Can We At Last Admit the Iraq Occupation Was A Waste? Have We Finally Learned the Lessons of Vietnam?

These questions bear asking as we behold  all the effort of 8-plus long years of Iraq occupation evidently all for naught as thousands of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq in Syria)  militants rage across the country - taking Mosul, Tikrit, Samara and bearing down on Baghdad. In the meantime, the $100m the U.S. spent prepping an Iraqi Army appears to have been wasted, along with the $150b reported wasted in Afghanistan this morning,  on equipment never used - only stored.  This, as we beheld images of the Iraqis cutting and running even tearing off their uniforms

Let us go down memory lane and recall here that every manjack with a brain knew Saddam was no angel, but at the same time no one would be stupid enough to displace him - given it was his strongman secular stranglehold that was in fact preventing Muslim factionalism and civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Let us also recall, lest memories have become ossified or lost, that the U.S. actually cultivated Saddam as its own 'creature' (in the 1980s)  to leverage against the Iranians. (A video still exists from the media, likely found on Youtube, showing Donald Rumsfeld praising Saddam for his efforts.) In addition, the U.S. supplied Saddam with billions of dollars in weapons to carry on the fight against the Ayatollahs - some of which were believed to be the "WMD" the Bushies used as a pretext to launch the Iraq invasion. See e.g. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/56466/up-close-and-personal-with-george-w-bush-s-horrifying-legacy

After being shoehorned into the Oval Office by the five conservo Supremes in 2000, Bush was now in position to implement the "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC) which had originally been designed for 1992 after an expected Bush Sr. election win. This plan had been originally designed by the likes of Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld to extend American power in the world starting in the Middle East, namely Iraq and Afghanistan. Oil also figured mightily into the planning, and no surprise a big Oil honcho (Halliburton) like Cheney would be humping and pumping it to the nth degree.

All the best laid plans went askew after Clinton won the 1992 election, and so the PNAC plan had to be put on hold, specifically its plan for an Iraq invasion and occupation.  The plan sprung to life anew after the Bush Jr. win in the 2000 general election (though Al Gore won the popular vote). Cheney, Wolfowitz et al knew they needed an excuse for invasion, however, since "Americans are still suffering from Vietnam hangover" as Wolfie once put it.  The event for springing into action occurred with 9/11 - and all the Bushies needed was a means to link Saddam to it - even if it was all bullshit.

The Bushies did a well known propaganda two step, first perfected by Hitler ("If you repeat a lie often enough, most people will believe it.") . They started by using the Reepo-friendly FOX bunch to keep repeating a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. As this specious crap kept being repeated the Bushies became elated as watching pro-intervention poll numbers increase. Now, they needed another more believable Act Two.

They attained it via a dog and pony show after enlisting  Colin Powell to be their stooge in front of the UN. Using every sort of ruse - from 'yellowcake' to aluminum tubes and alleged claims of possible "weapons of mass destruction" (from a rat named 'curve ball') - the Bushies pumped up a bogus case for invasion, just like Hitler and the Nazis did (using faked imagery of German fraus being raped by Poles) to justify an invasion of Poland in 1939. Once he had the U.S. corporate media on his side it was merely a matter of drum beating a sheep-like American public into giving him the poll numbers he desired to launch an invasion in March, 2003.

Those of us who knew history, watched the hijinks in disbelief, wondering how or why so many - especially in the media - could believe it. Some tried to head it off, like Joe Wilson in an op-ed in the WSJ, pointing to the fact the whole "yellowcake in Niger"  thing was a ruse. But Wilson was crucified by the Bush bastards in a vengeful media onslaught (mainly on FOX) and in addition they outed Wilson's wife  (Valerie Plame) as a CIA agent.  Not one damned thing was done to the putative bastard who did it, which is why I don't get exercised now when the same weasels insist Edward Snowden is a "traitor".

Let's also bear in mind that congress was the last bulwark to stop the Iraq invasion and they punted. Though yes,   Bush and his craven neocon slime confected an "Iraqi War Resolution" enough courageous congressmen could have killed it - but they were yellower than the yellowcake link the Bushies claimed- as most signed on to it. So even if Bush and his cohort designed the plan, congress as the last bulwark to preventing an outlaw act could have stopped it. They didn't.

And it indeed was an outlaw, illegal act - invading a sovereign state under a pretext to launch a pre-emptive war. Bush’s aggression then exposed other unsavory aspects about ourselves as a nation:  a willingness to violate Nuremberg Article IV to actually launch a pre-emptive, aggressive war just as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland in 1939. The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushies actually compared Saddam to Hitler!  Some 'Muricans actually swallowed this shit up and took it as gospel!

