by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
But he got asked the wrong question.
The right question to ask Jeb Bush is this:
“How dare you run for president when you should be dying of shame instead, because your brother is a war criminal?”
We seemed to have banished simple morality from all our discussions of public policy.
We call the Iraq War our “most serious foreign policy blunder” instead of what it really was: a war crime. An evil deed conceived by evil men because Saddam Hussein cut oil deals with Russian, French and other foreign oil companies, instead of with American oil companies — a snub that our two Texas oil men in charge, Bush and Cheney, could not abide. So they committed a war crime, and lied our whole country into their war crime.
Their act of evil makes the all-too-often-invoked Nazi analogy applicable to America. Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Powell are the mini-Hitlers of our time, and our country, America, is the Nazi Germany of our time, because of the war crime of the Iraq War. Because of our evil, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women and children are dead.
We are a nation steeped in evil.
We are the biggest manufacturers and sellers of arms in the world. We export evil to an evil regime like Saudi-Arabia, the country that funded 9/11 and beheads women for adultery.
We have a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who took years to apologize for her vote to allow Bush and company to commit the evil of the Iraq War.
We had another female secretary of state, Madeline Albright, who was an apologist for evil on “60 Minutes” in December 1996. Read this exchange and weep:
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”
We have our American Psychological Association in cahoots with our government in practicing torture. American psychologists — instruments of evil.
We have a police force who goes around shooting a black 12-year-old in a park playing with a toy gun stone-dead, and another black man running away in the back: a police force with trigger-happy racist evil doers in its midst. According to a black ex-cop, 15% of our cops will abuse their authority at every opportunity, 15% won't, and the other 70% will go either way, depending on how much their department has been corroded by the 15% who abuse their authority. (Personally, I think it's crazy to give young men in their 20s a gun and the authority to use it, when their brains haven't fully developed yet. Cops should NOT be allowed to carry guns till they're 30.)
We put a woman of conscience in jail for 30 years because she revealed to us the evil that our military wreaked in Iraq. We've done evil unto Chelsea Manning, when all she did was expose our evil.
We have an ex-president. Bill Clinton, who did nothing about a holocaust happening in Rwanda — a man who allowed monstrous evil to happen on his watch.
We experience a gunman's mass-killing of little children in Sandy Hook, and do nothing about gun control, because our politicians fear an evil organization, the NRA.
We believe it's OK to make a profit out of people getting sick. Our entire health insurance industry is an industry of evil.
We have a political party, the Republican Party, who is the face of pure evil. Because they hate our black president and his signature achievement, Obamacare, so much, many Republican governors refuse to expand Medicaid to poor people in their states (which will cost their states nothing), and so cause the unnecessary deaths of 17.000 Americans a year. The Republicans: a party who would kill their own people out of hate for our president. A party of stunning evil.
We have a teenage Pakistani girl, Malala, telling our president to stop his drone killings, but our president won't listen, because he likes his little evil habit of drone killings too much, and doesn't care that his drones kill more innocent folks than actual evil folks.
Verily, America is the exceptional nation. We Americans behave like the scum of the earth, and we don't even know it, let alone acknowledge it.
So let's take a look at our biggest war crime since the Vietnam War (which plunged Cambodia into a holocaust):
The Iraq War.
Why did we commit this deed of utter evil? Why did we kill innocent Iraqi women and children by the hundreds of thousands?
There are seven reasons why we invaded Iraq. Four of the reasons were real, and they were hidden from the American people. The remaining three were fake ones Bush and Co. used to bamboozle us — or as the pundits say, “to mislead us into war.”
1. THE REAL CHENEY REASON: OIL
As CEO of Halliburton, Cheney shared the mindset of Texas oil barons. For them, Iraq was a mouth-watering treasure ripe for pillage.
In Cheney's Halliburton days, Iraq was producing almost three million barrels a day. However, there was potential for much more. Within 20 years, its oil fields could, if fully exploited, reach Saudi levels (full-steam, that's 11 million barrels a day).
So there was Iraq, “floating on a sea of oil” — this rich, plump, juicy plum.
