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnoses in U.S. service members: 103,792

Number of bombs dropped in Shock and Awe Campaign: 4,845

U.S. financial cost so far: $1.7 trillion

Amount owed to U.S. veterans in benefits: $490 billion

Predicted cost to U.S. over next four decades: $6 trillion

Cost of U.S. reconstruction efforts: $60 billion

Amount of reconstruction effort funds wasted: over $8 billion

Halliburton overcharges classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported: $1.4 billion

Number of WMDs discovered: 0

Sources: Costs of War Project, Congressional Research Services, News Sentinel, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction .

With thanks to Matt Payton's Tumble-o-rama for bringing this to our attention.

Veteran from KCMO pens letter to Bush, Cheney

From The Huffington Post yesterday and TruthOut earlier:

Tomas Young, Dying Iraq War Veteran, Pens 'Last Letter' To Bush, Cheney On War's 10th Anniversary

Days after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Tomas Young, then a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., made a decision repeated by many other Americans around the country: He was going to enlist in the military in hopes of getting even with the enemies who had helped coordinate the deaths of nearly 3,000 men, women and children.

Less than three years later, Young's Army service placed him not in Afghanistan -- where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated -- but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young's convoy was attacked by insurgents. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again, and in fact, for the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks that allowed him to survive only with the help of extensive medical procedures and the care of his wife, Claudia.

The incident turned Young into one of the most vocal veteran critics of the Iraq War. He has, however, saved his most powerful criticism for what he claims will be his last. Young says he'll die soon, but not before writing a letter to Bush and former Vice President Cheney on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.

From Young's letter, published on TruthDig:

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Young goes on to attack the "cowardice" of Bush and Cheney for avoiding military service themselves, and to encourage them to "stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness."

(Read Young's entire letter here.)

Young was the subject of the 2007 documentary "Body of War," which was about his recovery process and the Iraq War. At a February screening of the film, Young told the audience that he planned to end his life in April.

According to the Ridgefield Press, Young announced that he would stop taking all nourishment and life-extending medications at that time. He's since said that the deterioration to his body from the injury and ensuing complications would make it physically impossible for him to commit suicide in any other way.

"It's time," he told the audience over Skype, while seated beside his wife. "When I go I want be alert and aware."

Young spoke more about his decision in a recent interview with journalist and Iraq War critic Chris Hedges.

“I made the decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding and fade away," he said. "This way, instead of committing the conventional suicide and I am out of the picture, people have a way to stop by or call and say their goodbyes. I felt this was a fairer way to treat people than to just go out with a note."

For the rest of Hedges' interview with Young, click here. For the rest of The Huffington Post's coverage on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, click here.

On the 10th Anniversary of George W Bush's Iraq War

President George W. Bush lied to us, ladies and gentlemen.

As did his Vice President Dick Cheney and now-former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, at minimum.

And the worst thing about it is that at least 4,488 Americans soldiers died because of it while a minimum of 32,021American soldiers were wounded. Added to that are the estimated 122,000+ Iraqis that were killed, let alone those wounded and/or made homeless.

It was and is a huge tragedy and debacle, besides being against our own, internal, national laws as well as against external, international laws.

It should never have happened and many, many lies were told and deceptions created in order to have it take place.

It happened. It took place.

And it took place on our watch.

We should absolutely explore who was responsible for it happening.

We should explore who lied.

And we should prosecute those that did, without question.

More than anything, we must make certain it and nothing remotely like it ever takes place again.

That's why this is so vitally important.

Links:  Iraq Body Count

Casualties in Iraq 

Casualties of Iraq war go beyond those who died in action

U.S. lacks mechanism to accurately track troops wounded in Iraq

One of the best, most important articles Americans will never read

It posted this week:

The Worst Mistake in U.S. History

America Will Never Recover from Bush's Great Foreign Policy Disaster  

       Ten years ago, George Bush made a decision that this country will regret for a very long time.

 

"Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we -- and so many others -- will pay the price for it for a long, long time."