Again, to those of us who know and RECALL history, it also disclosed disturbing similarities to Vietnam.  For example, LBJ employed the ruse of the North Vietnamese firing on the Maddox and Turner Joy in international waters in August, 1964 as the basis to ramp up the Vietnam War. Later documents released under the freedom of information act showed it was all based on deceptions and lies.

 In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that the Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2, but that there were no North Vietnamese Naval vessels present during the incident of August 4. The report stated regarding August 2:

“At 1505G, Captain Herrick ordered Ogier's gun crews to open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards. At about 1505G, the Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first”

and regarding August 4:

"It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. [...] In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2"


In other words, the U.S. aggressors used it as a pretext to demand the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and launch a war that killed nearly 58,000.

In the aftermath, the more sober heads believed the U.S. had finally learned its lesson not to intervene in other nations on the basis of false pretexts. The losses, in blood and treasure, were just too costly. Vietnam rang up a loss of $269b compared with $ 4 trillion in Iraq.  The sad part is that our unjustifiable meddling in Iraq showed we never learned the lessons of Vietnam.

Worse, through all the years of military waste and intervention - in both Iraq and Afghanistan - we could have better used those trillions to  attend to our own nation's needs: repairing our crumbling infrastructure, bolstering our social insurance programs and providing money for students in affordable loans. What one hopes now, in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan -  is that we finally re-learn the lessons we ought to have learned after Vietnam. That is to stay the fuck out of places where our immediate domestic security isn't threatened and not to invent bogus pretexts to make war on others. 


Were all those troops that went to Iraq and Afghanistan "fighting for my freedom"? Hell no! They were fighting for Wall Street, the Bushie opportunist Oil imperialists and their privateer companies (like Halliburton and Bechtel) and the advance of Amerikkan Neoliberalism. Believe it! (Some, of course, loved the 'high' of 'war' - as professed yesterday morning by the guy who did the recent documentary 'Korengal' and fought in Afghanistan. He claimed on CBS Early Show he got "addicted" to the "brotherhood" and the "action".)

It's about damned time future troops understand what they're getting into before they enter some hyped- up "freedom crusade" - and they also understand that when they sign onto a "volunteer army" (even for later supposed "benefits")  they become de facto mercenaries in the service of war capitalists.  As for getting "high" on the fighting, and "brotherhood" - I suggest they join a gym, take up amateur boxing, and sign on to a club volunteering in positive ways to assist their communities. You don't have to blow up villagers and kick down their doors to get "get high". Or shoot them dead.

To that end, all citizens also need to understand how Bush has recently  tried to whitewash his crimes in Iraq using the venue of his Bush Library. To see Rachel Maddow's  take down of this nonsense, go to one of my previous blog posts here:


http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/05/rachel-maddow-exposes-bush-library-for.html

When the militants finally get to Baghdad, as they will - and the media will show the imagery non-stop-  let's remember all the above and how we really only have limited control over our own plot of the planet. Let's mind that before we fuck around with others in the future! The Neocons, their puppets in the media (like the WaPo's Trudy Rubin) and other miscreants will scream for "boots on the ground" but that ain't an option! Besides, with a backlogged VA,  where will all the additional wounded go for care?  If the Reepos aren't going to fund the VA they have no right to call for any more wars, or ground troops!

See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/56347/blaming-obama-for-iraqs-chaos

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/chris-floyd/56373/hell-s-gate-the-iraqi-blitzkrieg-and-the-cult-of-violence

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/gary-leupp/56399/no-peace-and-no-democracy-two-occupations-ending-in-hopeless-disasters

Russia "Violating International Law"? How About the U.S.?

The nonsense now issuing from the Neoliberal fascist press is dumb founding as well as enraging. Oh, "there're no Nazi thugs destroying buildings or beating people"! Putin just made it all up as an excuse to invade Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula. Another blow dried bimbo on Kornacki this morning insisted: "Well, ya know, Russia is gonna do what it wants to do to advance its interests in the end!"

