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10-Year Iraq War Anniversary: What We've Learned In the Past Decade
Reflections On a Major Debacle
Preface: Many experts and alternative writers pointed out the false justifications and huge downsides before the Iraq war started. I know for a fact that many letters and phone calls were made to Congress in an attempt to stop the war.
And the protests against the Iraq war were the largest protests in history.
Yet the politicians plowed ahead with the disastrous war and refused to listen to the facts ... or the will of the people.
The Iraq war started 10 years ago. This is a roundup of the facts that have been documented about the debacle in the last decade.
The War Was Planned Long Before 9/11
The American government planned the Iraq war long before 9/11.
Former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11.
Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office.
In 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.” And see this and this.
Indeed, neoconservatives planned regime change in Iraq – and throughout the Middle East and North Africa – 20 years ago.
Weapons of Mass Destruction and 9/11
Everyone knew that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction (update here).
U.S. officials are guilty of war crimes for using 9/11 as a false justification for the Iraq war. Indeed, the entire torture program was implemented in an attempt to justify the Iraq war.
American officials considered lettering Saddam should down a U.S. or UN plane, in order to provide a false justification for war.
Saddam allegedly offered to leave Iraq if the U.S. would call off the war ... but we refused. We wanted to invade.
The Real Reason
No wonder ...
As even the top Republican leaders have admitted, the Iraq war was - in fact - for oil.
War Crimes
The U.S. engaged in a systematic program of torture in Iraq, which rounded up innocent farmers, reporters, old people and children. People were murdered and sexually abused as part of the torture program.
The American military used depleted uranium in Iraq - which can causes cancer and birth defects for decades (see this, this, this, this, this and this).
Chemical weapons were used in Falluja, which greatly increased the rate of birth defects.
The Pentagon sent in one of the main US creators of the death squads in El Salvador to set up paramilitary death squads and torture centers in Iraq.
(And Iraqis are worse off now than before the Iraq war. Christians are more widely persecuted than under Saddam.)
Cost: $5-6 Trillion Dollars
The government claimed that the entire Iraq war would cost $50-60 billion. How much did it really end up costing?
Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated in 2008 that the Iraq war could cost America up to $5 trillion dollars.
But a new study by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies says the Iraq war costs could exceed $6 trillion, when interest payments are taken into account.
Given that top economists say that war is bad for the economy, the Iraq war is one of the primary reasons for our current economic problems.
The War Has Hurt America's National Security
National security experts – including both hawks and doves – agree that waging war against Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries has weakened America's national security and increased terrorism risks. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.
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Democracy: the god that failed
Anarcho-capitalism Bitchez!
bunch of drivel
"$6 Trillion Dollar Mistake Screwed Up the American Economy"
Are you talking about Bush or Obama, (or both)?
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED ZERO HEDGE!
Mark this post, the USA wants another fuckup Bush in the white hous named Jeb. He will win on a engineered technicality just like his fuckup brother. USA politics are dripping with corruption.
Awesome testimonial of dying man to those who aided his demise :
Tomas Young, Dying Iraq War Veteran, Pens 'Last Letter' To Bush, Cheney On War's 10th Anniversary
Why say "neoconservative" when what you really mean is "JEW BASTARD" who does not swallow DemoJism?
I'd say it's because you are a pussy.
What a silly, childish article. Who is this George Washington loser?
There is plenty in the world to complain about TODAY. Why the need to drag up something from 10 years ago. And to claim the war is what is ailing our economy TODAY is beyond absurd, its just plain stupid.
bjfish the topic is relevant, because it is the pretext behind the theft of our Republic and every re-hypothecatable asset in it. So, yeah, it's relevant.
Get a brain, moran!
Executive Summary: bjfish...silly... childish...loser...beyond absurd...just plain stupid.
9/11 and everything that followed was a big gambit on the part of the criminal Amerikan establishment to control the flow of oil from the Middle East and thereby allow the debt money party to go on indefinitely. Containing Iran on the orders of the Jews was a secondary motive.
