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March 25, 2007
How US was led into invading Iraq?
By Khalid Saeed
Before 2000, George W. Bush seemed a tabula rasa, a blank slate on foreign policy. He had no experience in foreign policy and had exhibited zero interest. In the 2000 campaign he confused Slovenia with Slovakia, referred to Greeks as “Grecians” and flunked a pop quiz when an interviewer asked him to name the leaders of four major nations.
Richard Perle’s depiction of his delight at first meeting the future president reads:“The first time I met with Bush 43, I knew he was different. Two things became clear. One, he did not know very much. The other was he had confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn’t know very much. Most people are reluctant to say when they don’t know something, a word or term they haven’t heard before. Not him.” Thus began the tutoring of George W. Bush in (William) Kristol’s “new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy,” just months before he assumed office as president of the United States, writes Pat Buchanan in his book “Where the Right Went Wrong”.
In April 2001, at a White House meeting called by Richard Clark, the counter terrorism chief to discuss Al Qaeda and Osama, Wolfowitz scowled, “ I just do not understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man Bin Laden … there are others that do …. At least as much. Iraqi terrorism, for example.” When Clark brought up Al Qaeda’s role in the first World Trade Center bombing, writes Buchanan, Wolfowitz dismissed it: “you give too much credit. He could not do all these things, like the 1993 attack on the New York, not without a state sponsor.”
On sept. 12, as Americans were still in shock, Bill Bennett told CNN ,”we are “in a struggle between good and evil, that the congress must declare war on “militant Islam”, that “overwhelming force” must be used. He cited as targets Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and China.
On Sept.15, 2001, according to Bob Woodward’s book “Bush at War”, “Paul Wolfowitz put forth military arguments to justify an attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan.
On Sept. 20, an open letter was sent to President Bush with forty signatures, among them Bill Bennett, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, William Kristol and charles Krauthammer. It was a political ultimatum. To retain the signers support, Bush was told, he must target Hezbollah for destruction, retaliate against Syria and Iran should they refuse to sever ties to Hezbollah and overthrow Saddam.
Failure to attack Iraq, the signers warned Bush, “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on the international terrorism.” Nine days after an attack on the United States, this tiny clique of intellectuals was telling the President of the United States and the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be publicly charged with a “decisive surrender” to terrorism.
Yet, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq and Iran had nothing to do with 9/11 still, the president had been warned. He must exploit the horror of that atrocity and channel America’s rage into a series of wars on nations, none of which had attacked us, but all of which were hostile to Israel, or he, President Bush, would face political retribution, Buchanan writes in his book.
Mind boggling was the Donald Rumsfeld’s argument in favor of invading Iraq. ” Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan, and we should consider bombing Iraq, which he said had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious.” Richard Clark writes in his book.
9/11 was a convenient excuse for these neo-cons to push their agenda. In 1998, a USA think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), wrote a letter to USA president Bill Clinton advising him to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq without mentioning moral reasons, human rights, or terrorism. Part of the letter states: "We urge you to seize [the] opportunity and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the USA and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." These authors later became advisers to USA president George W Bush in 2000 and they include Richard Perle; Richard Armitage, John Bolton and Paula Dobriansky, Elliott Abrams, Peter W Rodman, Zalmay Khalilzad, James Woolsey and Robert B Zoelick.
The Cost of Iraq War has reached to $500 billion. Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman said there was no firm estimate of the costs for fiscal 2007, but there is speculation that this year’s costs will top last year's record $120 billion. As of Tuesday, March 20, 2007, at least 3,223 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The mainstream media is now a globalize entertainment industry. Everything is entertainment: wars, murders, civil resistance, election frauds, convicted pedophiles or even stem cell research. The seriousness is gone out of the NEWS. All networks are busy 24/7 updating the list of the possible fathers of Anna Nicole’s baby.
No one is even talking about the destruction of a country and 654,965 innocent Iraqi men women and children, who, died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003, as reported by the researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Khalid Saeed is a resident of Woodland, California.
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