Yeah, so? The implication being that the goody two shoes, scrupulously lawful (when it suits its fancy)  U.S. wouldn't? WTF are you saying? Again, more protectionist smokescreen  blather to cover the tracks of the Neoliberal coup taking place in Ukraine, even proclaiming now an unelected gov't the "legitimate one".  But what is exponentially galling to me (and many others)  - who don't get our news from the putrid prostitute American Neolib corporate media- is the notion that the U.S. wouldn't be doing the very same thing as Russia if the tables and situation were turned.  But many Americans who are gobbling this propaganda of Russia "breaking international law" - as Obama spouted last night, don't even know where the hell Ukraine is! The map below should give them a clue:

 Note Ukraine abuts Russia on its southwest border. Note it carefully!  Now, try to conceive a juxtaposition of events and conditions whereby Florida (on the U.S. SE coast) has somehow become a separate protectorate  - say like Puerto Rico - and is suddenly taken over by hundreds of thousands of Cuban Castro sympathizers.  They localize attention at Miami where they essentially take over and raise Cuban flags. All this on a state right next to Georgia.

 

Would the then "symmetrical situation"  U.S. just sit back and let events unfold, especially if the commie Cubans were going around beating up upstanding citizens, defacing buildings, burning up synagogues or churches  etc.? In your dreams!  There'd be such a display of 'shock and awe' invasion it would make your head swim! So no one can prattle away nonsense and tell me the U.S. wouldn't do the very same thing Russia is now doing, if the situation were somehow reversed.

 

Thus, the crap former Ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor was trying to push on MSNBC this morning (supposedly the most "liberal" of the networks allotted to us) is absurd. Taylor, totally deficient in recent U.S. history and flouting of international law, actually declared:

 

"We ought to treat Russia as an outlaw state, and that means treating Putin and Russia like other outlaw states"

Oh, oh, you mean like the U.S.?

 

Has this mentally-challenged imp forgotten how the U.S. became an outlaw state in 2003, invading under bogus pretense the sovereign state of Iraq?   In the case of Bush's justifying the Iraq invasion and butchery (WHO estimates up to 600,000 Iraqis killed)  we beheld a perfect example of what moral philosopher  John Kekes called "rationalizing evil" ( 'The Roots Of Evil , p. 168).

 

Using every sort of ruse - from 'yellowcake' to aluminum tubes and alleged claims of WMD (from a rat named 'curve ball') - the Bushies pumped up a bogus case for invasion, just like Hitler and the Nazis did (using faked imagery of German fraus being raped by Poles) to justify an invasion of Poland in 1939. Once he had the U.S. corporate media on his side it was merely a matter of drum beating a sheep-like American public into giving him the poll numbers he desired to launch an invasion in March, 2003.

 

One idiot commenter  (it's incredible how many lurk all over the damned place) on a UK Guardian forum, in response to another who had pointed this out, scribbled:

 

"Oh wait! So you're going to use what Bush did back then to justify what Putin is doing now?"

 

Bush actually didn't "do it" on his own. He and his craven neocon slime confected an "Iraqi War Resolution" which MOST congress critters of BOTH parties then signed on to. So even if Bush and his cohort designed the plan, congress as the last bulwark to preventing an outlaw act could have stopped it. They didn't. Hence, it's on the U.S.  Putin is behaving in no different way now than the U.S. did then, in fact he has more justification on his side, given Ukraine's on his doorstep not 6,000 miles away!

 

Anyway, Bush’s aggression also exposed unsavory aspects about ourselves as a nation:  a willingness to violate Nuremberg Article IV to actually launch a pre-emptive, aggressive war just as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland. The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushies actually compared Saddam to Hitler!  Some 'Muricans actually swallowed this shit up and took it as gospel!

But WHERE are the objective voices and people to point this out now? Well, they are no place to be seen! It's perfectly okie dokie if WE invade another nation, just because a dictator made idle "threats" against a former president's daddy, but woe betide any nation that remotely tries to protect its own interests - which are geographically even more proximate.

 

Thus, the irony inherent in Obama telling Putin he's "violating international law" might at least be easier to swallow if the towering blatant hypocrisy weren't already imbued in U.S. policy-   including targeted drone strikes in more than half a dozen Middle East nations - whose sovereignty is being regularly trashed.

Why has this country veered so far off course? Most of it can be traced to the document known as NSC-68 prepared by Paul Nitze of the National Security Council – completed by 1950. The document essentially contained the blueprint for unending strife and undeclared wars, all of which would be invoked on the basis of a zero tolerance threshold for foreigners’ misbehavior. The putative basis? To enable U.S. agitation, overthrow (or assassination) of democratically-elected leaders, e.g. Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954,

 

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

 

 and large and small occupations (ranging from the few thousand troops in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to more than 200,000 in Iraq by 2006.) 

The motivating force of the document was clear in this regard:

“a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere”
 

In other words, any place for which the U.S. even remotely construes a “defeat of free institutions” gives it license to intervene at will. This critical aspect is described thusly by Morris Berman[1]:

“Nitze emphasized the importance of perception, arguing that how we were seen was as crucial as how militarily secure we actually were. This rapidly expanded the number of interests deemed relevant to national security”.

