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Sunday, September 23. 2007
Contradiction, Still the American Paradigm
Here we are, four and a half years into the Vietnam War … err … the Iraq War and the president and General Petraeus are talking about drawing down the troops next summer. Gee, just in time for the elections. Just a coincidence no doubt.Oh, and it will just be a draw down of the troops from the surge number to the pre surge number; in other words, by this time next year there will still be 130,000 American service personnel serving in Iraq.
Last week Chris Matthews asked the question nobody seemed willing to answer: are the soldiers killed from this day forward dying in vain?
Alan Greenspan, once the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, said the two wars with Iraq — 1991 and this latest fiasco — were about oil, nothing but oil. Reasons like spreading democracy and being against tyranny were just the excuses used to sell both wars.True, Saddam Hussein was a vicious killer, a tyrant by any standard, but we’ve tolerated tyrants in the past, including tyrants who once were our allies — as Saddam once was back when we needed a vicious killer in a war against Iran. Yeah, he was a vicious killer before we made him an ally and our complicity with his tyrannical reign has been one of the “forgotten” facts in this whole debacle.
The big hypocrisy of course were the Bush loyalists who hailed Hussein’s conviction in that kangaroo court as righteous, despite the fact that Hussein was denied the chance to present evidence that the U.S. supported him at the time he committed the crimes that bought him the noose.
In 1982 he ordered the killing of 148 Shia in the town of Dujail, at the same time the Reagan Administration was beginning its overtures to side with Hussein in the war he started with Iran.
In 1983, after setting the groundwork for the alliance with Saddam Hussein, our old friend and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with Hussein. Rumsfeld, for those who may not know, was the driving force behind the alliance with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. For all his efforts in fighting Iran, declassified documents show the U.S. gave Saddam’s Iraq various weapons, including technology for chemical and biological weapons, and cluster bombs, sold through a Chilean front company.
All this while Hussein was using chemical weapons on an almost “daily” basis, not only against the Iranians, but on his own population as well.
This gets even more interesting: while we are allied with Hussein, the Reagan Administration sent envoys to Iran — with a cake — to make a deal that would free American hostages in Lebanon — Iran-Contra! Got to give it to the Great Communicator, he did step up to the plate and accept responsibility for trading arms for hostages.
The hypocrisy though, is staggering. We helped Saddam Hussein be the brutal tyrant he was, and then our own government had the temerity to hail his sentence as “just” and denounce the wars Hussein started—including the war we helped him wage.
Have you ever seen the video of Saddam Hussein’s execution? Click Here if you’re interested. Might as well, we had a hand in it, from 1982 when we supported his war with Iran, until December 30, 2006.Sorry, that was an extended tangent, one I’ve written about many times in the past. Here we are today, and General Petraeus, the man who was (is) going to turn it all around in Iraq can’t say if the surge is or will be a success or that America is safer because of the war. All he suggested was that the U.S. might start drawing down troops to pre-surge levels sometime next summer and then this past Thursday, the president got on primetime TV and told us he would keep troops in Iraq until there was “enough” success to bring them home.
Here’s another little white lie the administration is fond of trotting out: the surge is working and the proof is the lessening of violence in Al Anbar province. The little white lie is that the decreased violence in that province has nothing to do with the surge, which was started to lessen the violence in Baghdad. Al Anbar cooled down because the warlords and tribal chiefs decided to make peace with U.S. forces in order to fight a common enemy, Al Qa’ida. Violence in Iraq’s capital is still pretty much going on unabated.
Maybe the Bush Administration thinks enough American voters are just stupid enough to go along with the president’s “plan,” such as it is, that they can spin it for a Republican win in next year’s election. Both the president and vice president have been touring the country telling everyone who will listen the surge is a success and yet his own administration delivered a report to Congress that says there hasn’t been any success as first defined for justifying the surge. That is, the Iraqi government meet certain benchmarks. The White House report says only nine of the 18 have been met, but on review from other analysts, that was too rosy of a picture. Yet another little white lie by the president: In his big speech Thursday Night the president thanked all the nations that are “with us” in Iraq. Let’s see … the British have pulled out all but a 3,500 of their soldiers, Hungary has the next largest contingent: 15 people. Japan, Latvia and Turkey each have two, Singapore, New Zealand and our Canadian friends each have one soldier in Iraq. Yep, that’s a heck of a coalition.
And the president exclaimed in his speech how well the Iraqi government was working, despite the testimony from the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who said, “The government in many respects is dysfunctional, and members of the government know it.” The Iraqi government, the same one the president praised for “getting things done” admitted it’s oil revenue sharing plan has collapsed. Oops, I guess that’s not quite the success we thought it would be.
The president also said life in Iraq was getting back to normal. By what standard? Iraqis can’t count on having electricity every day and when they do have it, they can’t be sure that’ll have it for more than a few hours. And while it’s true the massive bombings have abated, the death toll remains the same as pre-surge levels. The number of bodies found tortured and murdered has risen to fill the gap. The president said the security in Diyala Province has improved; yet the U.S. security forces in that province said it was so unstable it was hampering aid programs.
Did General Petraeus betray us? By White House standards, no. Did we get the clear and accurate picture of Iraq we were promised nine months ago when the president started pushing for the surge? By White House standards, yes. What’s a little contradiction when we’re talking about war — and oil.
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