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and the news from Iraq?

Posted on Monday 27 October 2008


Following the Iraq war over the years one of the most frustrating elements was the issue of permanent presence: would we stay there for 40 years or not? Usually the answer came back as a belated yes, for although the evidence was spotty and Rumsfeld always lied to Congress it was fairly clear 12 large permanent bases would be maintained in Iraq, eventually to meld into four “mega-bases”… Well, regardless of whether how many tens of billions were allegedly spent on permanent bases in Iraq, it’s all utterly wasted, we’re leaving by 2011 at the very latest.

It’s been buried beneath the campaign and economic news, but the Iraqis stared the Bush administration down in forcing it to accept the latest status of forces agreement that included a total withdraw from Iraq by 2011. But the Iraqi government couldn’t accept the negotiated agreement, so they want to re-open negotiations. Then the US “blackmailed” the Iraqis by threatening to pull out by this January 1st…

At some point we will find out just how many billions we wasted on “permanent” bases in Iraq and the nature of the lies used to obscure them, just another tragic element to a disastrous , lying war. I won’t forget, and the country is never doing something so stupid as occupation for nothing again, no. We really will learn this time.
For many of us who have blogged night after night for several years, the wish is that if enough people say it enough times, the true tragedy and deceit of our Iraq Invasion will finally sink in to the national psyche. The post above is from the left coaster, the group blog where eriposte meticulously dissected the [quaisi] prewar intelligence and demonstrated how it was distorted to justify the war in the first place. Here, paradox is writing about yet another piece of this bungled operation – the idea that our new best friend Iraq would provide us with a site for permanent military bases in the Middle East.

So much of what happened has gotten lost in this frantic Presidential Campaign. The plan to invade Iraq antedated the Bush Administration by years – probably arising at the time when President George H.W. Bush wisely decided to quickly pull out of Iraq after the First Gulf War. Paul Wolfowitz’s Defense Guidance prepared for his boss, Dick Cheney, in 1991 proposed the aggressive change in foreign policy that reappeared in this Administration as the Bush Doctrine. But it had been lovingly nurtured in the halls of the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century in the intervening decade. There, they convinced themselves, under the influence of apocolyptic crackpots like Michael Ledeen and Laurie Mylroie that the escalating Arab Terrorist attacks could not be the work of rogue groups like al Qaeda, but must have been sponsored by States [Iraq or Iran].

The 9/11 attack gave the Administration an excuse to play out their fantasy, even though it actually disproved their theories of State sponsorship of terrorism. But I’m not even sure they believed their own theories. They had a plan that drove everything, the theories were just a reason to explain what they were doing to a gullible populace. The plan:
  • invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein
  • install a puppet government of expatriots led by Amhad Chalabi
  • gain access to Iraq’s oil reserves
  • establish a permanent military presence in the Middle East
We know the rest. The pre-war justifications [Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and Iraq’s ties with al Qaeda] were both lies and are now publicly invalidated. The puppet government idea failed from the start. They have gotten no access to Iraq’s oil. And, as paradox now reports, the permanent base in Iraq idea is dead in the water even though we’ve spent millions building these hoped for bases. In the meantime, they spent a trillion dollars, sacrificed 4000+ American children and thousands of Iraqi Civilians, gave away our reputation in the world, and shredded our Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

What could be worse? Well, now we find that they’ve been so busy with this plan of theirs and trying to create a Republican Reich that would last forever by politicizing our government, that they have ignored our domestic and world finances to the point that a recession is inevitable and a depression is a real possibility, as is downright bankrupcy.

So, for many of us who have blogged night after night for several years, the wish is that if enough people say it enough times, the true tragedy and deceit of our Iraq Invasion will finally sink in to the national psyche.
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    1 Boring Old Man » in another pattern…
    October 28, 2008 | 10:57 AM
     

    […] on Tuesday 28 October 2008 Thinking last night about the Iraq War [and the news from Iraq…] put me in a reflective mood – an Eliot mood: What we call the beginning is often the end And to […]

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