The Tenth Anniversary- Whoopee!
I don't have much to say about the tenth anniversary of the American war of aggression in Iraq, so I'll get it over with fast.
I remember watching on TV as Colin Powell gave his infamous speech to the United Nations. As did a lot of other people, I knew beyond a doubt that he was lying his ass off. Anyone who said so, unfortunately, was shouted down as a traitor. Powell was complicit with Bush, Cheney, et. al. in perpetrating what Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials called the worst war crime of all- starting an unjustified war. Of course, none of them was held accountable in any way for this action, which may have resulted in the deaths of a million innocent people. It was obviously far less serious than Bill Clinton's blow job.
Well, here, courtesy of Mother Jones, is what we are going to end up paying for it:
And what did we get for the six trillion?
"...the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women's rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud..."
But the Vice President of the United States personally made tens of millions of dollars when he steered no-bid contracts to his former company, in which he was still massively invested- a company which, due to his mismanagement as CEO was facing bankruptcy before the Iraq war saved it. Killing five thousand American troops so you can personally enrich yourself is apparently not considered corrupt enough to worry about in today's America.
Let me leave you with the single most memorable image of the entire sordid episode- perhaps the biggest military blunder since Napoleon decided to invade Russia:
Aren't you proud today to be an American?
I remember watching on TV as Colin Powell gave his infamous speech to the United Nations. As did a lot of other people, I knew beyond a doubt that he was lying his ass off. Anyone who said so, unfortunately, was shouted down as a traitor. Powell was complicit with Bush, Cheney, et. al. in perpetrating what Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials called the worst war crime of all- starting an unjustified war. Of course, none of them was held accountable in any way for this action, which may have resulted in the deaths of a million innocent people. It was obviously far less serious than Bill Clinton's blow job.
Well, here, courtesy of Mother Jones, is what we are going to end up paying for it:
"...the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women's rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud..."
But the Vice President of the United States personally made tens of millions of dollars when he steered no-bid contracts to his former company, in which he was still massively invested- a company which, due to his mismanagement as CEO was facing bankruptcy before the Iraq war saved it. Killing five thousand American troops so you can personally enrich yourself is apparently not considered corrupt enough to worry about in today's America.
Let me leave you with the single most memorable image of the entire sordid episode- perhaps the biggest military blunder since Napoleon decided to invade Russia:
Aren't you proud today to be an American?
Comments
By the way, I have always suspected that the reason the first Bush didn't topple Saddam is that half the reason for the war was to have an excuse to ban Iraqi oil from the world market for ten years or so, driving up the price of oil and making the Saudis tens or hundreds of billions of extra income.