Iraqapalooa: A Short History Of An Endless War--Part Four

Pre-War

IRAQ, HUSSEIN, AND 9/11

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2002-3

    Bush’s prime-time press conference on March 6, 2003 (his first in a year and a half), was a constant repetition of "Iraq, "Saddam", "threat", "increasing threat", "deep threat", "terrorism", and "9/11". According to Noam Chomsky, the next poll revealed that a majority of Americans believed Iraq was connected to 9/11.

    Bush isn’t just a puppet, he’s a hypnotist.  Maybe there were subliminal signals going through the transmission while he talked.  As many have said, there were no Iraqis on those planes, but there were 15 Saudis.  Bush has never mentioned that, because his dad is in bed with the Saudis.  Of course, crazies like Tom Tancredo use 9/11 to demand laws against illegal immigration, although there were no terrorists on the planes named Rodriguez, either.

    Ten million people worldwide protested the war in Iraq before it began—the largest protest in the history of the world.  The "cabal" didn’t care. An article in the "American Political Science Review" finds that the major influences on foreign policy are corporations, although there may be experts, who are influenced by corporations.  Public opinion has "little or no significant effect on government officials".   No shit, Sherlock.

    They don’t even let Bush SEE the protesters...He doesn’t watch TV, he doesn’t read the papers.  And all the Pod People on TV after the war went down the shithole said "Everybody in Washington and the country was for the war—we couldn’t have foreseen, blah blah blah, no one said anything"—yeah, except some of the Democrats, and some of the pundits, and the websites, and the "Nation", and "Democracy Now",  and, well, the TEN MILLION PEOPLE.

    Bush, with the sock in his crotch and that flight suit on the aircraft carrier, what was called the beginning of his re-election campaign, was still saying "we have taken out an ally of al-Qaeda".  He later claimed he never said that, it wasn’t his "Mission Accomplished" sign, in fact, he was nowhere near there.

    According to Bob Woodward in "State Of Denial", Cheney told a fellow neo-con we’d be in Iraq for "a week".  Maybe he meant that God-in-Genesis week...

    Michael Scheuer, in "Imperial Hubris", writes that "there is nothing bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American occupation and invasion of Iraq...bin Laden’s gift from America."  Well, maybe the Bush cabal owed him for back payments.

    Sure they "won" their "war" in three weeks...THE IRAQIS HAD NO WMDS.  We had "Smart Bombs" (not smart politicians), which had computers and were laser-guided and cost millions each, which could come down from 30,000 feet, ring the doorbell, hide behind a bush, sneak into a window, go down to the basement, wait three days, and then blow up a house full of innocent civilians.  What did the Iraqis have?  Scuds, which I think is a goat with a dynamite stick up its’ ass.  They had mud bombs and yak grenades. Their military budget was something like 1% of ours.
   
    Naomi Klein: "One of the US businesses ready and waiting to be the gateway to this experiment in frontier capitalism was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, Bush's ex-head of Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency]. It promised to use its top-level political connections to help US multinationals land a piece of the action in Iraq. ‘Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products would be a gold mine’, one of the company's partners enthused. ‘One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.’

    Like the prisoners in Guantánamo's love shack, all of Iraq was going to be bought off with Pringles and pop culture -- that, at least, was the Bush administration's idea of a postwar plan." Oh, my dear Lord, the bombing and killing wasn't bad enough, now we're going to bring in a Wsl-Mart?!?  But I bet it will be the only building in Iraq with steady electricity...

    Most of the nations Bush kept bragging about in his "Coalition Of The Bought" were countries like Tonga.  The "31 partners" totaled less than 24,000 troops.  Ricks, in "Fiasco",  said "the real ‘coalition of the willing’...was the international jihadists flocking to Iraq to fight (us)."

    The pre-war drumbeat was perfectly timed for the 2002 mid-terms.  Later events in Iraq would be timed to Bush’s re-election campaign, like holding off on the leveling of Fallujah, and the ridiculous notion, parroted by the media, that you have to re-elect a "Commander-In-Chief" in time of war: you know, "don’t change horses’ asses in the middle of the stream"...

    US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson of the Nuremberg Tribunal, simply defined an "aggressor" in a war crime as a country that commits the "invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State."  People have talked about how the members of the Bush regime should be subject to a "Nuremberg-type trial".  It wouldn’t matter—I’m sure Cheney and the gang all have cyanide pellets sewed into their lapels...

    Bush said in a speech that the US "must now stop the peril of world darkening", and "with its new spiritual energies", America is able to "take on the historic mission" of saving the world from "annihilation" by its enemies.  Just kidding.  That was Nazi Martin Heidegger in 1935.

To Be Continued...

    (All my diaries are factual information culled from real sources.  Like I say onstage, "It’s all true, except for the later funny part."  For this series, I am indebted as always to "Countdown With Keith Olbermann".  Other sources include: Frank Rich in the New York Times, Thomas E. Rick’s "Fiasco", The New York Review Of Books, George Packer’s article in the New Yorker, Larry Beinhart, Katie Halper,Joshua Holland, all on AlterNet, Noam Chomsky's "Failed States", "Interventions", "Imperial Ambitions", and "Hegemony Or Survial", Bob Woodward's "State of Denial", and Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine".  I wish to thank these sources and I highly recommend them all.)

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