But:
Iraq was socialist. The state owned the oil. And the state was ruled by a two-bit dictator. He had to go: so let's invade Iraq and secure its oil fields for our oil companies.
Not that there's anything inherently evil about invading a country for its oil, especially if the invasion can be said to be some sort of liberation. It might be bad manners, but it's a good reason. Oil is oil. We use it, so maybe it ought to be ours to start with. You can do what you want with your country, as long as we get to pump out your oil. The only problem with this good reason: It doesn't sound all that good. Too damn mercenary. A scary, fake reason was needed to cover up the real reason.
2. THE FAKE CHENEY REASON: WMD
Paul Wolfowitz famously called WMD the “bureaucratic” reason for the war. In other words, not the real reason.
The question is, did Cheney himself believe his hype?
Let's consider the known facts. Cheney was looking for a reason to sell his oil war. He was bugging the CIA to come up with evidence that Saddam had to be taken out. He was grabbing on to the slightest hint, the merest rumor — on to any scrap of information, any data, any source, no matter how compromised or dubious. “Curveball,” by all accounts an alcoholic, “crazy, congenital liar,” was the source for Saddam's biological weapons, but the mobile labs turned out to be trucks that made helium for weather balloons.
Why would Cheney believe any of this crap when he had his good reason already – oil — and didn't need WMD to be a good reason, as long as it was enough of a reason to sell the country?
So he started the war before the UN could finish its investigation. And to stop any truth-telling, he went so far as to commit treason by leaking the identity of a whistleblower and former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, who happened to be a covert CIA agent.
Cheney and Chalabi, his Iraqi source who wanted a war so he could take over Saddam's job, fed their WMD “facts” to journalist Judy Miller, who dutifully wrote them up for publication in The New York Times.
The next day, if anyone asked Cheney about WMD – say, another reporter, or Tim Russert on TV — Cheney would quote the Times as a reliable source that reported that Saddam had WMD.
Slick. They even conned poor Colin Powell into trying to sell their story to the UN.
Cheney had a whole task force devoted to selling the war to the public: the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, which met weekly in the White House Situation Room. What a crew: Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes, and Mary Matalin – bare-faced liars who'd bullshit their own grandmothers insisting that they were virgins while fresh sperm was running down the insides of their guilty thighs.
When it was revealed that there were no WMD, Cheney and his conspiracy neatly sidestepped all responsibility and pointed at the CIA — acting like they'd been sheepishly fooled, and shaking their heads sorrowfully over the CIA's “faulty intelligence.”
The New York Times duly reported this “fact,” too. Having helped the warmakers to sell the war, our proud newspaper of record then helped these same instigators escape responsibility by blaming everything on the CIA.
A huge hew and cry was instigated over the CIA's “incompetence.” George Tenet dutifully fell on his sword and was rewarded for his loyalty with a Medal of Freedom by the president himself.
“We were all wrong,” they chorused. No, they weren't all wrong.
There were the bullshitters and the bullshitten. The bullshitters knew, and the bullshitten didn't. The whole hype was neatly flagged by the president himself when he made a funny film for reporters of him looking for WMD under the furniture at the White House and not finding a thing. Only a man who didn't believe any of it in the first place could make jokes about it.
Wink-wink, nod-nod: See me make fun of my own bullshit.
3. THE REAL BUSH REASON: VINDICATE HIS FAMILY'S NAME
Bush, also an oil man, subscribed to Cheney's oil reason – hadn't Texas oil companies given him $50 million to run for president? But he had his own reasons for wanting a war with Iraq before he even became governor of Texas.
For George W. Bush, son of George H.W. Bush, this was personal.
His dad had made war on Saddam. His dad did not like Saddam. The feeling was mutual. Saddam had tried to kill his dad. Saddam was a bad guy. A boogieman.
His dad had expected one of two things to happen after the Gulf War: that a Shiite uprising would topple Saddam, or that the Iraqi officer corps would remove Saddam for screwing up by exposing them to a war with America (the way the elite steps in and removes anyone who fails them).