There is no "cabal" of people responsible. They are your own elected leaders and all of the lobbyists and banks who surround them.
This is what has been coined the credibility trap. There will never be any meaningful investigations or prosecutions, because those would of course implicate the very people doing the investigation.
It turns out this gambit was a massive failure, because of cost overrun and because of their failure to do anything about the real problems that beset the country, even apart from the foreign misadventures. As a result, they are now reduced to money printing and propaganda.
The end times for Amerika are here, but the human race will go on.
An indignant Wolfowitz was on Fareed Zakaria show this weekend, blabbering about how we forgot our lessons from Vietnam about counter-insurgency, a disgusting character, he really should have been hung years ago
I'm calling BS on this. If this was all about oil, why the fuck would we spend $6 trillion? It would have been cheaper to buy it on the open market.
In retrospect nation-building was a bad idea but most everyone believed that there were WMD that had to be secured. If I knew this would have cost us $6T and 10 years, I would not have supported it.
If you believed the MSM back then you might have believed there were WMD. PBS (yes even PBS) had plenty of stories back then stating otherwise. When I saw Colin Powell present artist renderings as evidence it was obvious they had no real evidence. And war always costs 10X what they say it will cost. Lots of people didn't support it back then. But most people drank the koolaid and off we went. Maybe controlling Iraqi oil didn't work out like they hoped but the $6T went somewhere and enriched a lot of bastards. As far as the people who wanted the war are concerned it was a great success.
Truth be told, I guess I did buy into the narrative back then. I sure wasn't alone tho. Also, Saddam had tried to assassinate Bush 1, so there was that aspect of taking him out. I suppose if we ran the war like Imperial Rome and looted the country for the benefit of the citizens... but as others noted, "we" got nothing and got stuck paying the bill.
I suppose I'm a lot more wiser/skeptical now than I was 10 years ago.
Knight,
To echo HeyA-holes, "we" didn't do anything. Are you the guy at the bar watching the Cubs on TV and saying, "hey look, we won."
There is a fundamental disconnect between who pays for stuff and who gets the stuff. Yes "we" are paying and paying. But somehow someone else gets all the oil, and someone else gets to print money and spend it ahead of the rest of us. Funny, huh?
Horseface,
"We" did not do this.
The fucking criminal government criminals did this. And they profited from it.
"We" got fucked.
Asshole.
Ahh yes, the old "We were sure there was WMDs" line. Frame the argument around that supposed error rather than debating the whole premise of the bush doctorine and preventative war. We had to invade Iraq. They were giving us the stink eye and we were terrified they would attack us.
One aspect of the Iraq war very relevant to the heart of the geopolitical issue : OIL and the continuing oil scam during Iraq reconstruction :
Halliburton Company Got 39.5Billion Iraq - Business Insider
KBR (company) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kellogg Brown Root got 40 B in contracts....
This is what Pax Americana gravy train is. And it will begin again and again in Mena and Asia wherever the army marches in.
KBR was the only company qualified to do the work (put out oil well fires). Thats some conspiracy you're pushing there.
lol, and Ben is the only guy qualified to run the printing press.
I love these unique exceptions that are so precious to a nation that nobody can replace them. One nutted jewels like Lance. And <enron. All texans like the bush clan. Of course Cheney had nothig to do with it.
Red Adair was NOT KBR and the likes of Red Adair were manyfold.
As for Boots & Coots of Haliburton read this :
The company worked with Halliburton in Iraq in the aftermath of the Iraq War; however, there were only nine fires to deal with, a far cry from the number from the previous war.[2] In spite of signing a two-year contract including renewal options with Halliburton in 2004 to continue operating in southern Iraq,[3] the company faced an uncertain future.
More important than oil, or any other natural resource, is the monetary system that controls those natural resources. Therefore, more important than oil, or any other natural resource, is the power to make fiat money out of nothing, as debts, which enables those who can do that to constantly become more wealthy, in order to assert ownership over all natural resources.
