Lies and Deceptions come easy for the Republicans
George W. Bush’s Administration sold us the war against Iraq when it
had no proof that the Saddam Hossein’s regime had “weapons of mass destruction”
(WMD). After invasion and occupation of the land, years of search found no WMD.
Absolutely nothing! It was a gigantic lie manufactured by Bush (USA) and Blair
(UK).
In the meantime, nearly half a million Iraqis had to die in
one of the most sadistic wars of history in which the USA and her partners
showed their real ugliness with everything – their wanton killing of innocent
civilians, their ill-treatment of the occupied people, let alone the prisoners,
their savage bombing of places of worship, business centers, schools,
hospitals, heritage sites, museums and even the drinking and sewage system.
What the real civilized world (outside the impostors in the White House and the
10 Downing Street )
saw were savagery, war crimes, unfathomable carnage and destruction. As a
matter of fact anything that the trigger-happy occupying forces liked to take
an aim at was considered a fair game. Thus, not even a toddler’s life was safe
under Bush-Blair’s occupation, and surely not the lives of genuine journalists
(e.g., from Al Jazeera) who wanted to report the ugly facts from the harm’s
way. They were all kosher to the Judeo-Christian soldiers and their
unremorseful masters leading us down the path to what the late Gen. William E.
Odom called “the
worst strategic disaster in our history”.
The justification for the war was sold by the Bush administration not
only through its own neocon
planners within the administration -
many of whom sold to the altar of Zionism and Israel years
ago - and supporters within the Congress (i.e., the ‘Amen Corner’), plus
the CIA,
the Pentagon,
and the pro-Israeli pundits (like Bill Kristol) and think-tanks (led by
disingenuous guys
like Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, Jr. and many others) but also by
the ‘embedded’ journalists and talk-show hosts. None of the big news media
questioned the narratives of the War Party. It was politically incorrect to
dissent with the sinister Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Powell
agenda to destroy and demolish Iraq .
Rather than investigating their false narratives for
the war the so-called free-press shamelessly chose to be its mouthpiece! It was
no accident that 70
percent of the Americans believed that the Iraqi despot was behind the
9/11 tragedy – to the point that, even after this myth had been debunked 33 percent of
Americans in 2007 still
believed it. Not only that, they even believed that Iraq had WMD
and that the Bush administration was entirely justified in launching an
invasion.
The ‘War Party’ and their boss in the White House fancied in
the typical Pharaohnic way that the might was right and that no one would ever
dare question their tall tales leading up to the invasion of Iraq (condemned by
the UN Secretary General as an illegal war),
which had cost the American people trillions of dollars; and surely no one from
the Republican Party!
But now with the presidential election looming in the
horizon and the campaigns getting ever nastier, the gloves of the aspirants are
coming out to reveal their dirty and bloody hands. Donald Trump, the Republican
frontrunner, in his latest debate accused
Bush Jr., the 43rd president, of lying and feeding
misinformation that led to the costly war and unleashing
of the ISIS. Jeb
Bush precariously tried to defend his older brother’s flawed image in the
debate.
Some Republican voters are naturally upset
about such finger-pointing against one of their very own in which they are
asked to choose between the truth and the lie. They want Trump to ease off,
esp. given the fact that he himself endorsed the Iraq War in his radio
interview with Howard
Stern back in 2002.
Many Americans have very short memories though; 2003 seems
too distant a past to them. They need to be reminded of the hard facts leading
to the invasion and occupation of Iraq .
In his State of the Union Address on Jan. 29, 2002, Bush Jr.
called Iraq part of an
"axis
of evil," and vowed that the U.S. "will not permit the
world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive
weapons."
The next day, on January 30, 2002, the C.I.A. published
an unclassified report
to Congress that stated, “Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that
could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.” A week later,
Secretary of State Colin
Powell told the House International Relations Committee, “With respect
to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it.”
Talking about Saddam Hossein, on August 7, 2002 Vice
President Dick
Cheney said, “What we know now, from various sources, is that he...
continues to pursue a nuclear weapon.” On September 8, 2002, Cheney told a TV
interviewer, “We do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam] is using his
procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium
to build a nuclear weapon.”
Although there was no confirmed intelligence, on September
14, 2002 President Bush said, “Saddam Hussein has the scientists and
infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons program, and has illicitly sought to
purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.” Later
Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the UK , would parrot such an unfounded
assertion. On September 22, 2002, Blair claimed that
he was convinced new sources of intelligence from inside Iraq provide
"persuasive and overwhelming" evidence that Saddam Hussein was
reassembling and expanding his weapons program. He told his cabinet colleagues:
"Saddam is developing his weapons program and doing it as fast as he
can."
On September 26, 2002 Condi
Rice, the national security adviser to President Bush, said, "There
clearly are contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented; there
clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and
that there's a relationship here." She further said, "We know too
that several of the (al Qaeda) detainees, in particular some high-ranking
detainees, have said that Iraq
provided some training to al Qaeda in chemical weapons development." (CBS
News)
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell made a presentation
to the UN, attempting to prove that Iraq was evading the inspectors,
continued to produce WMD's, and was linked to al-Qaeda.
On March 16, 2003, talking about Saddam Hossein, Dick Cheney
stated on Meet the
Press: "We know he’s out trying once again to produce nuclear
weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various
terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization. . . . We know that
based on intelligence that he has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of
efforts. He’s had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely
devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in
fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is
wrong." It should be noted that a week earlier, on March 7,
2003, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, in Vienna ,
told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq
uranium sale were fakes.
On March 19, 2003, Bush and Blair attack Iraq . And the
rest is history! [Interested readers may like to read Larisa Alexandrovna
and Muriel Kane’s collection: The
Path of War Timeline.]
Yet, the war-lies continue. The Republican presidential
hopefuls for the November 2016 election are all lying to their teeth. It is the
hunting season for them to allure gullible voters! But if the voters continue
to let them be duped, shame on them.
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