But Saddam survived. The bastard was alive and well and taunting America. His survival was a personal blow to the Bush family prestige. Bush wanted to vindicate his family and “take out Saddam.” The defier of America and the Bush family had to go.
4. THE FAKE BUSH REASON: 9/11
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave Bush a good fake reason to invade Iraq. He let it be known that Saddam was connected to 9/11, and cloaked the Iraq War in the mantle of a pre-emptive war on terror.
Former US government official and counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke revealed that Bush had asked him to find out if Saddam had anything to do with 9/11 right after it happened — even when Clarke told him there was no connection. (Actually, Saudis were behind it, but Bush allowed the Saudi royals — two-generational friends of the Bush family – to refuse the FBI access to any suspects in their country.)
Bush only had to hint at a connection between 9/11 and boogieman Saddam, and the rest of the country ran with it. A despairing American public wanted to believe it, so they did. Even after Bush himself admitted that there was no connection, more than 40% of the country still believed there was one.
5. THE REAL KARL ROVE REASON: RE-ELECTION
When Karl Rove watched Margaret Thatcher fight a teeny war in the Falklands in 1982, he noticed that her popularity soared because of it. A war can make you popular. Rove, now White House Senior Adviser, knew the best way to assure his boss's re-election was to make Bush a wartime president. The country always rallies behind a president at war.. A second term would give Rove the opportunity to push his far-right agenda through, starting with the destruction of Social Security.
6. THE REAL WOLFOWITZ REASON: U.S. EMPIRE
The other good but covert reason (like oil) was the neocon reason: to establish a US empire after we won the Cold War, when Russia couldn't check our imperial ambitions anymore. The neocons even had a cute name for our empire: the Pax Americana.
In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had a strategy report drafted for the Department of Defense, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy.
In it, the US government was urged, as the world's sole remaining superpower, to move aggressively and militarily around the globe. The report called for pre-emptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions, but said that the US should be ready to act alone when “collective action cannot be orchestrated.”
The central strategy was to “establish and protect a new order” that accounts “sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership,” while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
An imperial posture. Hubris of the highest order. The doctrine of a python fixing to hypnotize a helpless rat.
Wolfowitz outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil” and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.
In 1997, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) was founded to press for this new strategy –- and for a war with Iraq. (The PNAC's members were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Condi Rice, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, James Woolsey, Scooter Libby and Zalmay Kahlilzad — now US Ambassador in Iraq.)
The PNAC urged:
a) a policy of “preemptive” war — i.e., whenever the US thinks a country may be amassing too much power or could provide some sort of competition in the “benevolent hegemony” region, it can be attacked, without provocation.
b) nuclear weapons would no longer be considered defensive, but could be used offensively in support of political/economic ends; so-called “mini-nukes” could be employed in these regional wars.
c) international treaties and opinion will be ignored whenever they are not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals.
d) The new policies “will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia.”
In September 2000, with Cheney now VP, the Project released its grand plan for the future in a report titled “Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century.”
It reads like a clear prescription for empire.
The report begins with the premise that “The United States is the world's only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world's largest economy … America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”
The report recommends new missions for the US armed forces, including a dominant nuclear capability with a new generation of nuclear weapons, sufficient combat forces to fight and win multiple major wars, and forces for “constabulary duties” around the world with American rather than UN leadership.
Hey, we've got to rule the world, y'all. As owners of the biggest military dick, we've got to wave it over the world's heads for all to see and fellate.
The report states that “the presence of American forces in critical regions around the world is the visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower” and proposes “a network of 'deployment bases' or 'forward operating bases' to increase the reach of current and future forces.”
(Currently the US has over 800 military bases and deployments in different countries around the world, with the most recent major increase being in the Caspian Sea/Afghanistan/Middle East areas. Call it a Pax Americana if you want, but the real name for this is empire. Or evil empire.)
As for the Persian Gulf, the report says “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein … Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has.”
Making no secret of its imperial posture, the report baldly remarks that “the failure to prepare for tomorrow's challenges will ensure that the current Pax Americana comes to an early end.”
