ISIL/Daesh:
I’ve read that ISIL with thoughts of a Caliphate may have started as early as 1999. However most news sources indicate it sprang from George W Bush’s war on Iraq when Bremer et al kicked the 400,000 Ba’ath Sunnis out of the Iraqi army (allowing them to keep their weapons).
Iraqi generals are now running ISIL according to Abdel Bari Atwan (see below) and acknowledged by the Washington Post in the following article. The brutality of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has metastasized and spread to Syria, Paris Yemen Egypt etc courtesy of Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bremer.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
en.wikipedia.org/...
Ahmed Chalabi’s meddling started in 1995 when “after preparation and lobbying he persuaded President Clinton to fund an expedition into northern Iraq to use subterfuge to start an insurgency.”
When the Bush administration took over in 2001, Chalabi was welcomed into the fold to feed his lies to Judith Miller, Colin Powell, the Washington Post, The New York Times, Cheney/Rumsfeld President Bush and all the participants in war propaganda. What use is a CIA that ignores its best analysts?
Towards the end, in 2014, the year before he died Chalabi said:
Iraq is a mess. Daesh is organised, with one command, united and well run, and we are so fragmented. We have no discipline, no command structure, no effective plans.[39]
ABDEL BARI ATWAN:
CSPAN carried an interview with Abdel Bari Atwan, on Sunday, November 22, 2015 on his book “Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate”. During the Q&A he went into depth on the blowback from the strategic blunder of the Iraq war and the gross negligence thereafter.
www.c-span.org/...
www.nytimes.com/...
In this CSPAN video of Atwan’s recent talk he fills in the gaps on the horror we are witnessing. Our foreign policy over the last 60 years or so has been based on illusions, lies, incompetence and “our oil under their sand”.
HAJIMU MASUDA:
As reporter and historian Hajimu Masuda explains, mass illusions can and have begotten foreign policies that have terrible and escalating consequences. harvardpress.typepad.com/...
THE SEVEN SISTERS:
The Seven Sisters’ international petroleum club has run foreign policy through western democratically elected governments for over 60 years. Former Pappy Bush aide, James Baker, caught off guard during a Q&A at Texas A&M in 2007 revealed as much. Asked if he now had doubts about W’s Middle East policy, especially in view of the terrible unintended consequences of the War on Iraq. Baker, in shock, stammered — but you are questioning a foreign policy that goes back more than 50 years!
It’s easier, apparently, to run foreign policy by taking a 30 minute meeting with an oil Sheik and a few petroleum company jocks to “get things done” than to make a commitment to the well being of the billions of people who inhabit this planet and the environmental niche that makes this planet inhabitable for life as we know it.
There’s a culturally embedded, delusional, directive of aggression designed to benefit a few. Until these war crimes are heard in court there may be no reckoning.
Let’s make no mistake about this. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld succeeded in exploding a fascist country ruled by a paranoid dictator propped up by oil revenues. The Iraqi Republican Guard gestapo has now metastasized and spread throughout the region.
MAYBE THE GOP ANTI OBAMA HYSTERIA IS ROOTED IN The FEAR THAT THEIR FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSIONS WILL BE EXPOSED AND THE PERPETRATORS WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. (the best defense is a good offense?)
MICHAEL MOORE:
9/11 was a convenient excuse for Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush/Rice to conflate the Al Qaeda attacks with lies about Saddam Hussein. Remember after 9/11 when Michael Moore asked: “Mr Bush what were you thinking” when you were reading a book to school children in Florida and a staffer whispered in your ear that the twin towers were hit?
It was a strange and passive look on Bush’s face, not alarm. Had he been expecting something? Had he read the Presidential Daily Briefings after all?
ISIL/DAESH:
DAESH, like all other terror groups in history uses violence and psychological terror to fight back. It makes me ill to hear American officials and especially members of the Fourth Estate, like Dana Bash in the last Republican debate discuss the horror we are witnessing now without acknowledging that one of the repeated goals of the Caliphate is to get the fucking invading foreigners out of the Middle East. Up until recently Al Qaeda had been focused on revenge while DAESH was focused on a Caliphate, but now, according to Abdel Bari Atwan it seems that revenge and establishing a Caliphate may have merged into one for the Iraqi generals that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld fucked and who are now running ISIL/DAESH.