Looking at the oil, or any other natural resource, is too superficial. FOLLOW THE MONEY TO THE SOURCE. The supreme material power for several Centuries has been the biggest gangsters, the banksters, and all of the corporations that have grown up around those banks. That is the system that was behind the Western wars in Iraq, and everything else, like the more recent events in Libya, etc.!
Sure, the natural resources are the ultimate things that matter. However, the control over those resources is exercised through the monetary system. It is the monetary system itself which is the most important thing, not the oil, nor any other particular things. The world is being dominated by the transnational banksters, who are collectively a group of trillionaire mass murderers. They, and their corporations, are behind every kind of self-destructive thing that the Pax Americana is doing. Since their established money/murder systems are runaway, triumphant, force backed FRAUDS, the final outcomes must be madness and self-destruction.
For sure, they will continue to try to consolidate their global hegemony over the world's privatized, fiat money made out of nothing, as debts, system! However, what they are thereby attempting to do is build a global social pyramid system based on HUGE LIES, which no amount of violence can ever make be true, and thus, which no amount of violence to back up those LIES can ever make them become sane enough to survive in the longer term.
The Anglo-American (Zionist) empire is primarily based on the triumphs of the transnational banksters, who have been able to take control over governments, through applying the methods of organized crime, through the political processes. Thus, the real world system today is terminally sick, since the illnesses of the legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, have become predatory parasites that are so totally intertwined with everything that everyone else is doing inside of that civilization, that there are no ways to fix these problems.
Of course, I like to try to hold on to irrational hopes for a series of political miracles, however, there are no good reasons to believe in anything like that actually happening. The whole world is already almost totally controlled by a fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting system. Therefore, every decision we make with respect to oil, and all other natural resources, is made by an utterly mad money/murder system.
As far as I can tell, there is practically zero chance of any saner overall understanding of human ecology, and industrial ecology, within the natural ecology, being able to be acted upon by enough people. Instead, the runaway insanities of force backed frauds, controlling the world through Huge LIES, is the only thing which looks like it is going to happen. Therefore, we can expect things like more insane fighting over basic natural resources, like water, whereby the banksters will try to privatize those, so that their triumphant fraudulent accounting systems can more and more buy up control over water too. Human realities are ALWAYS organized lies, operating organized robberies. What has been happening through the Pax Americana has been TOO MUCH TRIUMPH, WHICH WILL CAUSE TRAGEDY. However, that longer term tragic consequence of too much triumphant fraud can not stop it from happening now, anyways ...
We are controlling finite sources of energy and matter using fiat money, which is fundamentally fraudulent, which system exists solely because it was made and maintained by the best organized criminals, the biggest gangsters, the banksters, who were able to take control over the world's governments through those means.
EVERYTHING WE ARE DOING IS BASED ON HUGE LIES, BACKED BY LOTS OF VIOLENCE, BEING AMPLIFIED TO ASTRONOMICAL SIZES BY TECHNOLOGY. We are both trillions of times more powerful, and able to use trillions of times more information, HOWEVER, ALL OF THAT IS DONE THROUGH FRAUDS, AND THEREFORE, IS UTTERLY INSANE AND IRRATIONAL, AND AUTOMATICALLY GETTING WORSE!!!
That there are those above the law..
There are and have been books available in the Public LIbraries, and University Libraries, which would have made this clear to you at any time in the last 100 years. It's the basic operating principle of modern society.
If by modern you mean anything after 3000 BC then I agree.
I don't know? Was it a failure? What are they planning on doing and is the economy really that important for them?
And before we start bitching about Iraq...........I still want answers to 9-11 and particularly bldg7. You watch.......we'll go to WW3 and all get our asses killed before we get anyone in jail no fucking doubt in my mind. The closer we get the closer they get to getting us all blown up. In their minds if they can't have it all no one can have anything.
What we've learned in the past decade: NOTHING!!!
I believe this is the correct answer to a 97% probability; I would say it deserves full credit as a written test answer.
Just the facts mame ... good work Georges.