In other words, it provided the formula for unending war, and the building of Empire. Gore Vidal pinpoints the emergence of the American Empire when he notes[2]:

“Since 1950 the United States has fought perhaps a hundred overt and covert wars. None was declared by the nominal representatives of the American people in Congress…they had meekly turned over to the executive their principal great power to wage war. That was the end of that Constitution”.

The key point to note here is not only did the U.S. invoke a specious doctrine[3] to entitle it to engage in warfare wherever it deemed the “need” (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) but also to take out democratically elected leaders where and when they threatened U.S. corporate interests, such as Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953)- threatened U.S. Oil interests, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954)- threatened United Fruit Corp. by giving land to farmers, and Salvador Allende in Chile (1972)- strategic interests threatened.

Even when specious doctrines weren't invoked, lies and deceptions often were in order to involve the U.S. in massive troop deployments and years of ruinous (to lives and treasure) military intrusions. For example, LBJ employed the ruse of the North Vietnamese firing on the Maddox and Turner Joy in international waters in August, 1964 as the basis to ramp up the Vietnam War. Similarly, Bush and Cheney employed the ruse that Saddam had "WMD" to justify Operation "Iraqi Freedom" (a bogus name if ever there was one) and invade Iraq - which had not one damned thing to do with 9/11. (Though the numskulls who watched FAUX News would argue with that!)

What is most disconcerting in the present crisis' context, is that we can't even get an opposing POV from the Democrats. The  lips  of these lily-livered, co-opted Neoliberal wimps are uniformly sealed. Oh, except when they blurt out  or tweet bollocks, as a moron Dem from CT did yesterday, i.e. along the lines of: #Ukraine: "Putin playing with fire in Crimea!"

Putin "playing with fire"?? How about the U.S. and its resident neocons  playing with fire. Deliberately destabilizing the gov't in Kiev for months in advance, with visits by  Crazy Johnno McCain,  Neocons at the NED,  as well as manipulations by Neocon Victoria Nuland at State, i.e.  to topple the originally elected government of  Viktor Yanukovych and insert her pal "Yats" - a reich-wing, ultra-nationalist stooge.   The objective being to make it a NATO Neolib outpost right on Russian's SW border!  (Imagine if the Warsaw Pact still existed, doing a similar think to Florida!) As pointed out by smirkingchimp blogger Mike Whitney:

"In order to topple Yanukovych, the US had to tacitly support fanatical groups of neo-Nazi thugs and anti-Semites"

But, after their almost unified stance against Edward Snowden's whistleblowing on the NSA perfidy,  I've pretty well given up on the Demos anyway. They're only useful for invoking as a last minute counter measure if the Rs have someone or something  a million times worse. As one blogger on Smirkingchimp.com once put it: "They're no different from the repukes except they lube you up first."

Meanwhile, embedded Neocons such as Paul Roderick Gregory at FORBES, are trying to goad Obama into precipitous action by calling him a "paper tiger" e.g.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2014/03/01/alarm-putin-will-not-stop-with-crimea-paper-tiger-obama-will-do-nothing/


 This is not productive or conducive to our own national security, but it's the standard modus operandi of neocons with Neoliberal market aspirations of controlling other nations' destinies.

Let us hope cooler heads continue to prevail, and that Obama can summon at least part of the courage JFK had to during the October, 1962 missile crisis- when he faced down Gen. Curtis Lemay and other war hawks who demanded he bomb and invade Cuba. Kennedy told them to stick it up their wazoos, thereby avoiding a nuclear war.

Yes, according to the Neolib mouthpieces and their neocon nonsense blabbing this morning: "Russia is greatly reduced from what it was with the former  Soviet Union".

Maybe. But they still have more than 3,000 ICBMs bearing multi-megaton hydrogen war heads. NO matter how much the crazies in this  country want to go 'nuke 'em' or as one nut proposed ,"blow up a Russian train station so no troops can move in"  - believe me, it would be a bad idea!

Stay tuned!  See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/norman-solomon/54563/heard-the-one-about-obama-denouncing-a-breach-of-international-law

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/54548/the-road-to-war
--------------

[1] Morris Berman: 2006, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, W.W. Norton, page 118.

[2] Gore Vidal: 2002, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Thunders Mouth, p. 124.
[3] Of course, the ignominious “Bush Doctrine” – crafted under the auspices of the 2002 National Security Strategy – was even more noisome and outrageous, allowing for pre-emptive war as it made Iraq the gold standard for precedence. See: Berman, op. cit., p. 203.