Category: Iraq

Bush Knew that There Were No WMDs Before Invasion

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Sidney Blumenthal saysthat Bush was explicitly briefed on this fact.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

He wanted his war out of some Oedipal conflict with his dad, and now, to further compensate for his feeling of masculine inadequacy, he is planning to use nuclear weapons on Iran.

He must be stopped, and to paraphrase Olbermann, Democrats in Congress and those few Republicans who actually give a damn about America need to do it today, and set about removing Bush and Cheney from office and turning them over to the Hague for prosecution.

John Edwards Calls Out Congress on War

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Needless to say, the Washington DC Journamalist press corps will use this to claim that Edwards is too far out there*, but in reality the fact that that congress should not fund the war without a withdrawal timetable is actually pretty safe.

More than 90% of the primary voters, and more than 70% of those folks who are not Republican Dead Enders™ support this. It’s a natural vote getter.

My recommendation to any Democratic presidential candidate is to state loudly and clearly that escalation by attacking Iran is a bad thing. It would destabilize the region, provide popular support to the Iranian theocracy, and put more American lives at risk.

In fact, I would suggest that a candidate should suggest that this is a reason to initiate immediate impeachment proceedings.

RNC Doing Intelligence in Green Zone?

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Seriously, when reps Moran and Tauscher went to Iraq, the found that thousands of flyers, describing them in terms sounding like opposition research, were circulating in the Green Zone.

Bush and His Evil Minions™ have infiltrated every level of US government, and we are going to need de-Bushification when he is gone if we want our government to work.

One amusing/appalling note from the story above:

But even such tight control could not always filter out the bizarre world inside the barricades. At one point, the three were trying to discuss the state of Iraqi security forces with Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, but the large, flat-panel television set facing the official proved to be a distraction. Rubaie was watching children’s cartoons.

When Moran asked him to turn it off, Rubaie protested with a laugh and said, “But this is my favorite television show,” Moran recalled.

This is Unbelievably Stupid

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So, Moqtada al-Sadr orders a freeze in operations of his militia, but the US Military is continuing to aggressively raid his offices.

Sadr’s message came the day after he issued a public statement to his Mahdi Army to cease its operations for up to six months so he could restructure the group. But Sadr was forced to reconsider after a raid Thursday by U.S. and Iraqi forces on his office in the southern city of Karbala led to the deaths of six Mahdi Army members and the arrest of 30 others, the officials said.

It’s almost like someone in the White House or Pentagon is looking for a fight to excuse the failure of the surge or to have an reason to attack Iraq.

Oh

My

God

Cover Up, Part Deux

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Well it looks like the cover up masquerading as a court martial is finished.

So they acquitted Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan of everything but talking about the investigation, for which he will receive a reprimand.

So, no regular army officers, Jordan is a reservist, were convicted of anything, and the only thing an officer got was a slap on the wrist.

My someone with a star had to know, and explicitly approve of it, and someone at a higher level had to give tacit approval.

Based on reports, we already know that Rumsfeld viewed the Geneva conventions with contempt, and as the saying goes sh&% flows down hill.

Leaked GAO Report Says Iraq a Failure

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It appears that a draft of a GAO report has been leaked to the Washington Post.

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.

It’s been leaked because one of the writers knew that it would be censored by Bush and His Evil Minions™ in its final version.

In a related note, the Pentagon, “Said Wednesday that it won’t make a single, unified recommendation to President Bush during next month’s strategy assessment.”

This means that they don’t want to be Bush’s bitch on Iraq any more.

Hmmmm….I’ve Heard This Before

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A few years back…I can’t put my finger on it….Those things that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have been saying about Iraq Iran,”And Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,” sounds strangely familiar.

It’s almost like I’ve heard this before, maybe about 5 years ago.

Iraq is Not their Catastrophe, Iraq is their Utopia

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Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone cuts to the heart of the matter in their article, “The Great Iraq Swindle“.

It is a must read expose of the corruption in the contracting in Iraq, but it answers a bigger question, why did the Neocons want to go there in the first place?

Here is the money quote:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they f%$# things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

They could not do this in Afghanistan, there simply is not the money there, but Iraq, with its immense oil reserves served as the laboratory for their twisted vision of society.

Simply put, it’s scarier than you think. Iraq is not their catastrophe, Iraq is their utopia

A Very Interesting Point About Iraq

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The folks at Think Progress ask the question is the prospect of withdrawal responsible for the modest security gains in Iraq?

They quote the following from the NIE:

Gearing a Coalition withdrawal, some tribal elements and Sunni groups probably will continue to seek accommodation with the Coalition to strengthen themselves for a post- Coalition security environment…

It’s a good point.

There are a lot of people in Iraq who would be preparing for what follows, and hence not blowing up our soldiers, if they believed that our exit, or at least our withdrawal from routine security operations, were imminent.

Iraq War Brings Drop in Black Enlistees – New York Times

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There is an interesting article in the NY Times regarding precipitous drop in Black enlistment in the military.

The sharpest decline in black recruitment has been experienced by the Army, which has the most troops deployed in Iraq; black recruits dropped to 13 percent of the Army’s total in 2006 from 23 percent in 2001. In the Marines, with the second-largest force in Iraq, the share of black recruits decreased to 8 percent from 12 percent in the same period. There were also declines in the Navy and the Air Force, though not as great as those in the two other services.

To provide some perspective, note that Blacks are about 13% of the US population.

As a traditionally economically disadvantaged community, it should be noted that Blacks are traditionally more likely to enlist, as doing so is perceived as a way out of poverty and America’s profoundly dysfunctional ghettos.

“I’m not really into going overseas with guns and fighting other people’s wars,” said Mr. Finch, 18, headed to college this fall to study accounting.

While the fact that we are mired in a senseless quagmire in Iraq, this quote highlights another aspect of the drop, that many Blacks feel divorced from the US Government, and in particular George W. Bush, with whom the Iraq war is closely associated.

Additionally, it should be noted that one of the reasons that Black ghetto youth joined the military was to get away from gang activity in their neighborhoods, and because of the lowered recruiting standards, gang members, and gang culture, have increasingly entered the military.

Our military is being destroyed, and in a much more profound and long lasting way, by our fools errand in Mesopotamia.

The First Serious Republican to Call for a Pullout Wins Iowa

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Strategic Vision Polled voters on a number of issues, including Iraq, and the results are interestting, particularly question 4.

4. Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months? (Republicans Only)
Yes 51%
No 39%
Undecided 10%

Given those numbers, and given the number of candidates who are running, the highest in the polls gets barely 30%, the first credible* Republican candidate to call for a pullout wins Iraw.

*Credible means not a racist libertarian nutjob like Ron Paul.