@w2pow2 – you DO realize that in Dick Armey’s book, he recounted how he was about to recommend AGAINST the authorization of the use of force in Iraq, until Dick Cheney, his long time friend, came to him and TOLD him that Saddam actually possessed a suitcase nuke, do you not? Read his book, all in there.
You DO realize that Dick Cheney was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century in 1997…an organization which was founded by everyone who became Bush II’s original cabinet (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, etc.), which stated in their charter that America should achieve world dominance by engaging in multiple simultaneous theater wars in the middle east, do you not?
You do realize that Halliburton took in several billion dollars in no-bid contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, no-bid meaning they got the work, no one else was even allowed to try to undercut them, do you not? Yet, if you watch Robert Greenwald’s amazing documentary entitled Iraq for Sale, you’ll see how much they overcharged the government, how lavishly they spent their money on their high rollers, and how little they actually supplied for the money. And you do realize that after Halliburton was pretty much caught red handed being unable to account for where billions in taxpayer dollars was spent, Cheney helped to ensure there was no investigation, nor did any of their no bid contracts disappear, do you not?
And you do realize that Cheney was not only the CEO of Halliburton until he assumed the role of the Vice Presidency, but that his golden parachute included a payment in the amount of $250,000 per year for the first 5 years of his Vice Presidency, putting Cheney on the payrolls of both Halliburton and the US Government, do you not?
Ultimately, as long as the US requires foreign oil, having our citizens at the mercy of oil cartels in a hostile area of the world is a national security problem, and this is the problem Cheney and the neo-cons felt we should resolve by basically establishing a Jeffersonian Democracy in the middle east somewhere, probably Iraq. Further the fact that Iraq had leader who was certainly not morally pure, who had in the past been hostile to the US, who needed to save face and could be counted on to push back against any UN weapons inspectors, and one who also happened to have tried to kill the President’s daddy, well it’s no surprise that a year BEFORE the invasion, Condi Rice tried to brief bush on Saddam and bush said, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.”
The invasion of Iraq was 6 years in the making and required the PNAC to install themselves in the White House by ANY MEANS NECESSARY, so that they could get us involved in an action against Iraq. There was NO doubt whatsoever that Bush was going to get us into a war in the Middle East, hell, even the satirical newspaper The Onion was prescient enough to realize this (note the date of the article…3 days before Bush first took office), which you can read here. I bring this up because it’s frightening how close the article came to articulating the then future/now past-present era.
You don’t think the Bush administration was corrupt? Look no further than the machinations Bush and co underwent to steal the 2000 election (read The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast if you don’t believe me), illegally and fraudulently removing some 154,000 net Democrats from the voter rolls in an election that was decided by only a couple hundred votes.
Bottom line is, you should recall as well as I do that it wasn’t about going to war to take out an evil man. Yes, Saddam was evil, no tears were shed when he died. But there are evil dictators all around the world that the US doesn’t give two shits about, because they control countries that do not have a massive commodity that props up our entire economy. You can either be the police force of the world (something which is bankrupting us by the way), or you can remain neutral, but the US has always wanted it both ways, and this has been true under Dems and Republicans, we’ll watch people suffering but when it begins to affect us, we’ll get involved. Anyway, Saddam being evil and having gassed the Kurds had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the justification for the war.
Bush in fact went on TV and did a State of the Union address just before the invasion. At the time, Hans Blix was diligently working within the UN Security Counsel, inspecting Iraq for WMDs, and though from time to time he was meeting with resistance, by and large, he was getting Saddam to cooperate. But for months we heard this drumbeat from the Bush administration that we couldn’t afford to wait. The phrase they used over and over and over again (and remember the first rule of facism is that if you repeat something often enough, it begins to seem like the truth) was “the evidence that Iraq has WMDs could come in the form of a mushroom cloud”. I heard Rumsfeld say this, I heard other administration officials say this, and I heard Bush himself make a similar claim, in this aforementioned State of the Union Address. In this address he also pointed to a copy of a purchase order from Iraq to buy enriched yellowcake uranium from Nigeria….only two problems. One is that this was an OBVIOUS forgery, the name of the Nigerian President was someone who had left office in 1988! Two was that this whole document had already been discredited and the White House informed (which is what led to Cheney outing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative to get back at her husband who went public with the story that this document had already been discredited and that Bush should have known that).
Our Congress was basically TOLD what Dick Armey was told….he had been assured by Cheney (who had put in WRITING 6 years earlier that he believed we should invade Iraq to essentially build a permanent friendly presence in the oil rich region we depend on) that Saddam HAD suitcase nukes. So even if the vote count had been 100% (I believe it wasn’t too far shy of that), yeah, you tell Congress that a dictator has a suitcase nuke and is going to bring it to our shores less than 2 years after another terrorist crashes planes into the WTC and Penatagon, of COURSE they were going to vote to authorize force.
But again, what they voted for was not to go to WAR, but to authorize the use of force IF NECESSARY. Basically it’s been well documented that the authorization was presented to Congress as something that would make it easier to defend ourselves if necessary, and that once they had it, they used it to justify a preventive war.
Wake up and smell the coffee…we were misled into a war that most Americans and most of Congress would NOT have supported had they known the truth, the truth was actively hidden from both these groups, and the people hiding these truths had financial and political interests in going to war at any cost. If you really don’t think a U.S. administration could possibly be that corrupt, then you are indeed naiive. Not every member of Congress needs to be corrupt to push through an agenda….do you have a clue how politics works? It’s not about the greater truth, it’s about the best appearance. If you can paint a picture in the political realm of two possibilities, and make one picture incredibly bleak and the other sunshine and roses, well the reality could be the exact opposite, and people are still going for the better looking option….this is what happened to Congress.
Here’s what I’d suggest. Find a few books on the Bush Administration written from the “Bush bad” point of view….there are thousands, just pick like the two where you can look at the author and the author’s reputation and feel like they’re not a partisan hack (because many anti-Bush tomes have been written by non-Democrats), books where you feel like you’re not just going to write it all off, books by people perhaps who had an insider’s view. Look at these and read what the arguments are (which I’ve somewhat haphazardly summarized here) about how Bush and company lied to get us into war and how Cheney’s financial interests definitely had something to do with it, and get informed about what people are actually upset about instead of just writing it off. Many of us here have already done our homework…we can’t sit here and give you source after source after source. But what I can do is give you this well documented list (including sources) of nearly 1,500 reasons why Bush and his administration were bad, corrupt, self serving, devious, downright treasonous bastards.
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Composing members:
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