True and false reasons for Iraq War

by Kevin Lively

“What this country needs is a good war.”, my Grandfather declared in 2008 while we were gathered at his table in Buffalo with Fox News playing in the background, the TV lit up red with crashing market charts. “It’s the only thing that will fix the economy” he continued. No one pointed out that as these words were spoken, there were, put together, around 200,000 US troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, my grandfather was a good man, hard working, pious, and hardly prone to such statements. Yet, like many Americans who lived through the Great Depression, it was also deeply ingrained in his psyche that the event which led to prosperity during his adulthood, the greatness many are eager to return to, was also the bloodiest human driven catastrophe in history, WWII.

Hamburg, Germany after Allied bombing, left, and Levittown NY, in 1959 right

This is of course a widely accepted truism among US economists and historians, as the state department’s Office of the Historian will tell you. It is also part of the cultural fabric to extol the moral virtues of this particular war, given that it destroyed a regime which essentially defines the modern conception of evil. Of course, as with everything else in history, some of this triumphalist patting ourselves on the back is white-washed. It turns out there was more support in the USA for Nazism before the war than is often remembered, including in the business arrangements of the Bush dynasty’s progenitor. This should not be too surprising given that leading medical journal editors in the USA were urging that the public be persuaded on moral grounds to adopt similar eugenics policies as the Nazis enforced in the 1930s.

In any case, the other accepted truism about this turn of events is that America, as the victorious industrial superpower, realized that its isolationism had only helped lead to the calamity. Therefore, like it or not, it must shoulder the burden of power, stand against the rising communist threat to make the world safe for democracy, and establish the Pax Americana which we have enjoyed since.

As with any good myth, much of this is true. Read more »

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Jeb So Jeb Bush gets asked if he would have invaded Iraq “knowing what we know now,” and he flubs his answer.

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.

Tag: True and false reasons for Iraq War

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