BARACK OBAMA:
Thank you, Barack Obama, for publicly acknowledging that the Bush war on Iraq unleashed the current horror. At least you’re not in denial.
SHOCK AND AWE:
In early 2003, trigger happy Donald Rumsfeld unleashed “Shock and Awe” on 30 million innocent people,
It was sickening to hear the delusional/lying Rumsfeld boast about “SHOCK AND AWE” and then prevaricate on how long it would take to accomplish what no one really explained. (His statement: “I don’t know what I don’t know” may have been the most egocentric and psychopathic thing he ever said.)
SHOCK AND AWE?????? excuse me????? — MR. BUSH, MR. CHENEY, MR RUMSFELD, MS RICE, — how would you feel about a little SHOCK AND AWE coming your way — would you stand back and admire the devastation and being captured and brought to an Abu Graib? What did the poor Iraqi people ever do to you? They had been brutalized for 30 years by Saddam Hussein while you tried to make deals on oil contracts. It was because Iraq had thrown the western oil companies out that Cheney had a hard on for the invasion. He was their facilitator. Their hands were always clean.
— killing hundreds of thousands, destroying a culture, creating a sadness so deep and wide that revenge spread like wildfire to rid the land of the invaders.
Did you really believe that the oil you were after would be given up without a fight and that people would just lay down and happily die for you? No thought of the destruction of schools, museums, food markets, agriculture, antiquities?. You thought you would turn things over to the downtrodden Shia who had been victimized for 30 years by Saddam Hussein? And you could go back to cutting deals for Halliburton, Exxon, Shell, et al?
Did it ever cross your minds that your so called “enemy” Iran is principally a Shia nation, closely allied with the Shia you installed in Iraq? And that by fucking the Sunnis in Iraq and setting the Shia in Iraq upon them, you were creating a caldron of mistrust and hatred and violence?
Did it ever cross your minds that the same thirst for oil in the fifties, the U.S./Britain fomented coup against the democratically elected Mosaddegh in Iran also had terrible consequences? The Shah of Iran was installed as the petroleum cartel puppet. Iranians revolted against his torturous right wing regime and created the power vacuum that allowed the right wing religious ideologues to grab power. A half century of strife and violence. The unintended consequences are never recognised by the perpetrators of the original deeds as their responsibility.
As Professor Masuda points out in his 2015 book,
www.hup.harvard.edu/...
Unless we acknowledge the social/political/economic illusions embedded in the psychology and fears of the moment, we will continue to repeat the errors of history.
BERNIE SANDERS:
Sadly, the press wrongly states that foreign affairs is not Bernie Sanders’ strong suit because he does not join the bandwagon of thos pontificating on what manner of aggression should be used to deal with the horrors that our own government has played a role in fomenting. The press is reluctant to face the illusions that led us to where we are now. Senator Sanders has shown he is not afraid to admit how we got where we are now. He predicted that the consequences of a war on Iraq could be expected to have terrible consequences. He is therefore comfortable espousing policies based on reality instead of lies or myths.
(And In the most recent Democratic debate -December 18th, Bernie succeeded in articulating his position vs ISIL.)
I LIKE MY MAYORS DUMB:
Around 35 years ago, “developer Walter Mischer, Houston’s foremost political kingmaker at the time, was reported to have said ‘I like my mayor’s dumb but not that dumb’ “ about his then mayor Jim McConn, when McConn did or said something more stupid than usual.
Texas Monthly books.google.com/...
DICK CHENEY:
Dick Cheney’s first job in the White House was in the Nixon Administration, but It was really under President Ford that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld learned to ruin,….errr run, the executive branch.
Years later former Bechtel chief George Schultz, via Condi Rice, referred Cheney to George Bush II to help him vet his 2000 running mate….. well, who woulda guessed it, Cheney got the job.
Cheney/Rumsfeld were unelectable — but succeeded, nevertheless, becoming the shadow government of the United States. Pappy Bush said recently that in his view it was on W, as president, whether or not to let Cheney/Rumsfeld loose on the Middle East.
