Black & White and Cardinal Red All Over

Six Years And Counting

The election of Barack Obama has removed this as a hot button issue. Unfortunately, it still goes on despite our lack of attention being paid to it. I am speaking of course of the War in Iraq. Today marks the anniversary of the beginning of this fiasco six long years ago. It is the legacy that George Bush will spend the rest of his life running away from and may just be his personal undoing if someone ever has the balls to bring him up on those well-deserved war crimes charges.

The lies that have been told about our involvement in this unjustified war have been astounding. The denials of responsibility have been equally as astounding. The revisionist history flows like water from all the NeoCons now that history has proven them wrong on every account. (Don’t you just love how NeoCons develop a theory and then cherry-pick facts to fit their theory instead of using the scientific approach to formulating theories which is first gathering facts and THEN coming up with the theory? It would explain why they are wrong so often…)

Richard Clarke wrote about George Bush’s desire to hang the catastrophe of 9-11 on Saddam right from the very beginning (before any real facts had been established). From that point on the intel that was coming in to the Bush administration was corrupted to point to Saddam as the villain and only Saddam as the villain. The Bushbots all deny it now because they see what those lies got them but they did link Saddam to 9-11 even though it wasn’t true.

It was at this point that the influence of Paul Wolfowitz shone thru to the Chimpster. Instead of continuing the age old policy of containing our enemies and allow them to stew in their own juices until they implode or wither away, these brilliant NeoCon chickenhawks came up with the policy of preemption which basically means that now we just go to war with countries we feel threatened by instead of peacefully working to disarm or nullify the threat. It was saber rattling transmogrified into war mongering.

The boy genius Paul Wolfowitz was so convinced that Saddam’s people were corrupt, evil and worthless that he persuaded the Chimpster that disbanding all civil authority was a good idea. So, after the American invasion, everyone who worked in civil authority or the military was let go never to return. The results were immediate and disastrous. Customs agents abandoned the borders which became a free-for-all. No one was watching who was coming or going. Police departments that kept the peace under Saddam now were just empty buildings which people looted in short order. The military was dismissed since they were all beholden to Saddam and the result was anarchy. On their way out, they looted every armory in the country so that an insurgency was destined to be well-armed. The United States did not have enough troops on the ground to fight a war and police a country, too.

If al qaeda wasn’t in Iraq before, they certainly arrived fairly quickly. Iraq became the beacon for every badass who wanted to take a shot at the United States and earn their stripes in doing so. With American power concentrated on helping the majority Shia population who had been shut out of power in Saddam’s Iraq, the now powerless Sunni took up arms. It wasn’t until AQ overstepped their focus and began working against what the Sunni wanted (which was a share of power, not the destruction of Iraq itself) that the tide turned. The Sunni Awakening was the result and it turned the tide of the war that had been spiraling out of control up to that point. 

What is particularly revealing is how all of the architects of this fiasco now deny they had a hand in it or try to paper over their roles in what they did to this country in the name of “national security.” Everybody from George Bush on down to mouthpieces like Tony Fratto and Ari Fleischer are now denying their complicity in the wasted and stolen billions, the shoddy treatment of troops returning from the war, the torture done in our name that gained us nothing in practical terms, and the lost respect from our allies around the world to say nothing of the millions of lives that have been changed forever because of this NeoCon bullshit policy of preemption as practiced in Iraq.

I just have one simple question that no one seems to be able to answer on this the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War: where the fuck is Osama bin Laden?