The Awful Truth About Iraq

[Ayinde]

by James Carroll,  
Published on Tuesday, February 3, 2004 by the Boston Globe
 
SINCE DAVID A. KAY'S testimony before a Senate committee last week, the public focus has fixed upon mistaken intelligence that led to the American invasion of Iraq. Democrats are pounding the issue, which may actually be fine with President Bush. Events of a year ago are not the urgent question. Democrats should be asking, "What about Iraq right now?" No one misses Saddam Hussein, but the unjustified method of his removal has set in motion a train of terrible consequences. Politicians, including the leading Democratic presidential candidates, would rather talk about past American "mistakes" than present policies or future decisions for the simple reason that the present and the future of Iraq involve certain tragedy for which the United States is responsible.

Such is the climate of chaos that the Bush aggression has created that there is no clear way forward, and bad things are going to happen in Iraq -- no matter what Washington does now. Such unhappy news can sink the politician who dares admit it. Better to advance the conventional wisdom that, however mistaken the origins of this conflict, there is no choice now but to "see it through" -- if only to "support the troops."

Bush critics suggest that coalition forces need to be more fully "internationalized," but otherwise most seem to accept an open-ended US occupation of Iraq. We broke it; we have to fix it. For the sake of "credibility," or even "honor," we must "stay the course," even if the US presence itself causes the chaos.

In counterpoint testimony to Kay's from 33 years ago, young John Kerry famously asked a difficult question: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" After Kay's revelations, even the Bush administration seems ready to admit that the past justifications of the war in Iraq were "a mistake" (if only the CIA's), but what will it take for the United States government to admit that the present course of policy is equally a mistake? If the war was a mistake in its very origins, it is a mistake in its prosecution.

As the young Kerry was surely loath to apply the word "mistake" to a conflict that had killed and maimed some of his friends, an American leader must be loath to make such an admission to the families of more than 500 dead US soldiers. Yet what they died for was clearly not the noble cause as defined by Colin Powell a year ago, nor the "freedom" of which President Bush blithely speaks. Some American leader, in profound repentance, must acknowledge the awful truth to those families: "Your sons and daughters died for a mistake."

Only such truth-telling at home will make possible what must be done immediately in Iraq. If our getting into the unnecessary war was wrong, our carrying it on is wrong. The US military presence in Iraq, no matter how intended, has itself become the affront around which opposition fighters are organizing themselves. GIs in their Humvees, US convoys bristling with rifles, well-armed coalition check-points, heavily fortified compounds flying the American flag -- all of this fuels resentment among an ever broader population, including Saddam's enemies. It justifies the growing number of jihadis whose readiness to kill through suicide has become the real proliferation problem.

The occupation is its source and must end. "The day I take office as president of the United States," a true American leader would declare, "I will order the immediate withdrawal of the entire American combat force in Iraq."

And so with American commercial interests in Iraq. Certainly, the United States has the obligation to enable the efficient repair of the social and civic structures destroyed in the war, but not in the mode of Halliburton. Such infuriating corruption also fuels the war. Therefore, even while the US treasury funds an international reconstruction effort through the United Nations, American companies should be barred from making profits off this "mistake" -- especially oil companies.

No president has the authority to forbid the commercial initiatives of corporations acting abroad, but powerful inhibitions can be put in place through regulation and licensing. "When I am president," a true American leader would declare, "I will do all in my power to fight the fact and perception that we have in any way profited from our invasion of Iraq."

Ending occupation and preventing exploitation are, of course, corollary to the far more difficult acknowledgement a new president must make -- to griefstruck American families, to the Iraqi people, and to the world: "What we did in Iraq was a mistake. Innocent people died. The fabric of international order was torn. We see that and have moved to undo it. But there is no undoing the unnecessary suffering we caused. And for that we are sorry."

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company

[Ayinde]

Using the ends to justify the means repeats the folly of Vietnam.

by Robert Scheer  
Published on Tuesday, February 3, 2004 by the Los Angeles Times
 
The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right and from the secular to the religious. It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists and on through the suicide bombers of today.

Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President Bush in justifying his preemptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud. The undemocratic means employed by Bush — misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations — are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago.

Once again we seem unwilling to fully grasp the lesson of Vietnam, our other major exercise in preemptive war based on the theories of ivory-tower intellectuals with dreams of a Pax Americana. For those requiring a refresher course in that previous folly, which so fractured our own country while devastating three others, check out the new documentary "The Fog of War," in which the Vietnam adventure's prime architect, Robert S. McNamara, tearfully concedes it was all a grand mistake.

That decadelong conflict was brought to you originally by Democrats, one of whom, John F. Kennedy, remains much admired. McNamara attempts to make the case that JFK wanted to get out but was assassinated before that could happen, but I don't buy that theory. Getting out is the hardest part, particularly once you have put abroad the lie that you invaded a country in order to save it. It is political suicide to then abandon such a crusading war when it turns sour.

Today, in Iraq, we again have been battered senseless by the argument that it is "irresponsible" to leave, even when it is clear we are no longer welcome. Those who dare suggest that our continued presence as an occupier is actually part of the problem — like presidential candidate Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) — are pilloried as unrealistic. But attempting to alter other people's history — while also serving our own economic and political needs — leads almost inevitably to quagmire, blowback and a nonsensical path of trying to make future truth of past lies: We didn't go to Iraq to save it, but now we have to save it to excuse the fact that we went.

This tangled web is no less onerous when spun by Republicans Bush and Dick Cheney than by Democrats Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. And now, as then, in the early stages of the war we saw only the most tepid opposition from the political and media elites to the big-lie technique that so often accompanies war.

Most of the leading Democratic Party presidential candidates, for example, are compromised by having supported an invasion they should have passionately challenged before it was launched. It is not too late for them to admit they were fooled by Bush, as some of them have begun to do. Thankfully, the campaign of Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) is on the ropes. He has consistently endorsed the White House's cynical abuse of the facts; just last week, he said the Iraq invasion was "just" because "Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction," a stupid and dangerous twisting of language.

Similarly unnerving is the ease with which ideologues like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz manage to shape and shift their arguments whenever their grand theories are undermined by messy reality. "We have a more important job to do in Iraq … and that is to help the Iraqi people build a free and democratic country," Wolfowitz said last weekend.

If this was the goal all along, then why didn't Wolfowitz and Bush tell the American people before they sacrificed their sons and daughters to the crusade? What was all that about the imminent threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Hussein's ties to 9/11? All lies, it turns out. If Wolfowitz ever finds his conscience as McNamara apparently has, he too will be crying in some future documentary about the folly of presuming to bring enlightenment to a people we neither respected nor understood, while undermining our own fragile democracy.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Oshun_Auset]

We all know it was a lie from the beggining. We all knew it was for oil and the spread of the American Empire. It is neo-colonialism and imperialism. Anyone who didn't and continues not to see this is blinded by the propoganda machine (CNN and others). The nature of the capitalist system is exploitation. There will continue to be wars for resources until the people organize and rise up in revolt against the system, and form a system orientated for the benefit of the masses and not the profits of the elite few.