W took to being a cheer leader for Cheney’s war, eager to be part of the action. The boots on the ground, after all, were filled by other people’s feet. He had had strings pulled to get himself into the National Guard during Vietnam…..didn’t he, along with those fellow elite cowards who were willing to pull strings to stay back and watch others go in their place. The Vietnam War was sold using the illusion of what was called “The Domino Effect” a ridiculous distortion of reality that people like Cheney buy into and use to advance their careers.
After the 2000 election, Cheney was heard to say — now it’s time for us to get “ours”. “Ours apparently meant WAR, THEFT, SHOCK AND AWE, OIL CONTRACTS, GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS, DESTRUCTION and VIOLENCE.
Cheney was a Democrat climbing utility poles in Wyoming, when his high school sweetheart and then wife, Lynne Cheney, decided he should make something of himself…..god help us... god help the Middle East...Paris..and on and on.
(First, Cheney had to switch parties to get anywhere.)
So one could say that the great big bloody hole in Iraq, now spreading throughout the Middle East and lapping onto other shores sprang out of the horror unleashed by the young Lynne Cheney, cracking the whip on her Dick. The Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice/Bush psychopathy was merciless on our’n and their’n and the elder Bush’s looked on passively without comment. Laura was a big disappointment for me…...but my confusion cleared up a bit when Laura took the time to leave a shin dig at the White House to change her designer gown when a guest showed up wearing the same gown. Horrors! This cannot stand!
ANDREW BACEVICH:
I could find no elected Republican who dissented from the Iraq war policy. Retired military officers spoke out, Brent Scowcroft spoke out and many courageous elected Democrats spoke out.
One of the many Americans who expressed strong objections in advance of the Iraq War is retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich, currently a professor of history at Boston University. Professor Bacevich, who himself had served in Vietnam and recognised its folly, tragically lost his son to an IED when his son was serving in Iraq.
Bacevich has been "a persistent, vocal critic of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, calling the conflict a catastrophic failure."[2] In March 2007, he described George W. Bush's endorsement of such "preventive wars" as "immoral, illicit, and imprudent."[2][3] His son, also an Army officer, died fighting in the Iraq War in May 2007.[2]
Basevich was a critic from the beginning:
In March 2003, at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bacevich wrote in The Los Angeles Times that "if, as seems probable, the effort encounters greater resistance than its architects imagine, our way of life may find itself tested in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history."[2]
An editorial about the Bush Doctrine was published by the Boston Globe in March 2007.[3]
Basevich encouraged fellow conservatives to vote for Barack Obama for president:
"this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival."
but grew to regret his choice when President Obama ventured into Afghanistan:
In the October 11, 2009, issue of The Boston Globe,[11] he wrote that the decision to commit more troops to Afghanistan may be the most fateful choice of the Obama administration. "If the Afghan war then becomes the consuming issue of Obama’s presidency—as Iraq became for his predecessor, as Vietnam did for Lyndon Johnson, and as Korea did for Harry Truman—the inevitable effect will be to compromise the prospects of reform more broadly," Bacevich wrote.
In his article "Non Believer" in the July 7, 2010, issue of The New Republic, Bacevich compared President George W. Bush, characterized as wrong-headed but sincere, with President Obama, who, he says, has no belief in the Afghanistan war but pursues it for his own politically cynical reasons: "Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?"[12]
en.wikipedia.org/…
THE SEVEN SISTERS:
Saddam Hussein was the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush/Condi target because Iraq was not cooperating with American interests (AKA petroleum company interests). Iraq’s Ba’ath regime nationalised the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1972 which had been run by Shell, BP, Exxon, Mobile and CFP.
Here’s a brief history of the west’s foreign policy dominated by us grabbing our oil from under their sand and making tyrants rich for greasing the skids while they brutalised their own people:
www.worldwatch.org/...
JEB!:
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Condi, and now even JEB! will go to their graves arguing that Bush II did the right thing.
Except for Rand Paul the current gaggle running for the Republican nomination for President all buy into the same old game that got us into this mess. But Andrew Basevich’s words were profound:
In March 2003, at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bacevich wrote in The Los Angeles Times that "if, as seems probable, the effort encounters greater resistance than its architects imagine, our way of life may find itself tested in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history."[2]
Yes, indeed, Professor Bacevich was quite correct. And my condolences to him for the loss of his brave son. What a tragic and painful loss for him and his family. And there was nothing that he could do because his country allowed this horror to take place because enough of us fell into the trap of believing the lies.