 

A mistake for the nation, a mistake for the Middle East, a mistake for the world.

 

It's a great read.  Americans would do well to familiarize themselves with it so more of us learn what we did, so we also learn better where we are now because of it.

 

And why we need to make sure we don't let this or anything like it happen again.

The Iraq Documentary Americans need to see

Rachel Maddow and MSNBC created a documentary based on the book by the same name by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

'HUBRIS: SELLING THE IRAQ WAR'

In their book review, The New York Times tells a bit about the book:

In “Hubris,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn chronicle the Bush administration’s delusional march to war. Though there has been a deluge of works denouncing the follies of the military and the administration, Isikoff and Corn cover somewhat different terrain. They offer the most comprehensive account of the White House’s political machinations, aimed at convincing Congress and the public that Iraq posed a dire threat. Isikoff is an investigative correspondent for Newsweek and the author of “Uncovering Clinton,” and Corn is an editor at The Nation and the author of “The Lies of George W. Bush.” The authors, who have interviewed key politicians and government officials, supply a lot of new information. They show that in many ways the administration became the dupe of its own propaganda. Though their narrative spins out of control by the end, much of the book makes for fascinating reading.

As Isikoff and Corn demonstrate, the administration’s first mission was to snow Congress. At every step, Cheney took the lead, convincing the four top leaders of Congress — Dennis Hastert, Richard Gephardt, Trent Lott and Tom Daschle — that war was unavoidable. Together with George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, Cheney and the lawmakers gathered in the House Intelligence Committee briefing room, where they examined photos of what looked like new construction at what Cheney declared were Iraqi nuclear weapons sites. “When the Congressional leaders departed that briefing,” Isikoff and Corn write, “they looked grim.”

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

When it comes out, please don't miss it. We let these people have their way with us, with the nation, and with the Iraqi people and really, the world, to all their peril and our own. We owe it to them--and to ourselves--to know and get out the truth. It premieres February 19 at 8 pm Central Time.

There are a great deal of people in the world who would be only too happy if former President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, at the very least, were charged with war crimes.

The rest of the Times review is here:  Winds of War - The New York Times

Who we are

Don't doubt it.

America is the war monger of the world.

Bar none.

What are you going to do about it?

On now former President George W. Bush

From a posting yesterday at Truthout (http://www.truthout.org/) because we haven't learned, collectively, and we need to, badly:

A Small Fraction of a Man

Saturday 13 November 2010
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t
Op-Ed

This is the guy, I thought to myself when I saw his face or heard his voice. This is the guy.



This is the guy who took a massive Clinton administration budget surplus and gave it away to his friends at the top of the tax bracket, a move that laid the groundwork for our current economic calamity.


This is the guy who breezed past a pointed warning about Osama bin Laden, terrorism and airplanes on August 8, 2001, because he was on vacation and couldn't be bothered.


This is the guy who parlayed that massive failure into a constant goad of fear to be wielded with impunity against the people he purported to lead. Plastic sheeting and duct tape, anthrax under your pillow, and of course, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.


This is the guy who, not even a month after the Towers came down, looked into a television camera and said, "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates."


Oh yes, this is the guy who stood before the American people in January of 2003 and proclaimed that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile biological weapons labs, uranium from Niger for use in a "robust" nuclear weapons programs, and that Iraq enjoyed connections to al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.


This was the guy who presided over the outing of a deep-cover CIA agent after her husband had the temerity to call him a liar in the public prints. That agent was running a network for the purpose of thwarting any person or group that might try to deliver weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.


This is the guy who strutted like a bantam rooster under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," bragging about the end of a war that was to grind on for seven more years, and grinds on even to this day, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.


This is the guy who said "Bring it on" and put a target on the backs of tens of thousands of US troops. This is the guy who is personally responsible for the death and injury of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings. The body count from his administration is breathtaking in size and scope.


This is the guy who allowed the intelligence services of this nation to violate the Constitutional rights of its citizens in a way never seen before.