I just love how the state-sponsored media orifices are commemorating the event, conveniently excusing themselves.
Well here in the UK, we've certainly learned that Tony's surname was actually Bliar.
GCHQ got confused over Bush's pronunciation of maths destruction and have updated their bugs with a garbage filter.
We all got to hate the song "Deck of Cards".
While the US was "liberating" Saddam's gold, Gordon Brown was "liberating" ours.
We vowed never to get involved in this sort of war against an oil producing country again.
But did we actually learn anything?
Once Dubya got the closet Catholic onside, the war was on.
Doubtful. But my facetious reply to the original post was; "hey, nobodies perfect". I'm a life long student of history and human folly; perhaps the same subject; it's been absolutely amazing to watch this country lurch drunkenly from one pruposeless mass disaster to the next with mental midgets at the wheel. Lord Acton where are you when we need you?
maybe people should read every day a newspaper from the archives 5. 10 and 20 years ago, to see how they are getting information raped on a daily basis.
Some even believe religiously that what,s in the news is real AND the truth, and nothing but the truth.
The world dream, you have to be asleep to believe it. Adaptation of George Carlin,s words.
Another great post, GW. But let's not ever forget the precursor event staged to "justify" invasion of Iraq and the sandpit: 9/11. PNAC openly stated in their report that a "Pearl Harbor" type event would be necessary to sway US public opinion in support of such an invasion; 9/11 was that event.
Until and unless we indict and try those responsible for both events (IMHO Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, etc), the U.S. will never recover as a nation. It is a "enduring" stain on our flag.
BIG OIL
MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
CONTROL EVERY MOTHER FUCKING REPUBLICAN IN CONGRESS
Never Never Never Forget That.
But Zero Hedgers are all Republican Offspring who Sucked the Dick of Republican Ideology.
Well they didn't control Paul Wellstone and his anti Iraq war stance. Of course positioning himself in between the war and the MIC didn't work out very well for him I suppose. His *cough* plane crash and the anthrax letters did a fantastic job of bringing Congress into lockstep with the machine.
Like there's a difference between R or D.
Newsflash, they both are in power to steal from you and reduce civil liberties.
Meanwhile you're just the dick-sucking tool that engages in the false lefty-righty divide.
But I'm sure you knew that already (being a failed troll, after all).
Partisanship = Full Retard
Have a nice day!
I see that the mast subhead for this article mentions "mistake." Pols and crats do NOT make mistakes, they do exactly what they are told and what is good for them and let the rest of the world pay and deal with the consequences. Much like a thug that robs a store and kills the clerk for $20, the rest of the world be damned.
It is always about money and power and never a mistake.
And lest I forget, "the guillotines are on order." hujel
It's a mistake only if you're gullible enough to believe in the state as a legitimate social structure.
I find it fascinating that his articles ALWAYS clearly show the predatory nature of the state, yet he still relies on his childish conclusions that it can be fixed within the very criminal framework that gave birth to the scam o' the day.
As always, there is no lower form of sub-human life than that of the voter, an evil, apathetic "do-gooder" who will empower the most evil forces on the planet merely by swearing allegiance to their criminal cartel.
Self-propelled tool, indeed!
"Self-propelled tool"; I like that. I think I'll steal it.
Why would anyone beleive that - long term preference for the oil - either in the form of distribution rights (worth not much) or serious Gullbenkian commission wouldnt last that long .... in return for trillions- pleeease???
this was about a war for profit - the MIC and particularly Halliburton - chenys mistaken acquisition for Halliburton when he was CEO ( Babcock & Wilcox had serious asbestos liability which without the war profits would bring down H to BK)
nothing else was going on - its always about the .....money - threats are manufactured - new bad guys can be created at will
Police State: Mission Accomplished
akak said:
It goes even further than that. When bin Laden declared war against the United States in August 1996, he laid out several goals which he hoped to accomplish. Of these goals, two are worth examining in the context of the Iraq war and the collapsing economy.
One goal was to bleed the United States into bankruptcy. Another was to get the US to spread out its military and intelligence forces to the point where they would have few reserves and little flexibility.
