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War On Iraq – 10 Years On
Ten years ago I watched on TV how the first bombs exploded in Baghdad. The fireballs were bigger than I had expected. "What are they dropping there?" I asked. "And why?" asked my then girlfriend. "Oil," I replied.
It was obvious that Iraq had neither any weapons of mass destruction nor any connection to terrorism. There was no doubt about that. Every piece of false evidence that had been put out by the U.S. government had been debunked. Everyone with a bit of interest and a bit of time could have known that. Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau (today McClatchy) journalists Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay had writen piece after piece about that, as had several blogs and alternative media, Billmon's Whiskey Bar being on of them. Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradai and their experts on the ground said there were no WMD in Iraq.
The Bush government was a government of oil executives. When they came to power they were determined to get their hands on Iraq's resources. 9/11 only made it easier for them but they would have made the same flimsy case against Iraq even without that event. Greed for Iraq's oil was their motivation.
There is no excuse for anyone who publicly made the case for the war on Iraq. There is no excuse for anyone who wrote, edited or published WMD bullshit. Everyone who did so has lost all credibility.
The best case one can make for those people is that they could have known but were too lazy to learn the facts. In the worst cases they knew they were lying but fully intended to commit the crime. In most cases the propagandists just willingly drunk the Kool-Aid (recommanded reading!). They do so again and again.
The war on Iraq is still ongoing. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are still financing and supporting the Sunni insurgents against the Iraqi government. Today more than a dozen car bombs exploded in Baghdad killing at least 60 people and wounding many more. It will take another ten years and more fighting before Iraq will find some state of peace.
The same people who pressed for the Iraq war are now pressing for war on Syria and for war on Iran. It is important to fight them and to debunk their lies again and again. It is the most important reason to keep this blog going.
Ranke, I believe, held that the nature of a country’s government was exemplified, most clearly, in its foreign policy.
The broad and sustained attack on the living standards, political and civil liberties of the masses in Europe and north America was foreshadowed in the cynical and ruthless attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere. In every case they have been accompanied by clouds of lies, now topped in the ultimate lie (which everyone, besides a few ‘extremists’, accepts) that they were mistakes, false interpretations of intelligence and otherwise excusable.
They were lies. The propaganda was part of a campaign which has continued without interruption: this is no past, to be looked back on and contemplated, the Iraq war is the present. It continues. And those directly responsible for the million who died and the millions more displaced and ruined between 2003 and 2010 are adding every day to their crimes. They do so in plain sight.
As to us, the populations of, for the most part (this being a English language blog)the states which are dealing death every day in almost every moslem country (add Mali and Pakistan to the earlier list, don’t forget Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iran), I suppose that there must have been idiots who anticipated sharing the plunder, the oil, mainly, but also the other booty which, historically includes a warming glow of racial superiority, more usually sublimated nowadays as cultural ‘modernity.’ As to us the joke is that, far from benefiting the working people (middle class as they are called in the USA where, in the southern manner, the blacks are always the working class and to be white is to be bourgeois) the war on Iraq heralded the much wider campaign against living standards in excess of bare subsistence, pensions, social security, medical care, social mobility through education and all the others gifts of social imperialism.
Now we are all Iraqis, subject to thugs with guns, and none more, in the States, than the discharged soldiers who are discovering that what the state employed them to do to foreigners it very happily does to them too. The big difference being that you cannot find many Iraqis who would vote to elect people to treat them as they have been treated, whereas in Greece, Britain, Ireland the States and elsewhere those who immiserate the people can renew their mandates at the polls whenever they choose. Just as Obama got re-elected to smash up medicare, social security, Iran and anyone he chooses to kill, imprison or otherwise and any other crime that he fancies.
Posted by: bevin | Mar 19 2013 18:43 utc | 6
I think the Iraq invasion was much more than a lust for oil / control of it.
It was an invasion for war’s sake – lust for blood and destruction, and various money-making oppos. (Contractors, defense, arms etc. – taking in tax payer’s money, scams, etc.) The will to impose a new model of society (framed as democracy, freedom, etc.) was genuine as well, or at least credible and heart-felt to a point, a post-2000 version of colonialism, within the inner circles. The burning glee, desire, to impose a model that was already failing at home.
Oil executives, at the time, iirc, were against it, simply because they loathe instability and therefore war. The oil biz seen from the US is run by private Corps in multiple complex profit sharing deals with other private Corps, subcontractors, and Gvmt(s) > plus banks, investors, share-holders, etc.
Getting the oil out of the ground, refined, and to market is today so crushingly expensive and complicated it requires 10-year plans (at least!) and enduring efficient cooperation between x entities, all working together to create and act in a predictable (financially fixed..), ‘safe’, upper ground (not to mention down below..)
Which includes, amongst others, solid labor laws, respected contracts, stalwart banks, and, crucial: secure, unproblematic transport, laid down routes, means. All that depends on some stable Gov. or world arrangement. Cheney and other neo-cons surely understood this but ignored it, and I guess (?), never listened to anybody in the Oil Biz.
Oil was a touted as ‘added bonus’, a kind of greedy, legit, excuse.
Posted by: Noirette | Mar 22 2013 16:06 utc | 65
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