To further its ambition for a US empire, the PNAC channeled millions of taxpayer dollars to a Saddam opposition group called the Iraqi National Congress, which was formed by Iraq's self-styled leader-in-waiting Ahmed Chalabi. (The Project overlooked the fact that Jordan sentenced Chalabi in absentia to 22 years in prison on 31 counts of bank fraud). Chalabi's INC had been gaining support for its cause by promising oil contracts to anyone who helped put them on top in Iraq.
The Cheney oil conspiracy couldn't have wished for a better partner. The PNAC reckoned a Chalabi-led American protectorate in Iraq was needed to:
a) acquire control of the oil heads to fund the entire enterprise.
b) fire a warning shot across the bows of every leader in the Middle East.
c) establish a military staging area for the eventual invasion and overthrow of several Middle Eastern regimes, even those who were US allies.
In the September 2002 issue of his journal, Commentary, editor and fellow neocon Norman Podhoretz writes that the regimes “that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced, are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen.” This, he says, is all about “the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam.”
So this was the theory of empire in the Middle East.
The hard plan was to get a US company, Brown & Root, in there to build permanent American military bases.
Cheney's Halliburton and Brown & Root have worked cheek-by-jowl with governments in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burma, Croatia, Haiti, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Somalia during terrible times for these countries. Many environmental and human rights groups say that Cheney, Halliburton and Brown & Root were central to these terrible times. Brown & Root was contracted by the Defense Department to build cells for detainees in Guantanamo Bay for $300 million (sounds like one more overcharge, doesn't it?). Another company with a vested interest in both a war on Iraq and massively increased defense spending is the Carlyle Group. Former President George H. W. Bush was himself employed by Carlyle as a senior advisor, as was long-time Bush family advisor James Baker III.
7. THE FAKE WOLFOWITZ REASON: FREEDOM FOR IRAQ
On May 7, 2005, Bush heralded a remarkable change in his Iraq policy in a speech in Russia of all places:
“We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others. And so, with confidence and resolve, we will stand for freedom across the broader Middle-East.”
This was a remarkable rhetorical about-face. Suddenly Bush was saying that instead of boning the Middle-East with a blood-hard military dick, he was going to zip up America's pants. Why this 180-degree turn?
Let's go back to what happened after the administration rigged a brilliant photo-op by staging the “spontaneous” pulling down of the Saddam statue and declared “mission accomplished” with Bush in a pilot outfit, his testicles deftly strapped to show a bulging package.
At first the Cheney conspiracy moved quickly to impose its neocon vision of empire on Iraq (even though, to its great surprise, our troops weren't welcomed with flowers as liberators, as Chalabi had promised). When the first viceroy, General Garner, a great friend of the Kurds, wanted to have elections, they pulled him out pronto, like an unwanted pig from their ripe little pasture. They sent in Paul Bremer instead with a list of instructions. He worked on establishing voting caucuses in various areas, with the voting taking place in a controlled manner over a number of months – a rather obvious attempt to rig elections in favor of US-paid cronies. Even after a smokescreen of tasking the UN to pick an Iraq leader, the US still foisted their own stooge on everyone, Dr. Ayad Alawi, who happened to be a former CIA-controlled Iraqi agent.
Bremer also decreed an entirely new economy. Corporate taxes were capped at 15%. Anyone could buy a business in Iraq and repatriate their profits. The stage was set for Texas to take over Iraq's oil fields. Bremer's decrees guaranteed the perfect Republican business-friendly state. The people would not necessarily be free, but the business people sure would.
In the event, these economic decrees turned out to be mere wishes on paper for empire. Because most disastrously, Bremer enacted two real-world decrees:
a) Urged on by Chalabi, he fired all the Sunni Baathists in government – the entire bureaucratic leadership who were actually running the country. In one instant, he created the insurgency, and gave them their leaders.
b) He fired the army too, and created the foot soldiers of the insurgency, as well as providing its weapons.