In a manner reminiscent of Mein Kampf, he even said how he planned to do it. He would provoke the United States into war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. The 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were the first attempt at this. As those proved insufficient, the second attempt was the October 2000 bombing and near sinking of the USS Cole in Yemen. This still wasn't enough, but the third try in September 2001 worked quite well indeed.
Bin Laden didn't do it alone; like an Oscar winner at the Academy Awards, he gave credit to those who helped him, as we can see in this excerpt from his 2004 speech directed to the American people:
Yeah, I know, they hate us for the freedoms we had. As Zappa put it*:
Don't try to do no thinkin'
Just go on with your drinkin'
Just have your fun, you old son of a gun
Then drive home in your Lincoln
*From the song Bow Tie Daddy on the Mothers of Invention album We're Only In It For The Money
Yeah, akak, the real agenda behind 9/11, as an inside job, false flag attack, has worked out very well for those that did that, and helped cover it up. They generated the series of lies to start the war against Iraq. The USA is now totally controlled by organized criminals, and there is no possible way to stop that from automatically getting worse, faster, beyond our ability to imagine. Everything that Americans were tricked into doing to other people are going to come back home, and be done to them!
9/11 was the starkest symbol of the basic background fact that the government of the USA has been completely taken over by the application of the methods of organized crime for more than Century. While millions more Americans are beginning to wake up to that fact, the already established political systems are too far advanced into their terminal corruption to be fixed. Everything is already in place for the runaway fascist plutocracy's police state to start more genocidal wars, as well as impose democidal martial law.
That will surely degenerate, as the triumphant systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, inevitably, eventually, drive through their own psychotic breakdowns, since no amount of violence used to back up Huge Lies can ever make those Lies become true, but only drive the whole civilization to become more and more insane, and thus, drive it to collapse into chaos.
The triumph of lies, such as through the events on 9/11/2001 being a spectacularly successful inside job, false flag attack, enabled wars abroad based on more lies, which fantastically benefited those warmongers. 9/11 was used as the excuse for the Federal Reserve Board to blow the credit bubbles that caused the financial system collapses in 2008, and that too was an inside job. The American democratic republic is being deliberately destroyed from the inside. That process is now so far advanced that it is a terminal situation: Police State: Mission Accomplished ...
HOWEVER, THE DESTRUCTION OF THE RULE OF LAW THEN DESTROYS ITSELF.
Since 9/11, and the financial crises in 2008, were both DELIBERATE INSIDE JOBS, the $6 Trillion Dollar Mistake That Screwed Up the American Economy WAS NOT A "MISTAKE!" Those events were only a "mistake" for those who were tricked into believing in the Huge Lies, and therefore, agreed to act on the basis of believing in those Huge Lies. The people who made 9/11 happen, and covered it up, while promoting the Huge Lies about those events, have been spectacularly successful in becoming far more wealthy and powerful. Their successes in destroying the American economy are part of their overall plan to destroy the American democratic republic.
Personally, I expect all of those social insanities to get worse and worse, and for myself to probably end up one of the many, many people who will be murdered, as these political processes proceed. The only thing that I have "learned" in the past decade has been that the more I knew, the worse it got! After spending thousands of hours learning about the North American money/murder systems, during the past decade, I expect to become much poorer, and then to be killed, because there are no practical political ways that I can imagine which can stop the "Police State" whose Mission has been Accomplished!
i read something once that stated 'if women were in charge, the wars would end tomorrow.'
writer apparently had never heard the names, clinton, pelosi, and merkel just to name a few.
Hey GW : O/T
Did you see Fuku is in boiling mode as there has been a major power failure; one of the reactors has those rods now getting dangerously hot!
Nouvel incident à la centrale nucléaire de Fukushima
Nice summation of what happened. But you forgot about poor Dr David Kelly.
http://thinkingaboot.blogspot.ca/2011/06/dr-kelly-still-dead.html
Nothing like the sound of a donkey's bray in the morning......
jb