njlauren
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Joined: 10/1/2011
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There is plenty of guilt to go around, though the lions share goes to Bush and Cheney, who deliberately lied (sorry, the WMD's were bullshit and they knew it..the whole WMD came from one guy, Hallabi, who was looking to take over as dicatator of Iraq once Hussein was out of office)...they tried spreading the myth that Hussein had a piece of 9/11, and Fox News kept spreading that long after it had been discredited (for several years after 9/11/ people who watch Fox News for their primary news source by like 80%-20% believed Hussein had a hand in 9/11). They were told by other intelligence services, including the Mossad and The german security services that they didn't have them, that Hallabi was lying, but they pressed forward (a tangled mess of Cheney and Rove looking for a war to boost GOP popularity and create a permanent GOP majority, the Neo cons like Perle who saw the plan to overthrow Hussein as protecting Israel (they tried selling a similar plan to Israel and the Israelis looked at them like they were on drugs)....and it was plain arrogance, Bush was going to show he was a tough guy and avenge his father. Not to mention a military that didn't quite think of the consequences....ironically, Cheney agreed in 93 to stop before overthrowing Hussein for the very reason that killed us 10 years later, what would come into the power gap after Hussein was gone.
Then the story miraculously changed, Bush sold it as being a war to 'stop the threat of Iraq', then suddenly, the war mysteriously became 'Iraqi Freedom'......
And yes, they used one of the most effective PR tactics there is, lovely slogans like "Support our Troops" or "Support America", where suddenly it was everyone's duty to get behind the war effort, the 'you are either for us or against us', and it was quite effective, no one wanted to appear unpatriotic ("Patriotism=last refuge of scoundrels"). We had all the nice evangelical churches showing movies of jet fighters flying overhead, with patriotic music and rows of gravestones in military cemeteries, we had a full court press in Fox News and the rest, calling anyone traitor who dared to speak against it. You had people who should have known better, like Schumer in NY, who were caught up in the idea that this was protecting Israel, the Jewish community, normally a voice against stupidity, rallied around that concept with some few exceptions.
Then we have the real guilty parties, frontline did a great piece on this one. The mass media, the tv news, the newspapers, all completely fucked up, and I mean royally, they were so afraid of the GOP juggernaut, they were so afraid of being tarred as 'the liberal media' by the right wing hacks, that they were timid. Reports that the WMD's were exaggerated, the yellow cake mess, the Hussein=9/11 lie, all of the dissenting voices were on page 39 or something. The only paper who did an effective job was the St. Louis Post dispatch, they talked to intelligence people, the ones who do this for a living, and in the run up, they basically said "WTF? I don't see anything, there is simply no indication Iraq is a threat". These officers had sent memos and analysis, and they told the reporters they were getting nothing back....but that was one paper, not the NY TImes, not the Post, none of them did jack shit (not surprising, given the corporations that own much media...kind of reminds me that the NY Times, owned by a Jewish family, backpedaled its coverage of the Nazi's and what they were doing, so not to appear 'too Jewish', here it was 'not patriotic'.
I can say I was against it with a clear heart, I was, it smelled then and it still smells. I belonged to a pretty liberal church at the time, and there was a guy who was a member, this guy wasn't so liberal per se, he was ex military intelligence, he had been active duty during the prior gulf war, and we were talking, and he said he didn't have any specific information, since he obviously wasn't active duty, but he had a large network of friends, some of whom were active, some retired, and even looking at what was being reported, they didn't see the pattern, they didn't see the kind of things they would expect to see, the chatter in papers, none of it.....and he said that some of the guys on duty, while not saying why, said they didn't see anything in the stuff they looked at that would indicate Iraq had what they claimed it did (pretty much what the reported for the Post-Dispatch were hearing). ...and he was firmly against it, he said it smelled.......that alone impressed me, I don't discount information from someone whose career this was.
Course, it didn't help that Cheney made a fortune out of the war, he may have had his halliburton stock in a blind trust, but he knew the military was going to rely on cotractors, and he spiffed out personally.
Not to mention, that while spending what will prob end up about 3 trillion dollars when it is all said and done, the GOP gave the top 1% massive tax cuts in the middle of an expensive war (that Bush hid by putting it in as 'extraordinary requests').....
Al Qaeda couldn't have done a better job in fouling up the US then Bush and Cheney did, by pulling off 9/11 they got dumb and dumber to spend the US into oblivion, nice going...not to mention that the sideshow in Iraq also pulled troops from Afghanistan and allowed Bin Laden to get away.....
Blaming Obama is a but ridiculous, by the time he took office in January, 2009, we already had been in there almost 6 years, and you don't get out of a mess like that by packing up and going, kind of like tanker trucks spilling a cargo of toxic chemicals in the middle of main street, then just driving away.
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RE: 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War - 
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