The Unknown Candidate: Was Iraq War a `Blunder' or Was It Treason?

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Was Iraq War a `Blunder' or Was It Treason?

Terrific article by Dave Lindorff, articulating a point of view I have expressed often. Must read.

Hat tip to A. Buono.

By Dave Lindorff
CommonDreams.org

"New Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), is calling President Bush's invasion of Iraq a "stark blunder" and says that his new scheme to send 21,500 more troops into the mess he created is just digging the hole deeper.

I wonder though.

It seems ever more likely to me that this whole mess was no blunder at all.

People are wont to attribute the whole thing to lack of intelligence on the president's part, and to hubris on the part of his key advisers. I won't argue that the president is a lightweight in the intellect department, nor will I dispute that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and that whole neocon gang have demonstrably lacked the virtues of reflection and humility. But that said, I suspect that the real story of the Iraq War is that Bush and his gang never really cared whether they actually would "win" in Iraq. In fact, arguably, they didn't really want to win.

What they wanted was a war...."

Read more.

Also See:

Ray McGovern: Show Me The Intelligence
"Have you noticed? Neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney have cited any U.S. intelligence assessments to support their fateful decision to send 21,500 more troops to referee the civil war in Iraq. This is a far cry from October 2002, when a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was rushed through in order to trick Congress into giving its nihil obstat for the attack on Iraq.

Why no intelligence justification this time around? Because there is none...."
America's last `long war' offers lessons for Iraq, experts say:
"President Bush has called Iraq a crucial battleground in a decades-long struggle against Islamic terrorism. "It's important for our fellow citizens to understand that failure in Iraq would be a disaster for our future," he told soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia, last week. Historians and Middle East experts, however, say that America's last "long war," the four-decade Cold War against Soviet communism, offers some cautionary lessons as the nation debates its next moves in Iraq...."
Frank Rich: Lying Like It's 2003