With these two acts of epic psychopathology, Bremer destroyed all security in Iraq. More: he nuked the entire fabric of a working Iraqi society, and ensured a rebellion (a mini-civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, with the Kurds ready to hive off into their own state). It ended up in the creation of ISIS by former fired Baathist generals, who today are set to take over Syria and Iraq.
It's got to be the most ham-handed, thoughtless act of modern history. It would have been better for Iraq if Bremer had covered its entire landmass in a six-inch coat of hillbilly diarrhea imported from Kentucky.
But then reality stepped in big-time to slap all US imperial pretensions back into the dark bunghole they'd steamed from. The leading Iraqi cleric, a doddering old codger from Iran, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, got pissed at America for trying to rig elections. He demanded a same-day general election by all Iraqi citizens. He called out his followers, the 60% Shiite majority who'd been oppressed by Saddam, and they marched in thunderous protest against America's gerrymandering.
Abruptly, power switched — from the occupiers to the occupied. The Shiite majority flexed its muscles; the imperial Cheney oil conspiracy was forced to blink.
8. UNFORESEEN: THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
''Wars generate their own momentum and follow the law of unintended consequences,” Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, once wrote.
Damn right. With al-Sistani and his Shiite majority calling foul, Chalabi was no longer an option (especially since he'd been unmasked as being an agent for Iran all along). Establishing military bases became more difficult. Most frustrating of all, divvying up Iraq's oil riches for Texas became less likely.
The administration was stumped; it couldn't go against 60% of the occupied. General elections were announced. In the election, they managed to rig a goodly chunk of votes for their stooge Alawi, but not enough to save his ass. A rigid Shiite won. Al-Sistani had single-handedly saved his nation from a US puppet government.
The real reasons for the war – oil and empire — were marching right out the door, leaving their holders bereft, and one of the fake reasons walked in and said, hey, I'm the only reason left for you to be in Iraq. So now freedom for Iraq turned out to be why we were in Iraq. This was the last thing the Cheney conspiracy had in mind.
Ironically, the fake reason of freedom killed the real reasons. Ironically, the folks who never wanted nation-building, who never prepared for it, suddenly found themselves doing it.
Needed: a new rhetoric to put an engaging face on this humongous, unforeseen f-up. Hence, Bush's speech. We're getting shat on, but we're smiling about it, all upbeat and bravado-positive, trying to ignore the Shiite crap in our teeth.
America went from the “paranoid style in American politics” during the Cold War to the post-9/11 swagger of the Bush “unilateral” style to what may now be called the “helpless giant” style. Instead of dominating the world, we're helping it to defy us.
Talk about the chuckling irony of history. We thought we were going to bone the planet, but now we're the ones being boned big-time — with Iraq as the world's most uncomfortable dick shoved right up our asses. Instead of guaranteeing our empire, the Cheney conspiracy has guaranteed its downfall. In the end, absolute power has turned out to be absolutely powerless.
For the ancient Greeks, hubris unerringly invited tragedy. But our hubris cannot even console itself with the dignity of tragedy.
We've ended up with something merely pathetic. Blame the nature of our hubris, which is not high-born, but sprouts instead from the shallow soil of our lust for oil and from the pitiful vainglory of us masturbating the biggest military phallus on earth. No nobility there. Only things grubby and mean.
Meanwhile our warrior kids, whose mothers live among us, got their faces blown off by explosive devices over there. For no noble cause at all. For the vanity of oil and empire. They died in vain, sacrificed by Bush-Cheney for absolutely nothing. Tragically, we lack the moral dimension one needs for true tragedy. We lack the heroism we demand of our troops. We're a nation of moral dwarves, starting with war criminals Bush, Cheney et al.
And now a brother of a war criminal will be running for president. And neither he, nor we, will raise an eyebrow in protest against this outcome of evil.
Cry, my beloved country. You were duped into war. You let down your sons and daughters. The stink of your grubby reasons will follow you for decades to come. Would that there was some miracle detergent to wash your hands clean. But there isn't. There is only the smell of blood crying out to you from countless graves — thousands of our soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children.