This is the guy who turned the entire world against America after that same world embraced us so completely after September 11. World leaders could not stand to be in the same room with him, and openly mocked him, thus humiliating us all.


This is the guy who literally fiddled while Hurricane Katrina devoured the city of New Orleans.


This guy actually said he considered dropping Cheney from the administration? It would be comic if it were not so pointedly fraudulent. Cheney ran the government, ran roughshod over every right he found meddlesome, and Bush sat by and let him do it with that same simpering smirk on his face.


This is the guy who set stem cell research back more than a decade because of his overarching fealty to "snowflake babies" over living, breathing, suffering people.


This is the guy who unleashed all the horrors of the torture chamber because the lawyers said it was OK. If the president does it, it's not illegal, right? Nixon came up with that line, but this is the guy who took it farther than it has ever been taken before.


This is the guy, and now he's back on my television again, and it makes me want to eat my own teeth. I endured him for eight long, brutal years, and have often thought since that no matter how bad things get - and they have, indeed, gotten pretty damned bad - I don't have to endure his face or his voice or his abject serial failures anymore.


But now he's back, and it is like returning to a nightmare.


I don't know what this George W. Bush Reputation Rehabilitation Tour will actually accomplish in the end. The same 20% of the country that kept his approval ratings from slipping into single digits - said group now being known as the "Tea Party" - will go out and buy his book. They will lap up his mealy-mouthed pabulum like cats into the cream, and some of our "mainstream" commentators will try to shoehorn the idea that he is missed into the national conversation.


He is not. George W. Bush was, and likely will forever be, the single worst American president in the nation's history. To outstrip his remarkable record of failure, criminality and disgrace, a future president will have to personally cause the Earth to crash into the sun.


All I can do for now is avoid the TV, stay away from the newspapers, and pray to God on High that this small fraction of a man will soon retreat back into the ignominy from which he has emerged. There is no salvaging him, and thanks to him, there may be no salvaging America in his aftermath.


We are all children of this bastard fool now. The least he can do is stay in the shadows where he belongs, while we toil and sweat to repair what he wrought.

Link to original post:  http://www.truth-out.org/a-small-fraction-a-man65077

Check this out

Did you know that your own--our own--government, the United States government, is paying--yes, paying--Iraqis, regularly, "in exchange for not fighting" in Iraq?

If not, then, do you know how may Iraqis we are paying to not fight?

It's hard to believe.

91,600 Iraqis.* Regularly.



Thank you, once again, George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and all others involved and responsible.

Good plan, guys.

*Harper's Magazine, June, 2008, P. 15 (Multi-National Force, Iraq, Baghdad)

Say it once and repeat frequently

Let's say this now and make this clear, 9 months before the knucklehead leaves office:

George W. Bush created and, more importantly, LOST this war, that's the long and short of it. The next President, whoever that is, did not lose this war.

Say it again. Say it frequently. Make--and keep--this clear.

George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and anyone and everyone else who created or helped create this stupid, misrepresented, illegal war and incursion into Iraq are the ones who lost this war. The next person to pick up the mantel of President for the United States has to clean up the mess, yes, BUT THEY DID NOT LOSE THIS WAR.

It would be a gross, unjust miscarriage of justice to say or think that anyone else lost this war but "W" and his cabal. They went in against international law. They chose, arbitrarily and unjustly, wrongly, to go in. They chose to go in with too few soldiers and support. They chose to go in without a plan. They chose to go in without a plan for after the "liberation" and/or fall of Saddamm Hussein. They did all these things, themselves, all alone. Senators Clinton, McCain or Obama (or former Senator Gore), if they are the next President did none of this. It won't be theirs to lose, in any way and it's extremely important to call this out now--and again and again, through next January's inauguration and beyond. History needs to call out these important details and facts.

It would be a gross injustice to the next administration, to the American people and to history to have it labeled any other way than that it was a war--let me repeat again--that George W. Bush and his administration lost.

Meanwhile, this from Yahoo! and the Associated Press just now: "US GI's in Iraq Suffer Worst Week of '0". See it at this link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080412/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq