[longknife]

[My conservative fingers hurt just typing this]

This should make all the Leftie and Peaceniks quite happy.

Newly-Released Memo by Donald Rumsfeld Proves Iraq War Started On False Pretenses
by George Washington

Everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.

Indeed, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff – Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson – just said that Powell knew that there were no WMDs:

I wonder what will happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing

Read more of the damning documents @ http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/20 ... -pretenses

And it appears that the Left's favorite, Colin Powell, was in on it too.

[slim_jim]

I dunno if it was for 'nothing'...Haliburton did quite well out of it with the non-competitive, grotesquely wasteful, cost-plus payment contracts it got.

And it sure helped towards getting Bush re-elected as a 'war-time president'.

Lest we forget.

[neopagan]

The best part of the Iraq war was when an air-cargo freighter delivered a huge cling-wrapped brick of $100 bills the size of a couple of refrigerators. There was a photo of it in time magazine. Within a few days about half of it could not be accounted for. Whether you are left or right or center. The Iraq war was a monumental rip-off.

[Political Interest]

Who even remembers the reasons for why the war started? Saddam Hussein and Ba'athist Iraq are a distant memory now days. It goes to show that the situation which we are concerned with is now days one completely different to the original one.

[ralfy]

"Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984"

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

The more things change....

[longknife]

Who even remembers the reasons for why the war started? Saddam Hussein and Ba'athist Iraq are a distant memory now days. It goes to show that the situation which we are concerned with is now days one completely different to the original one.

Thank you for the reminder!

[Igor Antunov]

Massive tax payer----->military industrialist transfer of wealth = very profitable war for those controlling the US regime. Something on the order of $4 trillion in the span of just 10 years? Amazing return on investment.

[ralfy]

From only ten years ago:

"US occupation force in Iraq recruiting former Iraqi secret police"

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/08/iraq-a26.html

[skeptic-1]

The ex VP and one of the perps also made out and I read is now connected with oil producing in Iraq.

Oh say can you see by the dawn early light............!

[Rich]

Iraq 2003 was an utterly righteous and noble intervention. Power was wrenched from the Sunni Arab terrorists and given to the Shia and Kurds. The mass murder and barbarity of the Sunni Arabs against democratic rule has only further proved the righteousness and wisdom of that venture. The great mistake is our continued alliance with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other Sunni Muslim terrorist regimes. Aren't the Twelvers terrorist bullyboys themselves? Yes they are, but they are not as bad as the Sunnis and they are the minority, so we should support them in-order to divide the forces of Muslim terrorism. This war has been going on for fourteen hundred years. It doesn't accord to the time-scales of either Western Conservatives or Western Leftie Liberals.

Even now the Iraqi government is supporting the resistance to the Sunni Arab terrorists in Syria, while still fighting them within the borders of Iraq.

[Poelmo]

We can't say things like "the war in Iraw was for nothing", or "the war in Iraq was a super awesome 100% success". What we know is that the war ended dictatorship in Iraq x years earlier than would otherwise have happened, that the occurence of sectarian violence rose y percent, that the occurence of state-sanctioned violence dropped z percent, that Iraqi infrastructure was set back by a percent, that the war cost a certain number of lives on all sides and a certain amount of money, etc... Whether this means the war was "worth it" depends entirely on who you are and where you were at certain points in time and what matters most to you. Likewise a youth in the Netherlands may be grateful to the Canadians for driving the Germans out of the country in 1945 while an old Canadian who lost his/her father in that war may view the Canadian efforts negatively.

[Franker65]

I wouldn't exactly say it was for nothing but really looking at where we are today, it may seem like that. At least Saddam is gone, but perhaps the Arab Spring would have toppled him eventually in much the same way as Gadhafi. Despite all of the sectarian violence, at least Iraq finally has a democratic chance. Still, I don't think it was worth all the lives lost.

[Poelmo]

I wouldn't exactly say it was for nothing but really looking at where we are today, it may seem like that. At least Saddam is gone, but perhaps the Arab Spring would have toppled him eventually in much the same way as Gadhafi.

Iraq tried an "Arab spring" in 1991, more than 100.000 civilian deaths later Saddam was still in power...

[Social_Critic]

The Iraq war was justified using lies, fake documents, and it had media cooperation. Judith Miller worked at the NY times to help lay out the case for war. William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, the US News and World Report editor, the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch...Politicians in high places knew it was all a bunch of horseshit. Remember Senator Lieberman proudly smilng with the idiot son as we went to war?

There were powerful interests aligned: the Israel lobby, military industrial complex, and the imperialists. The neocons who cooked this mess were all associated with one or more of these groups. Next time these sons of bitches try to make you foam at the mouth to go kill somewhere far away from the USA borders, ignore them.

[Poelmo]

The Iraq war was justified using lies, fake documents, and it had media cooperation.

All of that doesn't make the war "for nothing" per se. Even unexpected results that show themselves in 2025 can be a factor in how future generations will judge the war.

[Serzat]

Iraq was invaded plainly because of oil, I say this point blank. That is why article 25 and article 109 of the Iraqi constitution(which was devised by the Americans and has never enjoyed the popular consent of the Iraqi public) read:

""The state shall guarantee the reforming of the i-racki economy according to modern economic bases, in a way that ensures complete investment of its resources, diversifying its sources and encouraging and developing the private sector"

"The federal government and the governments of the producing regions and provinces together will draw up the necessary strategic policies to develop oil and gas wealth to bring the greatest benefit for the i-racki people, relying on the most modern techniques of market principles and encouraging investment"

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/files/20 ... ion_en.pdf

Furthermore, the CEO of Cevron, one of the oil companies which are robbing the Iraqis of their livelihoods and which possesses leverage over the US government, is known to have said no less then 5 years before the Iraq War:

"Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas – reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to."

http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/c ... 40471.html

The oil-centered motivations for invading Iraq should be overly obvious in the face of these facts, if the ludicrousness of the official reasons given by the US government would not suffice anyhow. I consider the Iraq War to be another dirty stain on the face of international capitalism, and as a member of an ethnic group which was affected by the Coalition's onslaught for cheap oil, I do long for the day that all foreign oil companies are kicked out of the region for good, and the reserves nationalized under their respective populations as we desire. But the bourgeois strongmen and warlords that were installed to mandate corporate theft are not exactly aiding the people to that end.

[Oxymoron]

Yes because the Invasion of Poland by the Soviets was because of the plight of the Polish people .


In any case, yes the Iraqi war was because of Oil, as are most modern wars. Prior to that it was some other resource, territory, river etc

[starman2003]

The Iraq war was justified using lies, fake documents, and it had media cooperation. Judith Miller worked at the NY times to help lay out the case for war. William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, the US News and World Report editor, the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch...Politicians in high places knew it was all a bunch of horseshit.

There have long been claims that jews control the media, as well as exert inordinate influence in congress...

Remember Senator Lieberman proudly smilng

I'm ashamed to be from the same state as that bastard.

There were powerful interests aligned: the Israel lobby, military industrial complex, and the imperialists. The neocons who cooked this mess were all associated with one or more of these groups.

Sure and the greatest influence was the pro-Israel lobby. The key neocons at the time--Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle--were all pro-Israel jews principally motivated by a desire to benefit Israel.

Next time these sons of bitches try to make you foam at the mouth to go kill somewhere far away from the USA borders, ignore them.

Better yet hang them. They were traitors, plain and simple. Not satisfied with milking the debt-ridden US for Israel, they used our troops as cannon fodder for their #1.

[Gletkin]

Even better, we've got a govt. in Iraq that's allied to the United States....and Iran and Syria.
We've decided that things were too boring for us in the Middle East you see.

[Ummon]

Where have you been? This is news? Wow, no wonder it is so easy to manipulate social conservatives